It might surprise you to learn that:

· An American has a better chance of being shot by their own dog, than being harmed by nuclear power. (Chapter 3)

· More people die each year working on rooftop solar and wind turbines, than have ever died from sixty years of nuclear power. (Chapter 6)

· You’d get more radiation flying from the US to Ukraine, than from taking a tour of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. (Chapter 14)

· The average dose received by anyone downwind from Three Mile Island was equal to one chest X-ray. (Chapter 6)

· If no one had evacuated Fukushima, the maximum downwind dose would have been equal to one CT scan. (Chapter 1)

· The false estimate of 4,000 future deaths from Chernobyl was based on a 1927 experiment, conducted before low levels of radiation could be accurately detected and measured. (Chapter 9)

· The bad science that came from this work – that there is no safe dose of radiation, and that all doses are cumulative – is widely accepted as fact, even to this day. (Chapter 7)

What is Fear of a Nuclear Planet?

This book is a challenge to our fellow environmentalists to re-evaluate their position on nuclear power. Too many of us seem to believe that it's a fate worse than global warming, and that we must devise a national clean-energy solution based entirely, or mostly, on renewables instead.

Ideas are being offered and debates are being waged on the best way to get the world to Carbon Zero by 2050. That's a good first step, but our carbon emissions will eventually have to be less than zero, something known as Carbon Negative, to undo the damage from two centuries of burning carbon fuel.

Whatever technologies we ultimately use to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere and oceans, this much is certain: Carbon Zero isn’t enough. Even if the world stopped burning all carbon fuels today, we've already put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to risk a warmer and chaotic climate for the next several hundred years. We have to go Carbon Negative, not just Carbon Zero.

The world will require a stupendous amount of clean energy to achieve Carbon Zero. And then we’ll need even more energy to go Carbon Negative, to restore the world’s pre-industrial climate. And this energy will have to be produced above and beyond the energy we'll need to run the machinery of civilization. And, all of it must be carbon-free.

Passions are running high, because the decisions we make today will affect the future of civilization as we know it. That's usually just a figure of speech, but in this case it's all too real. Complicating matters is the fact that climate science has become a political chew toy, especially in the United States.

But this issue is beyond politics, or should be. The excess CO2 that's warming the planet and acidifying the oceans is a real and worsening crisis, regardless of anyone's political persuasion. So if all this climate stuff sounds alarming, that's good. If you're not alarmed, you're not paying attention.

Chapter 7: Bad Science is presented by Mike Conley.