Which is safer: flying or driving? This simple factual question is the subject of endless fascination, even though the data is very clear – planes are much safer (60x safer per mile; 4x safer per hour). But plane crashes are big news stories. And they have buried their way into our souls, much deeper than a simple factual error. Flying is also scarier than driving. Every flight starts with a safety lecture – this is the institutional manifestation of our collective fears. The *reason* that airplanes are safer than cars is because we fear them more. I wonder how much cheaper flying would be if we were willing to tolerate as much risk as we do driving.
Consider school shootings. Big news stories – vanishingly rare. But we worry. And we take action. Most schools now run “lockdown” drills to prepare students for the possibility of a mass shooting. We’re teaching our children to worry too, transmuting our exaggerated fears into childhood trauma. Is it really worth it?
Consider terrorism. The worst terrorist attack ever, 9/11, killed ~3000 people and cost billions of dollars. It was a horrific tragedy. But the material damage pales in comparison to the psychic damage. The most visible manifestation of that damage are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have cost hundreds of thousands of lives (mostly not American), and trillions of dollars [1]. There are also many harder-to-tally costs: Islamophobia, overzealous airport security, the “war on terror”, etc. And after all of it, are we really any safer?
For decades, nuclear power has been the safest and cleanest way to generate electricity (although never cheap [2], and renewables are now equally safe and clean). Public perception is exactly the opposite – that nuclear meltdowns are a terrifying threat and nuclear waste is a pressing unsolved problem. Why? Even though meltdowns are incredibly rare and cause few direct deaths [3], they are huge news stories. The opposition to nuclear power has made the climate crisis far worse.
The most important thing about nuclear waste is that it is solid. Air pollution is unbelievably bad – it kills millions of people every year (the total number of deaths per year is tens of millions). Once waste gets into the air, it is almost impossible to remove or avoid. Solid waste you can pretty much dump in a landfill and stay away.
The common thread in all of these examples is innumeracy. When you read the news, remember to multiply. Plane crashes, mass shootings, terrorism, and nuclear meltdowns make the news exactly because they are rare. Each individual event is horrible, but in aggregate, they just aren’t very important. And we should treat them that way.
[1]: Trillions of dollars to the US. I can’t find anyone who has tried to tally the costs for Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the rest of the world
[2]: I really want to know, but can find no data: how much cheaper would nuclear power be if it were allowed to be as dangerous as coal?
[3]: No one died during the Three Mile Island meltdown. The evacuation from Fukishima killed many more people than the meltdown (and the earthquake and tsunami killed many more, completely unrelated to nuclear power). Chernobyl directly killed only ~60 people. It is not known how to accurately measure the long-term indirect effects from radiation exposure from these incidents.
Bit Wise, Pound Foolish 