Public opinion divided?

Imagine a town with a nuclear powerplant close by. If its residents displayed signs of  radiation sickness, the finger of suspicion will point towards the plants however much the plant's operator might swear to its safety.

Mirroring a scenario where the town is also home to research centre where the radioactive material is also stored and used in experiments. Now the finger would waver between the nuclear plant and the research centre.

Now to complicate things further, if the nuclear waste from both the plant and research centre was buried in an underground dump a fair distance away from the town, a third focus suspicion would arise. Those suspicion of the nuclear power industry would be convinced that the plant was the source of pollution.

Little bits of circumstantial evidence would begin to circulate on social media as well as in the opinion columns of the newspaper pointing out to the power plant. The nuclear industry would fight back and accuse the research institute of causing radiation leak. The scientific establishment would close ranks around research lab and testify to safety standards in the laboratory as well as the quality of the research.

A third group of people would probably accuse both the power plant as well as the research institute of poisoning the world by using and storing the nuclear toxic waste. Each of these groups would believe that they has the truth and others were wrong. They would criticize if any investigation that did not agree their beliefs.

To find the scientific proof instead is a task as challenging as an archeologists painstakingly digging through hundreds of meters of tightly packed layers of mud & stone and debris in the hope of recovering tiny clues to the existence of an ancient civilization.

Source - The Hindu