2 Questions to Ask If You're Afraid of Nuclear Power

 

 

 

When you hear the term “nuclear power,” what comes to mind? Our immediate responses were:

1. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (that was 1945).
2. Three Mile Island (a nuclear reactor partially melted down there in 1979).
3. Chernobyl (the site of a flawed reactor in the Ukraine that sustained an explosion and fire in 1986).
4. Fukushima (scene of another nuclear power plant meltdown following a tsunami in 2011).

Each of these events was a catastrophe, the first ushering in the “atomic age” and the other three representing disasters at nuclear power plants, including one in the U.S. Radioactivity was released into the environment in each of these disasters, raising fears of future cancers and birth defects.
Although the atomic bomb is obviously unrelated to catastrophes at nuclear power plants, what these events have in common is that they form a common impression of nuclear energy as dangerous. Consequently, even though nuclear energy does not create greenhouse gasses and therefore cannot contribute to global warming, it is rarely mentioned when solutions to climate change are discussed by environmentally sensitive advocacy groups. Instead, we default to what is known as the “availability bias” when we consider nuclear energy—our penchant to consider only what is most readily recalled. Graphic images of nuclear disasters, amply provided by the media, are the easiest aspects of nuclear power for us to recall. Hence, our emotional responses to “nuclear power” are often fear and anger.


How do we even know whether nuclear power is dangerous?

Does this emotional reaction fit the data? In order to answer this, it is useful to consider two seemingly simple questions we often neglect to ask when evaluating health and safety claims.


1. How many active nuclear plants are there in the world?


First, as we stressed in our recent book, Denying To the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us, we usually forget to ask, “What’s the denominator?” That is, we remember three nuclear power plant disasters—Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—but do we have any idea how many power plants operate around the world without accidents? And if the argument is that even one nuclear power plant accident is too many because of the increased risk for radiation-related cancers, do we know how many such cancers can be attributed to each nuclear accident compared to the base rate of cancer?
In fact, we already know that the Three Mile Island accident has not caused an excess of cancers or cancer-related deaths[1]. Yes, some people who lived in the area surrounding the nuclear power plant meltdown there have gotten cancer. But cancer, unfortunately, is a common disease, and the rate among those exposed to radiation at Three Mile Island turns out to be, at least so far, no higher than would be expected without radiation exposure.


2. Is nuclear power really more dangerous than burning fossil fuels?

Nor do we ask the simple question, “Compared to what?” There is no question that the Chernobyl disaster has and will continue to be the cause of increased cancer incidence among those exposed. That is of course a tragedy, which all experts agree stemmed from a faultily designed power plant and incompetent maintenance and not from problems endemic to nuclear power plants in general. As The New York Times editorial board recently noted, “Chernobyl has been used as an argument against nuclear power…but it shouldn’t be. Modern reactors have extensive safeguards against the kind of meltdown that happened in [the Chernobyl] reactor No. 4…”[2] But more importantly, we assume that deaths from nuclear accidents exceed those from other methods of generating electrical power.
This turns out to also be untrue. There are orders of magnitude more deaths to both workers and the public caused by accidents at coal and oil energy-producing plants than nuclear plants[3]. Over the last five years, 60,000 deaths are attributable to coal power in the U.S., compared to one death from nuclear power[4].  Moreover, when air pollution is factored in, the mortality rate from burning coal, oil, and gas far exceeds that of nuclear energy. It is estimated, for example, that 300 million children around the world breathe highly toxic air every day of their lives[5]. Simply put, burning fossil fuels kills many more people around the world every year than nuclear energy, even when deaths attributed to the handful of nuclear power plant catastrophes are included.


So why can’t we accept the facts about nuclear power?


Accepting these facts is very hard for us. Recently over lunch with a close and very intelligent friend I went through all of the statistics listed above and more to make the case that nuclear energy should be considered as an important part of the solution to climate change.  He seemed to understand each point I made, nodding in assent many times.  When I was done, I expected him to say “okay, you’ve convinced me,” but instead he said “but even one accident could kill millions of people.” I was chagrined but realized that next time I will have to try harder to overcome our bias to worry more about things that cause death in a “spectacular” way, like nuclear accidents, even when the actual risk is low.
None of this is meant to deny the real concerns about nuclear energy. The problem is that fear has caused us to mostly give up on nuclear power without even trying to fix some of the real potential problems with it. Those fears translate into politicians calling for a shutdown of nuclear power plants rather than allocating adequate funds to maintain and repair them or, even better, to build new plants with state-of-the art safety features or new technologies like molten salt reactors[6]. It is unsurprising that aging nuclear plants have loose bolts and other worrisome deficiencies, because we have become too scared to fix them[7]. We are also reluctant to devote funds for research necessary to find better ways to secure nuclear plants from terrorism and to dispose of nuclear waste.
There is even a more compelling reason to consider nuclear energy besides comparing it to the mortality rates caused by burning fossil fuels, and that is the devastation that failing to reverse global warming will produce. Already we see deaths from increasingly severe storms and epidemics caused by shifting habitats of disease-carrying animals like bats and mosquitoes. Indeed, this reality is leading many environmentalists to reach the conclusion that nuclear power will need to be part of the solution if we are going to avert the disasters looming from climate change. Solar and wind power alone are probably not going to be sufficient to meet this challenge.
So how can we overcome our fear of nuclear energy and make informed decisions about its potential use? First, we need to slow down our thought processes and consider all the sources of information we have about this issue. Is everything we know from newscasts about the Fukushima meltdown or from anti-nuclear interest groups? Second, we must remember to apply those questions “what’s the denominator?” and “compared to what?” to this issue as with all issues involving our health and safety. We can then decide if our ideas about nuclear energy are being driven by irrational fears or evidence. Only then will nuclear energy get a fair hearing.