Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change

by Jared Diamond

what are the risks of nuclear power, and what are the risks of the alternatives? France has generated most of its national electricity requirements from nuclear reactors for many decades without an accident. It seems implausible to object that the French may really have had accidents and not admitted them: the experience of Chernobyl demonstrates that the release of any radioactivity into the atmosphere from a damaged reactor is easily detected by other countries. South Korea, Taiwan, Finland, and many other countries have also generated much electricity from nuclear reactors without any significant accidents. Hence we should weigh our fear of the possibility of a nuclear reactor accident against the certainty of the millions of deaths caused every year by air pollution resulting from burning fossil fuels, and the enormous and possibly ruinous consequences of global climate change caused by fossil fuels.