Thinking again on nuclear power

I find the whole nuclear power debate interesting more from an applied epistemological perspective than the issue itself.

That is, I've got a PhD in astrophysics and have been employed as an astronomer for coming up to 9 years. I read articles on critical thinking as a matter of course. Though I'm no expert in either nuclear physics or medicine, I've been following the nuclear debate for many years. By any objective standard, I should be in a better than average - though nowhere near the top - position to be able to decide who's right and who's wrong. Yet I find myself completely unable to advance beyond a tentative, "cautiously pro-nuclear" stance. Without actually investigating the issues in expert-level detail for myself, how am I to reach a more definitive conclusion ? By extension, how can the the general public be expected to make a proper decision on things like climate change ? How can we even decide which experts to trust ?

The problem with knowing who to trust is that all of the parameter space of expertise versus opinion appears to be occupied : you can find an expert of any qualification level who ascribes to any opinion you want. A senior professor thinks nuclear is safe ? Well, I can find you one who disagrees. A 17 year old vegan hippie environmentalist who thinks nuclear is worse than eating puppies ? Again, I can find you one who disagrees. It's not even clear where the bulk of opinion lies : how many senior experts favour which position. I don't doubt that statistic exists somewhere, but it is not widely reported. Thus I can't even gauge if an article is espousing the view of mainstream science or a minority fringe. I have absolutely no way to deciding which sources of bias are at work. I also have to wonder why this article is coming out now, at a time when the costs of renewable sources of energy are falling so rapidly that it almost looks as though nuclear won't be necessary on a large scale.

It seems to me the arguments boil down to extracting whether very low-level radiation causes a significantly elevated cancer risk, after controlling for a very wide variety of factors that vary strongly from place to place (e.g. diet, exercise, working conditions, exposure to non radioactive chemicals). An increased risk of cancer over a whole lifetime must be set against the other risks that would occur anyway. Determining whether nuclear power is anything more than a contributing factor looks like an impossible task in all but the most extreme cases.


Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people. In other words, the main lesson that should be drawn from the worst nuclear accidents is that nuclear energy has always been inherently safe.

Twenty-eight firefighters died after putting out the Chernobyl fire. What about cancer? By 2065 there may be 16,000 thyroid cancers; to date there have been 6,000. Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent — it is an easy cancer to treat — expected deaths may be 160. The World Health Organization claims on its web site that Chernobyl could result in the premature deaths of 4,000 people, but according to Dr. Geraldine Thomas, who started and runs the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, that number is based on a disproven methodology.

“That WHO number is based on LNT,” she explained, using the acronym for the “linear no-threshold” method of extrapolating deaths from radiation. LNT assumes that there is no threshold below which radiation is safe, but that assumption has been discredited over recent decades by multiple sources of data. Support for the idea that radiation is harmless at low levels comes from the fact that people who live in places with higher background radiation, like Colorado, do not suffer elevated rates of cancer.

Even relatively high doses of radiation cause far less harm than most people think. Careful, large, and long-term studies of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki offer compelling demonstration. Cancer rates were just 10 percent higher among atomic blast survivors, most of whom never got cancer. Even those who received a dose 1,000 times higher than today’s safety limit saw their lives cut short by an average of 16 months.

Thanks to nuclear’s inherent safety, the best-available science shows that nuclear has saved at least two million lives to date by preventing the burning of biomass and fossil fuels. Replacing, or not building, nuclear plants, thus results in more death. In that sense, Fukushima did result in a public health catastrophe. Only it wasn't one created by the tiny amounts of radiation that escaped from the plant. About 2,000 people died from the evacuation, while others who were displaced suffered from loneliness, depression, suicide, bullying at school, and anxiety.

It Sounds Crazy, But Fukushima, Chernobyl, And Three Mile Island Show Why Nuclear Is Inherently Safe

After a tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan eight years ago today, triggering the meltdowns of three reactors, many believed it would result in a public health catastrophe. "By now close to one million people have died of causes linked to the Chernobyl disaster," Helen Caldicott, an Australian medical doctor, in The New York Times.