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Dear all,

Having followed Norm's discussions with others, I was 
taking some time to weigh in regarding what I saw the 
basis of the disagreements between the positions that he 
represents, and the positions that I believe most of the 
folks on this listserver hold to.

However, I happened to run across an interesting 
discussion of the subject by someone who pretty much 
sums up the issues, so I decided to save myself some 
work.

This is from www.sepp.org, and I encourage all to visit 
the site.  You probably won't agree with everything you 
see, but (at least on a cursory glance), it appears that 
the group is trying to use the correct *process* for 
dealing with public policy issues.

Jim Barnes, CHP
Radiation Safety Officer
Rocketdyne/Boeing
james.g.barnes@att.net

====================


Discussions of Nuclear Power Should Be Based In Reality
by Theodore Rockwell
The Scientist, March 16, 1998


The great scientist-philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington 
wrote that his words about "the soulless dance of 
bloodless electrons" might be truth, but they were not 
reality. He urged us to get away from theoretical 
speculations periodically and watch a sunset. 
Speculation is our business, but when people ask us 
about a technical matter, they deserve an answer that 
has real-world meaning, not a hypothetical argument. 

For example, one day consumer activist Ralph Nader was 
debating radiation pioneer Ralph Lapp. 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 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 hypothetical conjecture 
was a real-world problem. He's saying that the lethal 
dose of plutonium is a five-billionth of a pound. It's 
really several thousand times larger, but even if Nader 
were correct, the only way you could actually kill the 
world's 5 billion people with just one pound would be to 
line them up and have a trained physician inject into 
each person just the toxic amount of plutonium—no more 
or there wouldn't be enough to go around. It would have 
to be in a fine aerosol mist, or it wouldn't be lethal, 
and it would have to go directly into the lung. Then we 
would have to 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, because plutonium poses no other health 
threat. 

Nader's statement is truth, of sorts, but it is not 
reality. In reality, atomic bomb tests have dispersed 
about six tons of fine plutonium mist into the air, 
enough to give each person in the world 1,000 cancers, 
and we've had some laboratory accidents and spills that 
contaminated people. But not a single case of plutonium-
caused cancer has been found, despite diligent 
searching. (Incidentally, plutonium is not the deadliest 
substance known; there are pesticides we throw onto food 
crops by the ton that are more toxic, spoonful for 
spoonful.) 

And what about Lapp's statement? It is true in precisely 
the same way as Nader's. If a tiny bubble of fresh air 
is injected in just the right way into the bloodstream, 
a fatal embolism will develop. The only difference from 
the plutonium case is that you wouldn'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 resulted from 
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. That's the difference 
between the world of the imagination and the real world 
we live in. 

Explaining The Differences 

Since most nonscientists don't flit so easily from the 
hypothetical world to the physical world, we should be 
clear when we do. When we talk about casualties we 
should distinguish between real and hypothetical deaths. 
For example: 

1. Persons who die of food poisoning are known by name 
and can be counted. They are real. 

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 and their 
number controversial, but they are probably real. 

3. Deaths "predicted" from exposure to radiation levels 
less than natural radiation backgrounds are wholly 
hypothetical, since the premise on which such 
calculations are based is an administrative convenience, 
not a scientific model. The premise is that individually 
harmless doses of radioactivity in a population can be 
added up to "predict" illness and even deaths in that 
population—a notion that affronts both science and 
common sense. 

These various kinds of victims should not be compared as 
if they were the same. We should not justify America's 
9,000 annual food-poisoning deaths and tens of thousands 
of air-particle deaths by claiming we have avoided 
hypothetical deaths that might result from irradiating 
the food or replacing coal--burning plants with nuclear. 
Scientists have expressed their concerns about global 
warm-ing and particulate emission predictions but have 
been surprisingly reluctant to speak out on radiation 
questions. Why? 

We are told that we must choose between wrecking the 
planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels at current 
rates or wrecking the economy by drastically reducing 
our energy usage. We don't even discuss the option of 
using nuclear power to produce as much energy as needed 
without creating pollution or economic disruption. 
Nuclear power has been reliably and safely generating 22 
percent of the United States' electricity for a full 
generation. But we ignore fission and talk about untried 
hopes such as fusion, solar power, and 
undefined "renewables." 

We decide not to build another nuclear power plant 
because "we haven't solved the waste problem." How many 
people do we save by not adding to the nuclear waste? 
None. No one has ever been hurt by nuclear waste in the 
U.S., 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. With such toxins we have 
ample experience that simple, common-sense waste 
disposal practices are fully adequate. 

Another notorious hypothetical scenario is the dreaded 
nuclear reactor meltdown and the subsequent China 
syndrome, in which the molten core melts into the Earth 
on its way to China. (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.) 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 reactor vessel 
fast; otherwise, the reactor will not melt. 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 problem— the mind can 
move the pipe ends instantaneously, even though the pipe 
walls are more than an inch thick and made of high-grade 
stainless steel. 

Dreaming Up Scenarios 

Other scenarios spring up like mushrooms. To study how 
radioactive clouds disperse under the worst possible 
weather conditions, we imagine a hierarchy of fantastic 
scenarios. This requires us to put a network of 
radiation monitors around each nuclear plant. And we put 
more engineering hours into calculating the impact of 
severe earthquakes 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 and 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 games—
serious games, legitimate games, but hypothetical 
speculations, not reality. What does the real world say 
about nuclear safety? Quite a bit, actually. Experiments 
and theoretical studies have been made, and we had the 
real thing at Three Mile Island in 1979. Nearly half the 
core melted down, 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 40 years' experience and running more than 100 
U.S. nuclear power plants (plus twice that many in the 
Navy), plus hundreds more in other countries, the Three 
Mile Island accident is the worst the real world can 
offer: nobody hurt, no environmental damage. Yet we 
proceed as if the speculations were real. The game is 
now costing hundreds of billions of dollars: 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 
it. And spending $13 billion to dig a hole in Yucca 
Mountain in California to hold some shielded casks of 
spent fuel and nuclear wastes. 

On June 3, 1997, the Department of Energy 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 (not civilian waste). Let me 
tell you how this works. As a truck with a shielded cask 
drives by, a government official says to a 
bystander: "Congratulations, sir. You are the millionth 
bystander." The puzzled fellow asks. "What do I get?" 

"You get to die," replies the official. "This cask has 
been emitting radiation at one-millionth the lethal 
level. We have now passed a million bystanders and no 
one else has died, so it's up to you." 

"But I got only one-millionth of a lethal dose, right?" 
he asks. "And that can't hurt me, right?" 

"Correct, sir. But we have delivered a lethal dose 
overall, to the whole population of bystanders. I don't 
expect you to understand it. Just be assured that these 
calculations have been peer-reviewed by scientists. You 
can count on them." 

"Tell me this is just a game," the poor chap moans. 

Do you doubt it? 



---------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------

Theodore Rockwell (tedrock@cpcug.org), an engineer with 
more than 50 years in nuclear power, is a founding 
officer of the engineering firm MPR Associates Inc. of 
Alexandria, Va., and a founding director of Radiation, 
Sci-ence & Health, an international public--interest 
group in Needham, Mass., working to rationalize 
radiation policy. He was technical director under Adm. 
Hyman Rickover of the national program to develop 
nuclear power for naval propulsion and to build the 
world's first commercial nuclear power plant. 
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