News of a fresh nuclear leak in Japan, and news that wildfires are threatening the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, got us wondering just how much people worry about nuclear accidents any more.
So we scanned last week's top 200,000 user queries looking for searches including the words "atomic" or "nuclear." (This is before the latest events, mind you.) We also tossed in Chernobyl and Three Mile Island for good measure.
Here are the results, with the percentage each topic received out of all nuclear/atomic queries:
53.7% Atomic clock
10.0% Atomic bomb
7.8% Chernobyl
4.1% Nuclear power
4.1% Nuclear weapons
3.2% Nuclear medicine
3.1% Nuclear energy
2.9% Atomic Kitten
2.4% Atomic structure
2.4% Three Mile Island
1.8% Nuclear war
1.7% Nuclear fusion
1.4% Nuclear blast
1.4% Nuclear waste
That's right: more than half the searchers were just looking for the time.
And we should emphasize that none of these topics got very many searches. The atomic clock got about as many searches as cover letters or movie posters, while nuclear waste got exactly as many searches last week as Eddie Fisher or chocolate fondue.
Add all the nuclear/atomic queries together and they still got less searches than chess, Wicca, or Amtrak. (Atomic Kitten, by the way, is yet another cheeky British babe band.)
Well, maybe it IS a hopeful sign that more people are worried about the next edition of the Spice Girls than about nuclear accidents -- and 20 times as many people are thinking about setting their watch than either of those. If that's not a sign of progress over Cold War paranoia, what is?
One final bit of good news: despite decades of public mispronunciation, nobody last week searched for the term nucular.
