Re: More on "informed dialogue"

[Al Tschaeche <antatnsu@pacbell.net>]

> 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.

There are several reasons for the high cost of nuclear power, much higher
than the AEC thought it was going to be.

First:  Each nuclear plant had to have an individual design.  The US didn't
do what France did and establish a standard design for all its plants.  The
result is that plant design had to be included in each plant, thus making
the US plants inherently more expensive than those in France.  The architect
engineers made lots of money in that system.  But the plants cost more.

Second:  Just at the time many nuclear plants were being designed and built
the US experienced the worst case of inflation that it had seen in decades.
That inflation made the plants cost more.

Third:  The anti nuclear people forced many "safety" requirements on the AEC
and NRC that a lot of us in the reactor business thought were unnecessary.
Those requirements made the plants cost more.

Fourth:  TMI happened and the NRC forced many retrofits to both operating
plants and those being built.  Those retrofits made the plants cost more.

Those four things were totally unforeseen when the AEC touted nuclear power
as inexpensive.  When we start to build standardized plants to reasonable
safety requirements without significant inflation in this country, I predict
nuclear will be significantly less expensive than any other form of
electrical generation.

> 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.

And, so far, that's true for the US.

> Is it any surprise, therefore, that the Three Mile Island
> accident came as an immense shock to the American people?

That shock was exacerbated by the NRC's total mishandling of the situation.
There was no danger of a hydrogen "bubble" explosion, but the NRC didn't
tell the American public that.  There was no danger from the little bit of
radioactive material released from the plant.  But the NRC didn't tell the
public that.  TMI was not a threat to the American public.  Nuclear power
was, is and, I predict, will be safe.

> 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?

If TMI had been presented to the American people as it should have been, the
credible part would have been presented as harm to the people, not a reactor
meltdown.  We still have not had a credible accident that produced harm to
the public.

>
>    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.

We never said that kind of an accident couldn't happen.  In fact, we
designed the plants to handle a serious accident.  The problem is, as I
said, the core melt could happen and we should have said that clearly, if we
didn't.  I'd like to see citations that told the public such an accident was
impossible.  I don't think anyone ever said that, except the antis after the
accident.  I trust some historian some day will go back and look at the
documentation to see who actually said what and when about whether such an
accident could or could not happen.

> 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.

If any car maker said such a thing, he really would be crazy.  As I said, I
don't think anyone ever said there never could be a core melt.   What we
said was, even though there were to be a core melt, there wouldn't be
significant harm to the public.  After all, that's why we have containment.

> 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?

Depends on how rational he is.

> 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?

What is this citation?  I'm not familiar with it?

> 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.

If, in fact, that report gives data on such a radiation effect, there may be
some reason to point fingers at the AEC in this instance.  But, you must
remember the AEC's legal charter.  A better example is the one of uranium
miner's lung problems because neither the AEC nor the PHS nor the States
would take responsibility for setting safety requirements for radon in
uranium mines.  I was a member of N13 when the radon standard was finally
established.  At the time, the question was raised, since we're setting
standards for internal dose (to the lung from radon, in effect), shouldn't
we also set external dose requirements?  The N13 chair and others said, no
because it would be too much of a cost for the mines.  In retrospect, they
were probably right, but it did seem inconsistent at the time.

> 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.

But, were the experiments done?

Where are the data that demonstrate actual significant bodily harm to the
Marshallese from radiation?  Sure, moving them was no fun.

> 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?

That was a business problem, not a safety problem.

> 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.

Only because the antis used it for their purposes.

> 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.

Because the antis forced the NRC into over regulation.

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.

There is no need yet.

>    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.

Don't forget secrecy.   The press in the early days didn't have access to as
much information as it does now so it couldn't be more challenging and
skeptical.  It didn't have the ability to find out what to be challenging
and skeptical about.

> 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.

No, but it might go a long way to solving them.  The antis forced the
fragmentation of the legislative system for the old AEC precisely to divide
and conquer.  Then they put their people in ERDA and then the DOE to further
sabotage anything nuclear.

>  Rational and
> temperate discourse, and a willingness to look in the mirror now and
> then, might accomplish more.

So, what should we do to fix the problem?  Are all the mea culpas said?  Are
all the skeletons out of the closet?  How do we get back public trust in
things nuclear?  How do we counter all the anti nuclear lies that
continually crop up in the press?

By the way, how should we handle the "problem" of the Moab tailings pile?

Al Tschaeche antatnsu@pacbell.net

>
>     -- Peter Crane (pgcrane@erols.com)
>
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