CJR on Fukushima

I'm writing this brief post from a National Science Foundation workshop on environmental, reproductive, and genomic justice, so things will be short.  But I wanted to call your attention to an excellent Columbia Journalism Review interview with the journalist who has been doing most of the reporting on the Fukushima incident for the New York Times.  His comments are revealing and, in my opinion, spot on.  Here's an excerpt:

If you want to get cold and analytical about it, we need electricity so we can have clean drinking water, sewage processing, fresh food in the refrigerator, sixty-eight degrees on a cold winter night, and seventy-two degrees on a hot August afternoon. All of those things have benefits, and all of them are going to have a cost somewhere. One of them is risk and sometimes death. Look at the people who died in San Bruno [California] when the natural gas pipeline there ruptured. These are the costs of extracting, converting, and delivering energy, but we don’t really look at it statistically. We don’t think in terms of deaths per megawatt hour. Nuclear power accidents are simply sexier than coal mine accidents.