Jordan Peterson on energy: what the evidence says · JRE #1769
SUBJECT: ENERGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
more people die every year from solar energy than die from nuclear. Who dies from solar? Guess how you die from solar? Sunburn? No, you fall off the roofs when you're installing it.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Comparative energy-mortality research, compiled by Our World in Data from peer-reviewed sources including Markandya & Wilkinson (2007), Sovacool et al. (2016), and UNSCEAR assessments of Chernobyl and Fukushima, measures safety in deaths per terawatt-hour of electricity produced rather than raw annual death tallies. By that standard, nuclear and solar have nearly identical, very low death rates (on the order of 0.02-0.03 deaths per TWh each, with nuclear's figure already incorporating fatalities from Chernobyl and Fukushima), and the source explicitly cautions that comparing them at the margin is 'misguided' because the uncertainty ranges around the two values overlap. Falls during rooftop solar panel installation are a documented cause of solar-related occupational deaths, so that part of the mechanism Peterson describes is broadly accurate. However, whether solar causes more total annual deaths than nuclear worldwide depends on how death counts are normalized: nuclear and solar generate broadly similar, but not identical, amounts of global electricity, so comparing raw annual death counts without adjusting for scale of energy production, as Peterson's phrasing implies, does not reflect how energy-safety researchers actually compare these sources. The claim is best characterized as a simplified and somewhat misleading extrapolation from a real, near-parity statistic rather than a straightforwardly false or straightforwardly confirmed one.