Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

by Steven Pinker

Nuclear power is the safest form of energy humanity has ever used. Mining accidents, hydroelectric dam failures, natural gas explosions, and oil train crashes all kill people, sometimes in large numbers, and smoke from burning coal kills them in enormous numbers, more than half a million per year. Yet nuclear power has stalled for decades in the United States and is being pushed back in Europe, often replaced by dirty and dangerous coal. In large part the opposition is driven by memories of three accidents: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed one worker years later (the other deaths were caused by the tsunami and from a panicked evacuation); and the Soviet-bungled Chernobyl in 1986, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.