Scared of nuclear power, dummy?

Prior to the release of the 2010 GSS data set, finding questions on the perceived danger of nuclear power generation required going back as far as the early nineties. In response to a commenter, I attempted just that. Now, more contemporary responses are available, albeit still prior to the Japanese tsunami.

Responses are on a 5-point scale that has been inverted from the GSS for ease of viewing. A 1 indicates the belief that the perils of nuclear power are minimal, a 5 that nuclear power is extremely dangerous. Respondents are broken up into five categories; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Really Dumbs (0-3, 12%). The average (mean) response for members of each group is shown. One standard deviation for the entire respondent pool is 1.14 (n = 1301):

IQ group	Danger
Really dumbs	3.82
Pretty dumbs	3.64
Normals	3.55
Pretty smarts	3.21
Really smarts	2.87

Although there is some perception that SWPLs-types oppose expanding nuclear power generation because of the environmental dangers it putatively imposes, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming concerns mitigate this. Nuclear power is the only way to viably produce power on a large scale without significant carbon dioxide emissions, so opposing nuclear power while simultaneously maintaining good standing in the Gaia church means putting modernity on the very weak backs of wind and solar, or simply looking like a luddite. So it comes as little surprise that more intelligent people are more supportive of nuclear power generation than less intelligent people are.

Parenthetically, over the 16 year interval since the nuclear question was posed in the GSS, the pretty smarts and really smarts have become even less fearful of nuclear power than they had been, while the sentiments of the other three groups have remained the same.

Will the Fukushima Daiichi evacuation and closure change that? Smarter people will more easily discern that had the emergency generators required to cool the reactors been on higher ground (they could handle 20-foot high waves, but needed to handle 50-foot high waves last March), no meltdown would've occurred--an unfortunate shortcoming, but an irrelevant one for most of Europe and the US. Germany has announced that it will close all of the country's nuclear power plants by 2022, but other European nations haven't followed suit (and if that remains the case, Germany will probably end up buying energy generated by nuclear power from places like France in the future).

GSS variables used: NUKEGEN, YEAR(2010), WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10)

Ignoring threats, or paying them too much attention?

On the passive suggestion of Parapundit's Randall Parker, I'm reading The World Without Us, a book by Alan Weisman that attempts to describe the future following the abrupt extinction of homo sapiens. It immediately strikes me as disappointingly misanthropic and distractingly quasi-religious (what Half Sigma terms "Gaia worship"). The recurring criticisms I have with this approach--the idea that humans have somehow unfairly intruded onto evolution's domain rather than being a product of it, the exclusive focus on biodiversity at the expense of biomass, and the assertion that while human immigration from the third world into the West is grand, all other forms of immigration (human or otherwise) are inherently bad--are present. Sifting through that, though, the descriptions given about the influence of humans on ecosystems, from what becomes of the salt dumped onto roads by trucks during snowstorms to the fates of potentially feral pets, makes for intriguing reading.

My point is not to give a book review. I'm not even 100 pages in, and, more importantly, reviews are, uh, not a personal strength. I did, however, want to tap readers for thoughts on the following passage (p3), where Weisman asks whether or not humans will realize the point in time where they've crossed the rubicon, dooming the planet as we know it. Seems to me that he gets it exactly backwards:

The truth is, we don't know. Any conjecture gets muddled by our obstinate reluctance to accept that the worst might actually occur. We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.

To the contrary, are we not 'excessively' worried about all sorts of perceived threats that are, in reality, far less threatening than we imagine them to be? We're afraid to go swimming in the ocean for fear that we might be mistaken shark bait, even though the annual number of shark attacks in the US averages less than 20, and less than 5% of those are fatal. We scurry indoors during a thunderstorm, even though the chance of getting struck by lightning is infinitesimal. We have to fight through the sometimes numbing anxiety of approaching an attractive girl even though realistically the worst that happens is we're politely turned down. We buy home owner's and life insurance policies even though odds are we're going to lose money on the deals, because we fear the worst. We're disgusted by the idea of eating a piece of food that falls on the floor, even as our pets happily show us how silly that worry is. We regularly go through media cycles in which the next big pandemic set to ravage humanity is spotted, with hysterical documentaries close behind, before going out with a whimper ahead of the next big pandemic just over the horizon.

What are the real threats that we systematically tend to ignore? Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, maybe? The fact that business owners will intentionally make economically poor hiring decisions and run their businesses into the ground just to spite a black guy or a lesbian, too, I guess. Uh huh.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense to me. Survival is the primary objective, more important even than reproduction, as the former is a prerequisite of the latter. Better safe than sorry. That veritable aphorism is one that Weisman, as an author, surely benefits from.