Recently, three articles have appeared in P&I about nuclear energy, one by Richard Broinowski on 29 August, one by Jim Coombs on 2 September, and a third by Joseph G. Davis on 3 September. All of them are negative about nuclear energy. The negativity in each case is driven by a fundamentally mistaken but widespread belief about nuclear energy safety. I respond here to these articles with a more positive view of nuclear.
The challenge of climate change, a principal cause of which is emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel electric power plants, has motivated an urgent search for alternative power generation to reduce and eliminate those emissions. However, because of the scale on which the electricity will have to be generated worldwide to replace all the electricity currently generated by fossil fuels, the options in the foreseeable future are few. They boil down to wind, solar, and nuclear energy. Much, though by no means all, conventional wisdom holds that the job must be done by wind and solar alone, with little or no place for nuclear. But, all too often, that conventional wisdom rests on mistaken beliefs about nuclear energy.
I have written about this topic before, for example here, here, and here. What I say here will draw on the arguments in those articles. For more details, please refer to them.
I will comment on the statements in the Broinowski, Coombs, and Davis articles that I believe to be in error and then expand on those comments.
Broinowski warns of “the deadly effect a military attack on Russia’s nuclear power complex at Kursk would have on civilian communities in Russia, Ukraine and potentially across Europe”. He then says “Both [Zelensky and Putin] tend to downplay the disastrous consequences an attack on the reactors or their electricity and cooling systems would have on civilian populations across Europe. They would be similar if not worse than the results of the Chernobyl fiasco.”
These statements give the mistaken impression that the Chernobyl fiasco had “disastrous consequences” on “civilian populations across Europe”. That is not at all true. It is true that at the time of the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, there was fear across Europe of the radiation that might spread. But that fear was because it was not generally realised at the time that radiation dispersed to such a distance — or in fact even to close distances — would be only lower concentration, low-level radiation and well below safe radiation levels, in fact below background radiation in most places.
Broinowski does accurately describe the actual effects of the Chernobyl disaster, but not in enough specifics and with an inherent bias. He says:
“…reports by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation found that immediate deaths caused by radiation from Chernobyl could be calculated, most certainly deaths from thyroid cancer, but not of long-term stochastic deaths. The precise number is unknown and there are wildly different estimates, including among the medical profession. Because of fears about radiation damage to foetuses, over one million abortions were performed across Europe in the year following the disaster.”
The reports to which Broinowski refere are the 2003-2005 Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts and the United Nations report Assessments of the radiation effects from the Chornobyl nuclear reactor accident which states that it essentially agrees with the conclusions of the former report. The former calculates that 28 emergency workers, those who were closest to the reactor, died of acute radiation syndrome. Wade Allison, a professor at the University of Oxford, estimates the additional number of deaths from childhood thyroid cancer at 15. Hence, as Allison says, “The only deaths that have been firmly established, either individually or statistically, are the 28 victims of acute radiation syndrome and 15 cases of fatal child thyroid cancer.”
What about the “long-term stochastic deaths” to which Broinowski refers? The United Nations report states, “there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure two decades after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated”.
As for the one million abortions that were performed across Europe following the disaster “because of fears about radiation damage to foetuses”, a study of survivors of the 1945 Hiroshima attack found rates of birth defects in their children were no higher than the general population average. Those abortions were, unfortunately, performed unnecessarily.
Coombs says that, “The process [of nuclear fission in a reactor] needs to be controlled or it goes off like Hiroshima.” This is false. A nuclear reactor cannot explode like an atomic bomb. An atomic bomb needs a much higher concentration of the fissile material uranium 235 than a nuclear reactor. He says, “Dutton blithely says the spent fuel rods will be stored on the power station site, which is mostly not the case elsewhere.” But that is wrong too. Almost all nuclear reactors in the United States, the country with the most nuclear reactors, store their spent fuel rods in pools adjacent to the power plant. And he says of the process of refining uranium to get a high enough concentration of uranium 235, “A long series of gas centrifuges of the highest quality stainless steel requiring a constant supply of energy to keep the spinning process going. A task at the very edges of technical feasibility.” Yes, it is a difficult task, but one that even Iran has mastered.
Joseph G. Davis says, “The risks of catastrophic Chernobyl or Fukushima-style accidents and their disastrous consequences are largely unchanged and cannot be understated.” But indeed, those risks are not understated, they are wildly overstated, again and again. Deaths per unit of electricity production have been lower for nuclear than even wind and solar. (Deaths from wind and solar have likely been due to installer or maintenance worker falls.) I have already spoken of the number of deaths due to Chernobyl. As to Fukushima, there is no clear evidence of any deaths due to radiation exposure. Meanwhile, almost 20,000 people were killed by the tsunami that also disabled the nuclear reactor, a fact that seems to be forgotten compared to the “catastrophic” nuclear reactor accident.
Davis also says that, “Another reason to be wary of nuclear technology is the longstanding connection between nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons.” In this, he is probably right. For example the United States and others have been wary of Iran’s nuclear energy program because the same technology — those centrifuges — that produces fuel for nuclear reactors can also produce more highly refined fuel for nuclear weapons. But there are countries, for example North Korea, that have developed nuclear weapons without having utilised nuclear power, and many others that have nuclear power, but no nuclear weapons. The weapons proliferation issue is a knotty one, one that the International Atomic Energy Agency is tasked to monitor.
One of the main concerns about those with the conventional wisdom view of nuclear energy risks is disposal of the waste product. But while it is not the only solution, storage in concrete casks above ground is a low-risk solution. A German research study envisioned a scenario in which a terrorist’s projectile pierced a cask storing the nuclear waste and released a cloud of radioactive aerosol particles. It estimated that a person standing at a distance of 5,000 meters downwind of the cask would have no more than a 20% chance of receiving a radiation dose greater than a full body CAT scan, and only a 30% chance of greater-than-normal annual background radiation. At least 100 times that dose is required over a short time to cause lasting damage to health.
In short, nuclear energy risks are, routinely, colossally overstated. The fear resulting from this overstatement has surely been at least in part responsible for its high cost and, in many cases, overly strict regulation, which results in very long lead times to go through the approval process before construction can begin. (In some countries, like the US; in other countries, for example South Korea, construction of nuclear power plants has been much less costly.)
None of this is to say that nuclear power is the solution to climate change, though it is likely to be part of the solution. It doesn’t even say what exact role it should or could play. What it does say is that nuclear energy has long labored under a taint due to misunderstanding of its risks. And it still does.
Michael Edesess is an accomplished mathematician and economist with a PhD in pure mathematics in stochastic processes and expertise in the finance, energy, and sustainable development fields. He is chief Investment Strategist of Compendium Finance.
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