There was a really interesting post I saw on Digg yesterday, questioning our fear of radiation. The author, Geoff Watts, wrote about his experience in an Austrian radiation cave. Apparently, inhaling low levels of radon is being offered up as a health tip.
Huffing on radioactive fumes aside, Watts’s core point is a familiar one: nuclear energy is cleaner than all of our fossil fuels which we burn, and produces power more effectively than our current generation of sustainable resources. If we could just get over our irrational fear of nuclear meltdowns, we’d be in a better place. Imagine if we treated fire in the same way as all things nuclear,” he says. “[W]e would have responded to house fires by banning matches.”
Well, if we’re going to play the analogy game: imagine if the half-life of a house fire was 700 million years. If a coal plant blows up, you get an explosion and a tasteful memorial to the fallen in the lobby of the next coal plant. If a nuclear reactor melts down, you get Chernobyl. One is a tragedy, the other is a Mad Max movie.
Watts counters:
Chernobyl, of course, was much worse… 116,000 people were evacuated; another 270,000 found themselves living in a zone described as “highly contaminated”.
It sounds bad. For 134 of the workers involved in the initial cleanup, it was very bad. The dose they received was enough to cause acute radiation sickness, and 28 of them soon died. Then, distrust of official information together with rumors of the dire consequences to be expected created a disproportionate fear…
The reality, though hardly inconsequential, was less catastrophic. A World Health Organization expert group was set up to examine the aftermath of the disaster and to calculate its future health consequences. On the basis of average radiation exposure for the evacuees, the people who weren’t evacuated and the many more thousands of workers later involved in the cleanup, the report concluded that cancer deaths in these three groups will increase by no more than 4 per cent. The report’s conclusions have been, and still are, contested — but the weight of orthodox opinion continues to line up behind the expert group’s calculations.
See, here’s where he loses me. A 4% increase in cancer deaths sounds pretty goddamn catastrophic to me. And then there’s the mental cost and anguish of being evacuated from your home. Watts references this… but somehow places the blame on our “overreaction” to nuclear fears instead of part of the cost of having a nuclear plant blow up in your town.
Nuclear power might not be the dangerous boogeyman hiding under your bed waiting to get you in the night. But it might be! There is still so much we don’t know about cancer and sub-atomic health effects. We do need to have rational discussions about the pros of nuclear power, compared to our other options.
But acting like radiation just has a branding problem is silly.
(Image of a thing we’re totally NOT supposed to think of when talking about nuclear power plants, courtesy of Shutterstock)
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