(I wrote this a while back – back when it was still news. Or at least back when people were paying attention to it being news. I decided not to post it, but now have changed my mind. It’s as relevant today as it was six weeks ago and even though it’s not “news” anymore, I don’t see it going away anytime soon – no matter how much we try to ignore it).

For every one death for energy derived from nuclear power there are four thousand from that of its older brother, Coal.

I’ve been explaining a lot of things this week. Where Japan is. How big the ocean is. How deep it is. What makes tsunamis. Plates – as in tectonics (this one I’m getting good at. Major earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and now Japan have all taken place during my time here). What is radioactivity. That one’s tough. The difference between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. And then anything that can be related to any of that. Basically open season on things I’m barely qualified to understand, let alone explain.

The disaster in Japan is being covered regularly on the news here. But as I’m sure it is back home, the ongoing nuclear saga has now grabbed the headlines away from the immense number of lives lost. What’s not being covered though are the basics. I read something about how back home most people’s knowledge about nuclear power is from watching The Simpsons. Here, we’re not even working with that.

As I’ve mentioned before, Paraguay – for it’s rung on the ladder in the list of the world’s developing countries – is a unique place, given its electrification rate: 96.7%. Hydroelectric power makes it all possible. Just three dams actually. (One of them happens to be the second largest in the world, but then again it provides power to a lot of Brazil – the world’s fifth largest country). This being the case, little time is spent thinking or talking about alternative energy or clean energy or even the fact that energy is, for most of the world, dirty and expensive. The concept of nuclear power plants here are as a foreign as the idea of a pastrami sandwich or a really good bagel.

It’s slightly acceptable – or I guess excusable is a better way of saying it – that people here, so far removed from the situation and the technology, don’t fully understand what’s happening. But for that to be the case in the States is kinda unacceptable. I’ve read a lot in the past 2 weeks about “nuclear power fears” and stuff along those lines. But I also read something today that made a little more sense: A forty-one year old nuclear power plant is hit by a the largest earthquake in the country’s modern history, then slammed into by a tsunami, has the roof collapse, burns for a few days, and not one person yet dies from radiation exposure.

That’s impressive. And something kind of hard to overlook as your trying to overlook that statement about coal up there.

kb