The risks of nuclear power
Michael Edesess questions the “mistaken conventional wisdom about nuclear energy”, arguing that nuclear is pretty safe. In 2021, Thomas Wellock, historian of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, produced Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk, the sixth in a series of authorised volumes.
The historian/journalist Daniel Ford, reviewing Wellock’s work, writes: “In 1982, I wrote… about the risk of another major accident following the one at Three Mile Island… The numbers suggested that another major nuclear accident would come due in about three years. The Chernobyl disaster occurred roughly on schedule, four years later, in 1986.
“By such figuring, with no crystal ball required, Fukushima was a bit late in arriving. But since it involved three meltdowns, the quick calculation that I had made still proved a good-enough indicator of how much risk the world is running. The next meltdown, arithmetically speaking, is just around the corner; the only issue I cannot resolve is where it will occur.”
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