From Greifswald (in erstwhile East Germany) and Three Mile Island (US) to Chernobyl in former Soviet Union (now in Ukraine), human errors and accidents have been warning champions of nuclear energy of the dangers. But they have either ignored or downplayed those warnings.

The media that have made a killing out of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility disaster will soon, as is their wont, forget the dangers and restart trumpeting the advantages of nuclear power. They are more like stock investors, who make hay when shares go up and are the first ones to jump ship at the slightest sign of danger. We have seen investors over the years - they were on show again when Japanese stocks nosedived following Friday's disaster.

In the end, helpless people are left at the mercy of officials running the government or private power or industrial plants where accidents occur. These officials are rarely forthcoming with facts, because they have their business interests to protect. We have seen this phenomenon everywhere, from the Bhopal gas tragedy in India to Chernobyl, from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility disaster.

The tragedy is that we still have to rely on them because we need energy to run the world's economic engine or rather grease the hungry-for-profit palms. Until we cut down our unnecessary demands on nature, until we stop producing in excess of our needs, until we learn to compromise our so-called modern-day comforts, until we heed the warnings of nature, we will keep encountering Bhopals, Chernobyls and Fukushimas.

The world has seen what years of human efforts to make money (as in Japan) can come to at even the slightest nudge of nature. The magnitude 9 quake and tsunami were just a reminder, not even a warning, of nature's wrath.

Yet the world, particularly the advanced world, prefers to ignore the threat of climate change (which nature has been warning of for a considerably long time). Once the volatile balance of planet Earth shifts, even so slightly, all the financial and other gains that the self-proclaimed masters of the universe, the economics and science whiz-kids have made can vanish in the flick of an eye.

But do the "masters of the universe" care?

The author is a senior editor with China Daily. E-mail: oprana@hotmail.com

(China Daily 03/19/2011 page5)