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Which Industry Offers The Safest Jobs In America: Nuclear Or Logging?

This article is more than 4 years old.

The most dangerous job in America is logging, with over 132 fatal injuries per 100,000 workers. The next nine most dangerous jobs, with fatality rates between 10 and 100, are: commercial fishing, aircraft pilots, roofers, trash collectors, steel workers, truck drivers, farming, construction worker supervisors (yes, just the supervisors), and groundskeepers.

The safest job in America is in the commercial nuclear industry, with less than 1 fatal injury per 100,000 workers - in fact, it is near zero. One has to go back and integrate 10 years to get to 1 fatal injury per million worker-equivalents. Nuclear is also one of the best paying of any job sector.

Other lists of safest jobs never include nuclear, probably because of inherent bias and ignorance, or maybe because most just lump nuclear with other energy jobs like natural gas, which is completely wrong. Nuclear is a thousand times safer than any fossil fuel, and is a hundred times safer than even wind and solar.

The other safe jobs include accountant, actuary, computer systems analysts, dietitian, interpreter, mathematician, medical records tech, paralegal, statistician, and web developer, all of them about 10 times more dangerous than nuclear.

Even when looking at non-lethal injuries (see figure below), like falling off a ladder, nuclear is still the safest job around, safer than sitting at a desk trading stocks, safer than being a realtor, safer than any job anyone reading this post has ever held. And that level of safety has cost more, but it’s worth it.

Because of the sturm und drang of the cold war, great pressure was placed on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the EPA, the DOE and their predecessors to do their jobs better, making nuclear the safest, cleanest, most efficient energy source known to humans.

This result, more than is generally realized, achieved with nuclear in environmental and health safety what no one has achieved with fossil fuel, or even with renewables: near-perfect safety records. These points should not be lost in discussions on energy sustainability.

Of course, it’s key that measuring radiation is easy, and protecting against radiation is even easier.

But when the job has been done this well, it needs to be acknowledged.  Ranting that nuclear needs to be safer is nonsense. Safer than the safest is a bizarre goal to have. And the other energy sources need to be held to as high a safety and environmental standard as nuclear.

So it’s actually good that nuclear power is increasing in the world - yes, rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.

According to the World Economic Forum, 8 years after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, global nuclear power generation is experiencing a rebound to pre-Fukushima levels and meeting almost 10% of the increased demand for electricity worldwide.

Last year, nuclear power production worldwide increased by 3.3%, with more than 50 nuclear reactors currently under construction. Fifteen of them are in China, whose goal is to have 58 GW by 2020 as part of its efforts to reduce air pollution from coal-fired plants. Japan is slow to restart its nuclear fleet, but about 30 reactors should finally come back online in the next ten years.

So, if you’re looking for a great job that pays well, and is safer than any desk job, nuclear is the top choice.

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