The human suffering in the Japanese disaster is obviously the overwhelming fact in the situation. Longer term, its effects will shape people’s well-being less severely but more widely. As the rubble clears, a bit of positive news emerging is that the incident’s impact on the global economy will be slight. Historic as the catastrophe was, most forecasters expect it to slow growth only 0.1% to 0.2% this year. The far more significant effect will be how the world responds to the disaster, which will influence our lives for years to come.
Most profoundly affected will be nuclear power, and the danger is that the world’s response to the events at Fukushima may not be rational. As The Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in this special package of articles, we humans don’t deal well with risk. We underestimate the chances of catastrophic events until they happen; then, because the world is so connected, the setbacks are much harder to handle. NRG Energy (NRG) chief David Crane, one of six experts interviewed here, notes that America hasn’t approved a new nuclear plant in more than 30 years. That’s a legacy of Three Mile Island, a “minor accident” (in the view of Intellectual Ventures founder Nathan Myhrvold, also heard from here) in which no one died. Coal power, through mining deaths and emissions, has been far more harmful, but less dramatically so. Hundreds of new coal plants have been built over the past 30 years.
A settled assessment of Fukushima will take months or even years. An emerging consensus, by no means unanimous, suggests that nuclear power will move ahead; the world needs more energy and fewer greenhouse gases. Because billions of people rising out of poverty will be consuming more energy, and because the ways in which we produce that energy will carry consequences for the planet’s future, the stakes in understanding Fukushima properly are extraordinarily high. The voices in the following pages can help. –Geoff Colvin