Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

by Hannah Ritchie

One of the biggest misconceptions is that nuclear power is unsafe. In fact, it’s one of the safest sources of energy. Over the last 60 years there have been only two major nuclear accidents: Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. When we think about nuclear power, it is these two terrible incidents that come to mind. When I polled my friends about how many people had died in them, the most popular guess was hundreds of thousands. The numbers are actually much smaller.39 When we combine the direct deaths from the Chernobyl explosion, and the potential deaths from cancer cases caused by the radiation, the accident is likely to have caused up to 400 deaths.40, 41 Every one of those deaths is tragic, but they’re much fewer than most imagine, especially given the fact that this was the worst nuclear disaster in history and is unlikely to be repeated. The Chernobyl reactors were an old and unsafe design, and the secrecy of the Soviet Union at the time meant the response to the disaster was slow.