Not a very catchy headline, is it?

Yet this is exactly what has happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan – an event which has now apparently overshadowed the many thousands of deaths from the tsunami which followed the earthquake; a tragedy of enormous scale, very difficult to get your head round, and virtually unbloggable.

Yes, it was stupid to site the plant by the sea-shore in a quake-prone region subject to tsunami inundation. Yes, there should have been thought put to the likelihood of a tsunami stopping the cooling system’s pumps from working. Yes, there should have been back-up cooling systems in place.

But…

No-one has died yet.

Of course any unnecesssary deaths are to be deplored but any deaths will be microscopic in number compared to the natural disaster.

And there are deaths associated with the extraction of coal and oil/gas for burning to make electricity. Even hydro-electricity has its drawbacks.

There are catches to alternative power generation methods too.

No power generation technology will be free of them.

It’s a question of risk, and nuclear generation has quite small ones really. (The waste is a different issue.)

I wouldn’t want a nuclear power plant in my backyard, though.

What’s that? Torness is only a relatively few miles away (as the wind blows) on the Berwickshire coast?

Hmm. So it is.

But then I grew up between Glasgow and Faslane; two prime targets in the event of the Cold War becoming hot, with a third – Holy Loch – not much further away, and barely gave it a thought.

Mind you, thermonuclear immolation would be a damn sight quicker than radiation poisoning.

I’ve not written anything so far about the huge oil leakage in the Gulf Of Mexico as it’s not really something you can do anything about except deplore it. It’s also far enough away from Britain as not to be a main news story in the middle of an election.

I would say, though, that this has been an accident waiting to happen. It was almost certain that with widespread offshore drilling a major ecological catastrophe would ensue.

I suppose since the industry doesn’t have a good safety record overall it could have happened to any oil company engaged in deep sea drilling. So it was partly bad luck it was one of BP’s rigs that exploded. But BP do seem to have made a decision to go specifically for oil growth and not diversify into other options.

So; is this the price we have to pay for oil? Are we too wedded to the lifestyle oil has helped to foster? (A lifestyle encouraged by governmental decisions which have downplayed public transport options and failed to invest in them or, in the case of the US, deliberately in the 1920s and 1930s built infrastructure that relied on the motor car as a means of getting about.)

Despite its myriad other uses the main thing we do with the stuff is simply to burn it away – which is really a criminal waste. But it is still the cheapest and easiest way to carry on modern life.

Yet oil, via the motor car, is probably the prime factor in the atomisation of people’s lives which has led to the erosion of the civil society I recall from my youth.

Is a disaster like this enough to turn our species away from the path of exploiting ever more remote sources of the thick, sticky black liquid?

The answer to that last one is likely to be. No.