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Nuclear Power Might Have Saved Your Life

Coal will kill you a million times over before nuclear even sits down at the table.
Image: Fotopedia, CC

No other power source casts as terrifying a shadow as nuclear power—but NASA research shows it might have just saved your life.

Nuclear power is an Eisenhower mushroom cloud, a lumbering host of irradiated zombies, a world-ending jalopy kept online by the hapless Homers of the world, all rolled into one. That's nuclear power in our post-Cold War, sci-fi-addled brains. Fukushima just helped keep the phantom afloat.

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But packed in among the crowd of deadly energy sources that keep our lights on, nuclear power is no cold-blooded killer. That honor belongs to oil and coal; each of those maniacs literally kill millions of people every year.

No, nuclear power is more like a mostly harmless drunk who gets behind the wheel once in a while—there are accidents, and they can be fatal, but they are few and far between. Despite being the world's favorite electricity-generating boogeyman, it is far less dangerous than its fossil fueled brethren.

NASA scientists, including the renowned climatologist Dr. James Hansen, just published a study that suggests that while nuke power has been the cause of some 5,000 deaths over the last 40 years—from Chernobyl, from radiation, from other worker-related accidents; and that number is on the high end—it has saved approximately 1.8 million lives.

If you're running on nukes, you don't need coal, and coal gives us asthma and rots our lungs. Pollution emitted by coal plants—mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other particulates—kill millions of people every year. China and India have it worst. The more nukes, the less asthma and lung-rot. Rocket science it is not.

Of course, there are are still big fat problems with nuke power, even if it's not the ticking time bomb of our fantasies. Disasters incur massive economic costs along with human tragedy, and this latest meltdown is going to cost billions and forever ruin a Japanese town thousands called home. And many health impacts of meltdowns are still poorly understood—researchers have tenuously linked radiation loosed in Fukushima to a spate of sick babies in Hawaii, for instance.

But still. Coal and oil are much, much worse. They are confirmed and convicted killers, and they kill those who live near freeways and belching power plants. They kill—and have killed—by the millions.

Which is why those who live nearby a non-melted down nuclear plant may actually have reason to be grateful—after all, it wasn't a killer coal plant. If it was, you might be dead. It is an actual possibility that nuclear power has or will have saved your life.