UNIVERSAL VISION

Seth Godin has a piece over at his blog that points out brilliantly 

something that I have been saying over and over about the Japan 

nuclear accident and mass media sensationalism: 

Things are being blown way out  of proportion.

Drama is much more exciting than dull and boring

Seth Godin writes in Triumph of Coal Marketing:

For every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die 

due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced... 



Regardless of the facts, too many people are guided by fear. 

Fear is not rational.

Seth also links on to another article and chart showing the 

statistics comparing deaths due to differing energy sources. 

Interestingly, in one example, even though Solar power accounts 

for less than 0.1% of world energy and nuclear is 5.9% of 

world energy, more than ten times more people die annually 

from Solar power than nuclear power.

I have pasted the chart here for your convenience:

Energy Source              Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal – world average               161

Coal – China                       278

Coal – USA                         15

(26% of World Energy - 50% of Electricity)

Oil                                36

(36% of World Energy)

Natural Gas                         4

(21% of World Energy)

Biofuel/Biomass                    12

Peat                               12

Solar (rooftop)                     0.44

(less than 0.1% of World Energy)

Wind                                0.15

(less than 1% of World Energy)

Hydro                               0.10

(europe death rate, 2.2% of World Energy)

Hydro - world including Banqiao)    1.4

(about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)

Nuclear                             0.04

(5.9% of World Energy)

It is a lack of information and fear of the unknown that 

creates this sort of atmosphere amongst the public. 

I posted some simple, yet excellent and thought provoking 

videos about nuclear power which I would hope everyone would 

take 30 minutes to watch.  The odds of you dying from coal 

related emissions are over 4,000 times higher than the odds 

of you dying from nuclear power related emissions. If people 

played the odds and were sensible about this, they wouldn't 

be moving away from countries with nuclear power but would 

be moving away from old-fashioned coal burning nations into 

nations with nuclear power.

But fear is a greater motivator than calm, fact-based rational 

thinking as fear is an emotional reaction.

Not to mention about how many millions of people have died 

and continue to die due to wars concerning the control of oil 

resources. There's no comparison to which have killed more 

people in the last 60 years.

Think about this: Nuclear power plants are not like nuclear 

weapons. Consider the case of Iran. Under IAEA rules, Iran, as 

a signatory, can produce nuclear power, but not  nuclear 

weapons - as processing Plutonium for a nuclear power plant 

and processing Plutonium for a nuclear weapon are two totally 

different animals. They have the technology to make nuclear 

power, but to make nuclear weapons they would need to process 

the Plutonium in a technical process that is much more 

complicated and that process produces a product that is many 

many times more dangerous than what is produced at a nuclear 

power plant.

The trouble is that people today have equated nuclear power 

with the atomic bomb and nuclear weapons. I believe that this 

is due to years of conditioning and molding due to marketing 

efforts by the coal and oil industry. I'm glad to see others 

who are expert at media agreeing with me. Nuclear power vs. 

nuclear weaponry? That's like comparing an apple with a herd 

of bull elephants or - like in the comparison that Seth Godin 

so aptly displays - like comparing the odds of dying in a 

car accident or from high blood pressure related diseases 

to dying in an airplane crash.

When you live in western society and whenever the facts 

do not bear out what you believe, you can bet your bottom 

dollar that most probably tens of millions, if not hundreds 

of millions of dollars have been spent on marketing, 

advertising and promotion to help create the ideas that 

you believe.