Theodore Rockwell
Founding Officer
MPR Associates, Inc.
3403 Woolsey Drive
Chevy Chase, MD 20815 U.S.A.
Tel: 301-652-9509 FAX: 301-652-0534
e-mail: tedrock@cpcug.org 

Scientists and technologists like to test out their ideas by playing what if games. What if all the radioactivity in a nuclear reactor core were released into the air all at once, during the most unfavorable weather conditions imaginable? The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission asked this question in 1980 of the Sandia atomic bomb laboratory, which ran off an in-house computer program called CRAC2 which produced a row of numbers for each of the 129 U.S. nuclear power plants then running or under construction in big and little communities across the nation. The first column showed "Early Deaths" ranging (for different plants) from 173 to 102,000, and "Early Injuries" from 3,130 to 710,000. The "Fatal Radius" was up to 25 miles, the distance for serious radiation injuries was up to 70 miles, and financial consequences from $13 billion to $314 billion in 1980 dollars, not including "socioeconomic costs, health care costs, and 'incidental costs'." This table of data, with little explanation, appeared in the first section of most of the nation's major papers. (In the Washington Post, the table headings were askew, and a reader could conclude that the fatal radius for one plant was 710,000 miles¾ 28 times around the world!) The NRC was surprised at the consternation this table created. The public just couldn't understand that this information was not supposed to relate to anything in the real world. There was no way that such a situation could be created, regardless of cost, effort and ingenuity. It was just an intellectual exercise, a mind-game. A similar exercise could have been run on how many people could be drowned in the local swimming lake. (You could drown a person with less than a gallon of water, so a million-gallon lake could drown a million people.) But nobody would pay for such a study.

The public, the media, politicians and regulators get two kinds of technical information on nuclear matters. Professional anti-nuclear lobbyists and their allies, many of whom have impressive-sounding credentials, turn out a frightening array of dreadful scenarios of death, mutations, cancer, and devastated landscapes. Nuclear proponents respond with the Rasmussen Report, the China Syndrome, LNT, collective dose, evacuation plans, and multi-billion-dollar subterranean labyrinths in the desert that must be controlled for millions of years. We are in no position to blame the public for being scared. With the information they have, they'd be foolish not to be.

When scientists talk about physical facilities in the real world, they should talk only about events that could really happen. Because being over-cautious can have grave consequences. If, to be cautious, we don't irradiate food, people die from food poisoning. If we build a coal-fired power-plant because we're not sure nuclear is safe, people die from inhaling particulate air emissions. If a life-saving medical procedure is held up because it involves radiation, people will die who might have been saved. If we spend hundreds of billions of dollars "remediating" land that is less radioactive than typical Colorado real estate, we deny an under-funded health care system the resources it needs. We clearly see the cost of being reckless. We must also learn the cost of unreasonable "cautiousness." We must learn to feel accountable for deaths we could have prevented.

The great scientist-philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington once wrote, after expounding on "the soulless dance of bloodless electrons," that what he had written "may be Truth, but it is not Reality," and he urged scientists not to dwell too long on such things, but to get out and watch a sunset and readjust to the physical world. On a similar tack, Admiral Hyman Rickover, who more than any other individual made a reality out of the dream of atomic power, wrote: "In Greek mythology, Antaeus was a giant who was strong as long as he had contact with the earth. When he was lifted from the earth he lost his strength. So it is with engineers. They must not be isolated from the real world." But perhaps an anonymous British politician said it best: "The people think we lie, but when they find we do not, they make a graver error: they think we tell the Truth." We nuclear scientists and technologists know we do not lie, but because of that we presume we tell the Truth. It is not so easy as that.

Most scientists prefer mental, rather than physical, exercise. One of their favorites is "thought experiments" which are experiments carried out only in the laboratory of the mind. Einstein, riding home on the trolley from his boring patent-office job, thought about what it would be like to ride on a beam of light from one of the street lamps along the way. This helped him think through some of the astonishing implications of relativity. No one accused him of claiming to have actually taken such a ride, but some of today's thought experiments have led to a lot of public confusion as to where reality leaves off.

For example, one day Ralph Nader was debating Ralph Lapp on the radio, and Nader stated that a pound of plutonium could kill every human being on earth. One could picture a one-pint jar of the stuff spilling on the ground and its deadly vapors spreading until all life was obliterated. That's what Nader's statement means in the common-sense real world. But Ralph Lapp put the statement in its proper context by replying: "So could a pound of fresh air, Ralph." Now how can that be? We've been repeatedly told that plutonium is the deadliest substance known. And we know that fresh air is literally the breath of life. What's going on here?

Nader's statement was not actually a lie; he was just trying to make us think that a thought experiment was a real-world event. A pound of plutonium could perhaps kill one or two million people (not 5 billion), but only under very particular circumstances that would never exist in the real world. We would have to line up all the world's people and have a trained physician administer just the toxic amount of plutonium¾ no more¾ into each individual, in just the form¾ in this case a fine aerosol mist¾ and into just the critical organ¾ the lung, and then wait several decades, protecting the individual from other life-threatening influences such as cars, smoking and malnutrition, until he or she died of lung cancer. This is truth, of sorts, but it is not reality. (Incidentally, plutonium is not the deadliest substance known; there are pesticides that we throw onto food crops by the ton that are more toxic.)

And what about Dr. Lapp's statement? It is true in precisely the same way. If a tiny bubble of fresh air is injected in just the right way into the blood stream, a fatal embolism will develop. The only difference from the plutonium case is that you won't have to wait decades for cancer to develop. We do not think of fresh air as deadly, lethal, or dangerous, and rightly so, although people have been killed by air bubbles in their blood. How dangerous is plutonium in the real world? The answer is Not a single death has been attributed to plutonium poisoning, although we've been handling it in tonnage lots for a couple of generations. A sheet of paper, or even a few feet of air, provides enough shielding from its radiation. We put about six tons of it into the air during open air testing of atomic weapons, we've had some accidents and some spills, and though we've looked scrupulously for cases of serious plutonium poisoning, we've never found any. That's the difference between the world of the imagination and the so-called real world we all share.

We need to explain the different kinds of casualties we predict, because they are really not comparable, one type with another. For example:

1. Persons who die of food poisoning are real individuals, known by name, and can be counted. Their death certificates are on file.
2. Persons who die from particulate air pollution are largely unknown individually but their numbers can be estimated approximately by methods that are subject to peer evaluation. These victims are nameless, their number is not known precisely, but they are probably real people.
3. Deaths "predicted" from exposure to radiation levels lower than some high natural radiation backgrounds (e.g. miles downwind from the Chernobyl accident) are wholly hypothetical. Such claims are based on the premise that individually-harmless doses of radioactivity in a population can be added up to "predict" illness and even deaths in that population¾ a notion that affronts both science and common sense.

These various kinds of victims should not be compared numerically as if they were the same. This is equating dreams with hardware. We can dream of castles in the air, but we should not advertise them in the real estate section of newspapers.

It is misleading to compare negative what ifs on one side with positive what ifs on the other. Some people say that if all sorts of improbable things work out favorably (and nothing bad happens, and we get some massive subsidies) then maybe various unproven energy sources wouldn't look so bad. As part of the same argument, they then say that if all sorts of improbable bad things happen, then maybe nuclear power plants would create a catastrophe. And we ask policy-makers to choose between these two scenarios. This is an interesting intellectual exercise, but the public thinks we're talking about reality. The reality of course is that nuclear power plants have been reliably supplying electricity for a full generation with no deaths or even injuries to the public, and the more exotic energy sources are still in the wishful dream state despite decades of subsidized research. It's important to keep coming back to reality.

While we scientists and technologists like to blame the media, the politicians, the regulators, and the scientifically illiterate public for phobic fear of radiation, we have actually created the basis for this fear by action or by acquiescence. The official, legal scientific consensus in these matters is the pronouncements of the NCRP and the BEIR groups who repeatedly state that no amount of radiation is small enough to be harmless. All of the other fearful statements arise from this one. So long as knowledgeable scientists accept this statement without objection, they must accept responsibility for its consequences. For example:

The New England Journal of Medicine editorialized (May 29,1997) on the growing seriousness of the food poisoning problem, concluding: "The time has come to use irradiation; we must not let any group use arguments without a scientific basis to keep such an important technique from the marketplace." We let 9000 Americans die from food poisoning each year and literally millions more get sick, rather than face a few protesters with frightening but baseless claims about radiation. The poisoning victims are real people. Where are the victims of nuclear technology? Only in our scenarios.

Example: We decide not to build another nuclear power plant because "we haven't solved the waste problem." The real-world result of that decision is that another coal-burning plant is built and several thousand people die over its lifetime, from air pollution, black lung disease, etc. If we choose a gas-fired plant instead, the pollution deaths are down but the global warming effect is even worse, because we have to add leakage of gas (which may be 30 times worse than carbon dioxide) from pipes and equipment all the way from source to consumer. How many people do we save by not adding to the nuclear waste? None. No one has ever been hurt by nuclear waste in this country and no one is ever likely to be. We should treat radioactive waste just as we do selenium, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, barium, and other toxic materials whose half-lives are infinite. The reality is that we have ample experience to show that simple, common-sense waste disposal practices for highly toxic materials are fully adequate. We should tell people that.

Another example: the dreaded nuclear reactor meltdown and the subsequent China Syndrome, in which the molten core melts into the earth on its way to China. This scenario was created by us and our allies, not by clever anti-nukes. (This thought-experiment became a Jane Fonda movie that after 18 years is still being checked out of video rental stores.) Trying to think up the worst sort of situation that could befall a nuclear reactor, scientists realized that not much could happen so long as the core is in water. (We're talking about the only kind of reactors built in the West and in the Pacific Rim. The Chernobyl reactor is a different story; not as bad as you've heard, but not relevant here.) So, to get radioactive clouds and evacuation plans and all the other aspects of a nuclear emergency, we had to dream up a situation that would get all of the water out of the system fast. Not in minutes, but seconds. In the laboratory of the mind, that's easy. We came up with the "guillotine break," a magical, instantaneous shearing of the heavy-duty main coolant piping. But even that is not enough, because the water can't escape rapidly unless the sheared pipe-ends move out of the way of each other quickly so that the water can flash unimpeded into clear space. No problemBthe mind can move the pipe ends instantaneously, even though the pipe-walls are over an inch thick and made of high-grade stainless steel.

And on we go! To study how a radioactive cloud might disperse under the worst possible weather conditions, we imagine a hierarchy of fantastic scenarios. The worst scenario we can imagine we call Class 8. And somebody comes along and says: "What if it's worse that that? Worse than you can imagine?" Now, you're talking to people who can imagine riding on a beam of light, but they said, "OK. We'll set up a Class 9 accident. We can't imagine how all this stuff could get out, but we'll assume it does anyway." And then we place a network of radiation monitors around each nuclear plant. And we literally put more engineering man-hours into calculating the results of hypothetical earthquakes on the plant than we used to use for the whole plant design. And we set up elaborate security provisions. And every component and safety system is backed up with backup systems. And we put the whole thing inside a steel-reinforced, leak-tight containment structure. And we prepare emergency procedures involving local, regional and national police, fire and emergency organizations, and we run periodic drills. And then we turn to the public and say: "How about that! Are we safe or what?" And the public says, "Gosh, they must really be scared of this stuff." And who could blame them?

The public didn't know we were just playing games¾ serious games, legitimate games, but thought experiments, not reality. What does the real world say about nuclear safety? Quite a bit, actually. Not only have experiments and theoretical studies been made, but we had the real thing at Three Mile Island. Nearly half the core melted down that day in 1979, and tons of the molten stuff fell down onto the bottom of the pressure vessel. That is the start of the China Syndrome scenario. But in fact the core penetrated only a small fraction of an inch into the thick vessel wall and stopped. Negligible radioactivity was released; the nearest residents got about as much radiation from the accident overall as they get each day from the natural radiation background (having nothing to do with the nuclear plant). No one was hurt, not even the operators. When I pressed a Nuclear Regulatory Commission official as to why this was not more nearly the model for a major reactor accident, rather than various theoretical speculations, he looked shocked and said: "If I really thought that, I'd have to ask what I'm doing here!" I assured him he should ask exactly that, as we all should.

So, after running more than a hundred nuclear power plants (plus twice that many in the Navy), with experience going back 40 years to the Shippingport plant, this is the worst the real world can offer: nobody hurt, no environmental damage. Yet we proceed as if the thought experiments were real. You might expect the nuclear community to try to downplay the dangers, but the reverse is now more apt to be true. There is no money to be made selling nuclear plants to Americans (though the rest of the world is building them). The only money being made in nuclear power is from playing the game: making multimillion-dollar studies; "decontaminating" land that is already harmless; designing shipping casks with yet another layer of protective shield although the radioactive cargo they contain poses less of a public hazard than the diesel fuel in the truck that carries them. And digging a $13 billion hole in Yucca Mountain. Does anybody really think it is an unprecedented technological challenge to fuse this stuff into glass logs the size of railroad ties, and keep people from eating it?

The game is now costing hundreds of billions of dollars. The Department of Energy, which was established to promote nuclear energy after its regulatory responsibilities were stripped off and given to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is now fearful that it will be seen as favoring nuclear technology. On August 8,1996, DOE issued a memorandum scolding contractor employees for participating in a meeting of the Eagle Alliance, an organization it perceives as having "inappropriate pro-nuclear bias" and ordering them to disassociate themselves from Eagle.

On June 3, 1997, DOE issued a report "after six years of study and analysis," predicting that 23 people will be irradiated to death as a result of shipping shielded casks of radioactive waste from the weapons program. They "kill people" by subjecting millions of people to a millionth of the lethal dose; no individual gets a significant dose, yet a "lethal dose" has been delivered to the population. The same rationale is behind NASA's formal assurance that they would not kill millions if the plutonium in the Cassini mission vehicle were to escape into the atmosphere¾ they would only kill 120. The scientific fact is, that the calculated 120 lethal doses to the population could not, in fact, constitute a high enough dose to any individual to create any detectable health effects. Deaths apply to individuals, not populations. Only under a very tortured definition of truth do these 120 deaths escape being a simple lie.

We should put less credence on computed hypothetical meltdown scenarios and pay more attention to the real-world data from Three Mile Island. We should abandon the ever-more-fanciful calculations of Yucca Mountain casualties and look at the actual diffusion of fission products and plutonium from the pre-historic natural reactor in Gabon, in western Africa. This natural phenomenon occurred nearly two billion years ago, when the concentration of the fissionable uranium isotope U-235 was 3%, and natural uranium ore could go critical when rainwater flooded the area¾ a situation no longer possible. This reactor produced about 15,000 megawatt-years of fission energy over many thousands of years, with no containment and no waste disposal. Measurements have been made of fission products and plutonium in the adjacent soil, showing that these materials have remained stabilized near the original reactor and have not migrated far in the subsequent two billion years. This contradicts computer models being used to question the adequacy of even low-level waste storage facilities.

 Gamma Rays are like Germs

To put the whole subject of low-level radiation into real-world perspective, I've found the following analogy useful. It refers to another environmental threat that does indeed pose a public health hazard, killing large numbers of people each year. But it's one we've learned to live with, and most of us face it daily without becoming paranoid.

Fear of radiation is like excessive fear of germs. There are people who are so terrified of germs that they will not shake hands unless they are wearing gloves, and they carry lots of napkins to wipe off door-knobs, silverware, and anything else they might touch. They are correct in assuming that there are dangerous germs out there: flu, syphilis, and strep throat. And you will definitely pick up some dangerous germs on your hands by touching everyday items.

Fearing that one extra gamma ray will be the one to give you cancer is like fearing that any single germ you pick up might be the one that gets you. The fallacy is the same in both cases. Psychotically wiping off door-knobs and everything else, you may take care of a few thousand germs. But the air you breath, the water you drink, and the food you eat, are all exposing you to trillions more. And, unless you live like the boy in the bubble, you can't escape the trillions. In this situation, it's silly to worry about the thousand germs you can avoid while taking in trillions that you can't avoid.

Life evolved in a world awash with germs and radiation, and our bodies have learned to thrive in it. We survive the trillions of germs (and trillions of gamma rays), because our bodies' immune systems are remarkably effective in preventing and repairing cell damage and removing cells damaged beyond repair. This brings up an even more important point: Exposure to tolerable levels of germs actually strengthens the body's defenses. People who have been sheltered from infectious diseases are usually the first to succumb to the local maladies when they leave home¾ because their immune systems have not been previously challenged. With vaccination, we inject germs directly into the body, and we not only survive, we find that the injection stimulates the immune system, and it generates reinforcements, leaving us more resistant to attack than before.

There is evidence that exposure to low-level radiation works the same way: the slight increase in the thousands of cells damaged by additional radiation is overwhelmingly offset by the increased rate of repair in the trillions of cells damaged by background radiation and by metabolism. This results in fewer damaged cells that could lead to cancer. There are indications that living organisms deprived of natural radiation suffer as a consequence and recover only when the radiation field is restored. And radiation has an additional advantage over germs: Germs multiply, so for some kinds, it may be important to get rid of every last one. But there is no reason to try to reduce radiation to zero, even if we could.

We could avoid x-rays and mammograms. We could choose not to fly, to escape the extra dose of cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. We could live in a wooden house to evade radiation from brick, stone or cinder-block. But every day the good earth inundates us with radiation from all sides. And one day we might go to testify before Congress about the dangers of radiation, and the natural radiation from the New England granite in the walls of the Capitol would give us more radiation than all the little bits we've avoided by being paranoid.

To quote Jim Muckerheide: A day without radiation is a day without sunshine!

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