“The injured were sprawled out over the railroad tracks, scorched and black. When I walked by, they moaned in agony. ‘Water… water…’
I heard a man in passing announce that giving water to the burn victims would kill them. I was torn. I knew that these people had hours, if not minutes, to live. These burn victims – they were no longer of this world.
‘Water… water…’
I decided to look for a water source. Luckily, I found a futon nearby engulfed in flames. I tore a piece of it off, dipped it in the rice paddy nearby, and wrang it over the burn victims’ mouths. There were about 40 of them. I went back and forth, from the rice paddy to the railroad tracks. They drank the muddy water eagerly. Among them was my dear friend Yamada. ‘Yama- da! Yamada!’ I exclaimed, giddy to see a familiar face. I placed my hand on his chest. His skin slid right off, exposing his flesh. I was mortified. ‘Water…’ he murmured. I wrang the water over his mouth. Five minutes later, he was dead.
...
Everywhere, as far as my eyes could reach, all the houses had collapsed, all the trees and electric poles had been broken down. About two kilometres away, around the spot which later proved to be the explosion centre, thick dark smoke whirled up from a sea of yellowish dust.
I remained stunned, completely stunned. The next moment I heard a faint groan, then disconnected words that seemed to come up from the bottom of the earth: "Yuko . . . dead . . . I’m dying . . . don't stay ..." It was my wife, but it was not anything like a voice uttered by a human being: it was a voice squeezed out from the last bit of life in death's grip. "What? Be strong now! . . . Where are you? Where are you?" As if in reply, a pile of tangled timbers moved with a creaking noise. Bleeding all over, my wife stood upright, with our two-month-old baby tightly in her arms.
All around us we heard shouting, groaning, cursing, voices calling father, voices calling mother, voices in search of brothers and sisters. All over the central part of town flames were shooting out as if the earth's crust had been ripped open. And these sorely burnt men and women all in stark nakedness! It was as if our corrupt world had come to an end, giving way to hell. My wife was most painfully wounded. On her whole body were stuck countless fragments of glass, large and small, that reflected pallid lights like a glittering spearhead of a demon. She could see nothing.
I took my wife on my back, and held the baby on my left arm. We walked three hundred metres, stepping barefooted on the debris and broken sheets of glass that went to pieces under our weight, and took refuge on a sand bank in a river where the tide had ebbed. Here we joined hundreds of suffering people, and the sound of the frantic search of parents for their children was heartrending enough to make one giddy.
And yeah, he did say exactly what the OP states. So... yeah.
To give the absolute benefit of the doubt, I could say they were referring specifically to nuclear fallout rather than the initial explosion, as a full on explosion is less likely in a nuclear plant emergency. But even assuming it was just an incredibly distasteful way to reference that, there are still thousands of deaths and even more injuries/illnesses associated principally with radiation poisoning.
This is not to say I'm against nuclear energy, but by god we've got to have more careful consideration than this.
Edit: As a bonus, Musk talks about his views on global warming around the 1:10 mark. The issue with greenhouse gasses is, uh... making it hard to breathe?
I listened to a bit of the interview and it's just insane nonsense, trump is ALL over the place with his topics, calling folks losers as a child would. But what was really odd was trump had this lisp almost like he had too much saliva in his mouth. It was gross and resembled that of an old man rambling incoherently
Yeah, because that's how you measure human tragedies, in buildings. Not loss of life, the aftermath, multigenerational trauma or anything else humane. But not unexpected from two of the most disgusting people in the western world, so 🤷♀️
So, at one point we wanted Tesla cars, powerwalls, and tiles. All of that went right out the window. So two cars and full solar setups for three houses...poof. Unfortunately we still have Starlink due to work requirements, but as soon as we don't need it, it is going right back out.
This image removes the bit of important context that they're talking about the safety of nuclear power. Elon is trying to argue that lingering radiation may not be as much of an issue as people may currently understand it to be. So, when talking about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaskai, he's trying to point out that even cities that were vaporized by an atomic blast can potentially be livable, and even thriving, within a human lifetime.
That being said, I would argue that there are far better ways to go about arguing in favour of the safety and efficacy of modern nuclear power plants without having to try to paint the horrific atrocity that was the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which have been reported to have killed approximately 200k people (civilians and military alike) in an instant and caused many thousands of later deaths due to burns and radiation poisoning and cancer and any number of other injuries caused by the blasts, as "not as bad as you think".
I'd argue that the great many strides that have been made in engineering and science to develop safe means of operating and maintaining nuclear power plants and the safe means of disposing and managing waste is a much better platform to start from for arguing in favour of nuclear power than the horrific accidents that have happened over the years which have themselves allowed us to gain the research necessary to ensure the current level of safety.
These are mistakes to be recognized, honoured, and learned from — not mistakes to be downplayed.