With all the talk of the dangers of nuclear power after Japan’s earthquake, a fact that’s been conveniently omitted is that, “for every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced,” reports author Seth Godin.

Simplifying a complicated chart created by IBM comparing the number of deaths related to each energy source — coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, hydro and biomass — per terawatt-hour, Godin found that nuclear energy was far from the most dangerous form of energy production.

As Godin also notes, what’s not included in this chart is the deaths that are caused by “global political instability involving oil fields, deaths from coastal flooding and deaths due to environmental impacts yet unmeasured, all of which skew it even more if you think about it.”

Godin’s completely right. The coal industry has done a remarkable job of making people believe that coal is the cheaper, more reliable solution to our energy problems, while ignoring all the dangers associated with it. Politicians from coal states also likely to point out that coal keeps our employment numbers up — unfortunately, that’s not the whole truth.

Here’s where the data was taken from, here’s the original chart.

Also, it is important to note that situations like Japan are rare. The last disaster happened in Chernobyl in 1986. Benjamin Sovacool, an assistant professor in energy policy at the National University of Singapore, calculated that about 57 nuclear accidents have occurred since then, leading to a world wide loss of life or damage exceeding $50,000. Considering the technology is capable of providing electricity to over 15 percent of the population — that number is low.

We need more renewable/cleaner forms of energy in the bigger picture, because global warming isn’t going anywhere. Coal is dirty, finite, and terrible for our environment. OIl doesn’t rank very high either. While nuclear energy isn’t the only other option (solar, wind, natural gas, etc), we cannot walk away from it in the long run because it is capable of powering far more homes than any currently existing alternative. And the longer we depend on coal or oil, the worse it is for the environment.

So unless we find something more viable between oil, coal and nuclear — we may be out of options.

Update: The year of the Chernobyl disaster has been corrected to 1986