Re: Please respond to Caldicott's letter

[Bernard L Cohen <blc+@pitt.edu>]

On Sun, 30 Nov 1997, J Hughes wrote:

> The following is the complete text of the 11/30/97 letter from Helen Caldicott to the LA Times 
> (www.latimes.com/)
>      
>      This is an opportunity for health physicists and other nuclear
>      professionals to criticize Calicott's statements. Her opinions
>      are accepted as facts by the media, because no one disputes them.
>      She has many followers who will repeat her statements word for word, as fact. 


		--I sent the following letter. If anyone sees the
Caldicott Commentary republished elsewhere (LA Times pieces are often
syndicated), please let me know so I can respond.

Letters-to the-Editor
Los Angeles Times

Dear Sir:
	I am writing in response to the Commentary piece on the dangers of
nuclear power published in your November 30 edition by Helen Caldicott, a
highly political activist who has never published a paper in a scientific
journal on health effects of radiation and is not a member of any of the
major scientific societies that deal with that subject.
	Her principal issue is the potential harm from the radioactive
wastes of nuclear power that will be converted into a rock-like material
and buried in the natural habitat of rocks, deep underground. She fails to
recognize that the ground is, and always has been, full of radioactive
materials from natural sources, and the wastes from nuclear power will
never increase the amount by more than a minute fraction of one percent.
She also fails to note that most electricity is now generated by burning
coal which releases waste (called ashes) into the top layers of the
ground, and these wastes include cancer-causing chemicals like cadmium,
arsenic, beryllium, etc which will last forever, not decaying away
naturally as do the nuclear power wastes of which 99% are gone after a few
hundred years. According to the same risk analysis procedures,the number of
cancers caused by the coal burning wastes is thousands of times larger
than the number caused by nuclear power wastes from generating the same
amount of electricity. Another of the wastes from coal burning, known as
air pollution, causes even more total deaths, all of them now rather than
spread out over millions of years. The wastes from oil burning are only a
few times less harmful than the wastes from coal burning. 
	The Caldicott claim that nuclear power does not greatly reduce the
releases of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) that contribute to
global warming is absolutely preposterous as any scientist, or even a high
school chemistry student, readily recognizes. It is not supported, as she
implies, by the Friends of the Earth (FOE) study she cites, and is belied
by the fact that France, which derives 70% of its electricity from nuclear
power, has far lower per capita carbon dioxide releases than any other
industrialized nation. She quotes the FOE study as implying that the
fossil fuels used to provide the materials for nuclear power plants are a
significant contributor to global warming, but she fails to note that
other studies attribute far less fossil fuel usage to nuclear power, and
that solar energy, the darling of FOE, uses more than ten times as much of
these materials (steel, aluminum, cement, glass) as nuclear power for
generating the same amount of electricity.
	In summary, the Caldicott piece is nothing more than a political
diatribe against nuclear power, with no attempt to put problems in proper
perspective or to properly inform your readership.

	Bernard L. Cohen is Professor-Emeritus of Physics and of
Environmental and Occupational Health at University of Pittsburgh, author
of several books about nuclear power and of about 300 research articles in
scientific journals, recipient of the Health Physics Society Distinguished
Scientific Achievement award and of four other national awards from
American Physical Society (APS) and American Nuclear Society (ANS). He is
a former Chairman of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics and of the ANS
Division of Environmental Sciences.