More on "informed dialogue"

[Peter Crane <pgcrane@erols.com>]

"In the AEC days," writes Michael Stabin, "the Government decided
what was 'good for you' in terms of nuclear policy and just did it. 
Technical decisions were based on input from the best minds of the day,
and were generally sound."
   With all respect, I cannot share Mr. Stabin's nostalgia for the days
when the Government could effectively dictate what people thought about
radiation and its uses.  Indeed, the argument can be made that many of
the problems that have beset the nuclear option over the last 25 years
are the direct result of mistakes made by the AEC.  
   First of all, the AEC consistently promised too much -- more than it
could deliver -- in terms both of cost and of safety.  Nuclear power was
touted as wondrously cheap; it turned out not to be, and some credulous
utilities, and their ratepayers, have paid a heavy price.  Nor was
nuclear power sold to the public, as it might have been, as a technology
which carried a very small risk of very high consequence accidents, as
an alternative to fossil fuels, with a 100% risk of a significant number
of deaths and illnesses from pollution, coal mining, etc.  Rather,
nuclear power was presented as something preternaturally safe -- so much
so that the Executive Summary of the 1975 Rasmussen Report (issued
shortly after the creation of the NRC) compared the likelihood of being
harmed by a nuclear accident to that of being injured by a falling
meteor.  Is it any surprise, therefore, that the Three Mile Island
accident came as an immense shock to the American people?  When a
serious accident occurs, and it is of a type that the Government's
nuclear experts had deemed not to be credible, how credible are the
experts at that point?  
   At this point, the apologists for nuclear power will be objecting
that nobody was hurt at TMI, and that TMI really proved how forgiving
and how safe nuclear technology is.  That's the best possible spin one
can put on it.  But to the mass of the population, the lesson of the
partial core melt at TMI is a simpler one:  you told us that kind of
accident couldn't happen, and it did.
   To use an analogy, let us say that a car maker touts the excellence
of its infallible antilock braking system, which can prevent any
foreseeable skid, no matter what the conditions.  A buyer of the car
discovers, when his car hits a sheet of ice, that in fact, the car can
skid, and it slams into a tree.  But thanks to seatbelts, an airbag, and
a sturdy frame, the driver emerges unharmed.  Would you expect him at
that point to sing the praises of the car, because he came through
unharmed, or to focus on why, when he had been told not to expect that
kind of accident, it nevertheless occurred?  Would he trust the company
afterwards?
   In the "AEC days," human experimentation was authorized, without
informed consent, notwithstanding that it had, as one of the AEC
managers commented, "the Buchenwald touch."  I keep reading on RADSAFE
about how the people injected with plutonium suffered no harm as a
result.  Would the same claim be made about the 88 University of
Cincinnati patients, most of them black, the youngest of them 9 years
old, given whole-body radiation?  
   One more example.  The AEC's January 1957 report on its research
program commented on the striking finding of high levels of thyroid
cancer in young adults who had received radiation to the head and neck. 
Did that word ever get passed on the medical community, so that an
immediate stop could be put to the then common use of x-ray to treat
enlarged tonsils and adenoids, as well as acne and other skin
disorders?  It did not; the AEC was not in the business of alarming
people about radiation, not when the primary responsibility of the AEC
was weapons, and the public was to be shielded from information that
might cause anxiety about nuclear tests.
   Residents of the Marshall Islands, where I served in 1991-92 as a
member of the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, would question whether the AEC's
decisions regarding them fell in the category of "generally sound." 
While I was there, a FOIA request in the U.S. resulted in the release of
an AEC transcript in which the question under discussion was whether
some Marshallese, removed from their island before an H-bomb test, 
should be returned to it.  One AEC scientist made the point that this
was a unique opportunity for research, since no one had ever lived in so
radiologically contaminated an environment before.  "They may not be
like us -- civilized Western people," he said jocularly, "but they're a
lot more like us than the mice are."  The Marshallese didn't see
anything amusing about this remark.
   For myself, in 25 years of observing the nuclear industry and the
nuclear regulatory establishment, the most striking phenomenon is the
never-ending quest to find scapegoats.  Does anyone ever mention that
four years before Three Mile Island, the nuclear industry suffered a
staggering blow from one of its own, when Westinghouse repudiated its
fuel supply contracts, and at once, a large number of plant orders were
hurriedly canceled?  I recall an AIF conference in San Francisco very
shortly thereafter at which John Simpson, head of Westinghouse and at
that time also head of AIF, called on all of us to become "pro-nuclear
speaker-uppers," and declaimed, "And as for the anti-nuclear extremists,
may God have mercy on their souls!"  The argument could be made that
John Simpson's Westinghouse did more to harm the future of nuclear power
in the U.S. than Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda, or the Union of Concerned
Scientists ever did.
   But it is so much more comforting to blame the omnipotent enemy.  The
identity of the scapegoat has changed over the course of time.  For many
years, especially in the 1970's, the blame was placed on "the
intervenors."  Nuclear power would revive, we were told, if it were not
for the intervenors.  Then the contested licensing proceedings came to
an end, the intervenors ceased to be a factor, and the favored villain
became the NRC and its purported overregulation of the industry.  For
the last 18 years, the NRC has been accommodating the nuclear industry
on issue after issue; and yet we do not see new plant orders coming in. 
Very well then, the villain must be the media, who for purely venal
motives -- selling newspapers -- have spooked the American public about
the risks and benefits of nuclear energy.
   I have to say I agree with Bill Lipton.  RADSAFE does seem to contain
a lot of childish whining these days about how terribly unfair everybody
is to us:  media, celebrities, etc.  (This is punctuated by occasional
overheated attacks on the "vicious, venomous, perverted" etc. NRC, which
do not do much to promote the notion of RADSAFE as a place for rational
discourse and the exchange of information and ideas.)  In "Julius
Caesar", Cassius says:  "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
but in ourselves."  It's not in our movie stars, either, I would
suggest.   
   In short, I would answer Mr. Stabin by saying that all was NOT well
in the days of the AEC, and that if the press has become more
challenging and skeptical (and not only in the nuclear area), it is in
part because of a sense that it was too credulous in the past.  A
yearning for the good old days when nuclear energy had the benefit of a
promotional AEC, a protective Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and a
complacent press is not going to help solve the difficulties of the
present.  Semantic fussing about what is a "disaster" and what isn't,
and competing like so many cheerleaders to hurl abuse at the media's
supposed ethical lapses, are not a solution to the problems besetting
the nuclear option; rather, they are a symptom of them.  Rational and
temperate discourse, and a willingness to look in the mirror now and
then, might accomplish more.
    -- Peter Crane (pgcrane@erols.com)
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