Re: Safety Questioned at Nuclear Plant -Reply

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 12:35 AM 6/3/98 -0500, you wrote:
>It can be satisfying to blame others (antis, politicians, extremists,
lawyers,
>the public, "oil money", etc.) for nuclear power's troubles, but, if nuclear
>power "experts" can't make their case to the public, perhaps they aren't
>REALLY experts.  

There is an enormous amount of information about everyday activities that
the public doesn't understand. New technologies and new materials are
entering the real world so fast that no one is well informed about all of
it. The problem isn't that people don't understand how nuclear power works.
They don't understand how coal-fired plants work, either. They don't
understand how photovoltaics are made for that environmentally cherished
idea of solar power - they don't know that the manufacturing process for
voltaics produces some of the nastiest toxic waste in the world, and it
won't decay away naturally, either.

The difference is, there isn't someone selling them the idea that solar
power is bad, evil, dangerous, run by people who don't care, etc, etc. It
is so easy to sell fear and so hard to sell the lack of fear that it's no
contest. So people who can't understand that a controlled chain reaction in
a power plant is different from the chain reaction in the detonation of a
nuclear weapon can easily plant fears in the minds of a public that was
never taught anything about radiation or radioactivity in school,
elementary through graduate (unless you majored in something like Physics,
of course).

---------
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(650) 926-3793
bflood@slac.stanford.edu