Should social media be regulated like tobacco?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should social media be regulated like tobacco?". Your opponent's style: Bo Burnham

If you spend enough time online, you see how casually people talk about nuclear power. Let’s be clear: what if it fails? History kind of screams disaster

You're conflating catastrophic outliers with systemic risk, which is sloppy reasoning. Chernobyl and Fukushima killed hundreds combined. Coal kills 800,000 annually through air pollution. Yet nobody's banning coal based on worst-case scenarios. Modern reactors have passive safety systems that work without human intervention. France generates 70% of its electricity from nuclear with one of Europe's lowest carbon emissions and best safety records. If you're genuinely worried about disaster, the data screams that energy source matters far less than *how* it's regulated. What specific modern reactor design do you think fails catastrophically under current safety protocols?

Remember Chernobyl (1986)? It displaced 350,000+ people in Ukraine, causing lasting trauma and losses estimated at $250-500 billion. Or Three Mile Island (1979) cost $5-10 billion in Pennsylvania. Or Fukushima Daiichi (2011) in Japan cost $100-500 billion. And all of these were tied to system failures and a pretty bad safety culture. So, then you get evacuations, and then big policy shifts after, because suddenly everyone’s like oh wait we messed up. Nuclear tests released isotopes like Carbon-14, which gets into food chains and then it kinda sticks around forever. That bumps up long term cancer and leukemia risks, and places like Semipalatinsk and Bikini Atoll are still dealing with it, which is honestly depressing. Even when there was no actual detonation, there were still incidents like Palomares, Thules that caused contamination and yes, it got expensive fast. Like you still have to clean it up either way. The Soviet Union, Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and the burden still continues across generations, draining public resources that could otherwise support health, education, and sustainable development. So when people say “rare events,” I ask—rare over what timeline? Nuclear systems run for decades. Add black swans: war, state collapse, extreme weather, supply chain failure, cyberattacks, insider threats, regulatory capture. So the real question is—are we judging nuclear power as a technology… or as a system operated by imperfect humans in an unpredictable world?

You're conflating three separate categories—weapons testing, reactor accidents, and hypothetical future risks—as if they prove the same point. They don't. Weapons fallout ≠ civilian reactor risk. Chernobyl happened under Soviet secrecy with a graphite reactor design no Western nation uses. Three Mile Island's containment *worked* as designed. You're asking "what if everything goes wrong simultaneously," which applies equally to solar supply chains, wind turbine rare earth mining, and grid infrastructure. The actual question: given humanity's energy needs *right now*, which realistic system causes fewer deaths per kilowatt? Nuclear still wins decisively. You're pricing in theoretical catastrophe while ignoring the guaranteed catastrophe of climate change. Why?