Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (47 page)

In 2003 the United Nations established the Chernobyl Forum, an investigative body composed of seven UN agencies, including the World Health Organization, the UN Environment Program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
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In 2006, 20 years after the explosion, the forum published its findings on the impact of the accident. Two facts stand out. First, it concluded that only 56 deaths, including the 34 people who died in the explosion or fighting the fire, could be directly attributed to the accident. Second, they acknowledged the worst effect of the accident was the forced evacuation of 350,000 people from the contaminated zone into tenement blocks on the outskirts of Kiev. The incidence of suicide, drug and alcohol addiction, marriage breakdown, and mental illness and trauma that resulted from living in these crowded urban quarters far outweighed the possible effects of the slightly increased radiation exposure they would have experienced if they had been left in their country homes. The evacuation was ordered with the best of intentions, but it would have been better had most of the people been allowed to stay in their own communities.
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Despite the unfortunate fact that injury and death were caused at Chernobyl, nuclear energy is still one of the safest technologies we have invented. Every industry, whether it be construction, farming, mining, steel production, forestry, financial services, transportation, or energy production, has risks associated with it. For the amount of power it produces and the number of people involved in its operations, the nuclear industry is a very safe place to work.

In 2008, workers in the U.S. nuclear industry experienced an accident rate of 0.13 accidents per 200,000 worker-hours. The accident rate for all manufacturing industries combined in the U.S. was 3.5 per 200,000 worker-hours, 27 times higher than for the nuclear industry.
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U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics confirm that it is safer to work in a nuclear plant than it is to work in either real estate or financial services.
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A study of 54,000 nuclear workers conducted by Columbia University and published in 2004 found these workers had significantly fewer cancers, less disease, and lived longer than their counterparts in the general population.
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If it is that safe to work inside nuclear plants, surely we can feel confident that it is safe to live near them. When asked by a reporter for MSNBC if I would be willing to live near a nuclear plant, I replied, perhaps a bit flippantly, “I’d be happy to live in a nuclear plant.” When you think about it, there are not many safer or more secure places to be.
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Compare the record of the nuclear industry to other major energy technologies. An accident in the turbine room of Russia’s largest hydroelectric dam caused 69 deaths in July 2009.
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In February 2010 the Connecticut Kleen Energy natural gas plant exploded, killing five plant workers.
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In April 2010 an explosion in a coal mine in West Virginia resulted in 29 deaths (about 5000 workers die in coal mines every year, mostly in China).
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Later that same month, 11 workers were killed when a British Petroleum oil rig blew up and sank in the Gulf of Mexico.
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By contrast, no nuclear worker has ever been killed in a nuclear plant accident in the West and only one accident has caused fatalities. The Chernobyl accident was the exception that proves the rule that nuclear energy is one of the safest industries we have.

Fear of Radiation

The fear of radiation fuels much of the opposition to nuclear energy. I attended a public hearing in Vermont, conducted by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to receive comments on whether or not the Vermont Yankee reactor should be granted a 20-year license extension. A young woman came to the microphone with a small child in her arms and proclaimed that she had moved to a house near the reactor and she knew her child was going to get cancer from the radiation being released into the environment. My immediate thought was, If you really believe your child will get cancer from living near this plant, surely you should move somewhere else. Apparently this is not a politically correct thought, as my colleagues advised me later. Why would someone stay where they think their child will inevitably get cancer? Was she just grandstanding for the crowd? Or did she genuinely feel concerned? It is not for me to judge.

One of the most helpful and annoying aspects of radiation is it is so easy to detect at minuscule levels. You can buy a radon test kit for $25 and determine if you have unusually high radon levels in your basement. The natural geology of many regions contains higher than average levels of uranium, which decays into the radioactive gas, radon. The radon can seep up through cracks in the foundation of your house and concentrate in the basement. This can result in exposure to radiation that is considered unsafe, especially if the basement is occupied. Your 25-dollar test kit can easily detect very low levels of radon, and you can easily rectify the problem by improving the ventilation in your basement.

Not all environmental hazards are so easy to detect. Detection of toxic chemicals requires highly trained technicians to collect samples, analyze them with expensive equipment, and interpret the results, all of which takes considerable time. Radiation can be measured instantly from levels that pose no harm to levels that should be avoided. This makes it very easy to monitor radiation levels in and around nuclear facilities. The second radiation is present it can be detected and then its source can be discovered. There is no radiation-related health hazard around any of the nuclear power plants operating in the world today.

But it is annoying because antinuclear activists are fond of detecting minute amounts of radiation near nuclear plants and then claiming the radiation came from the nuclear plant and that it will cause widespread cancer. The “Tooth-Fairy Project”, conducted by the stridently antinuclear group Radiation and Public Health Project, collects baby teeth and analyzes them for strontium-90, one of the fission products from nuclear explosions and nuclear reactors.
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They claim the levels of strontium-90 in the teeth “may” cause an increase in cancer among people who live near nuclear plants.

A quick search finds that 99 percent of the strontium-90 in the environment is from atmospheric nuclear testing that occurred between 1945 and 1980 when China conducted the last nuclear explosion in the air. During that time period 522 atomic and hydrogen bombs were set off in the atmosphere.
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These tests injected 4.2 tonnes (4.6 tons) of strontium-90 into the global environment.
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Because strontium-90 has a half-life of nearly 30 years, about one-third of that amount still remains; much of it has been washed into the sea, but some of it still remains in the food chain and is deposited in babies’ teeth.

About 1 percent of the strontium-90 in the environment came from the Chernobyl nuclear accident. It is not as widely distributed as the fission products from atmospheric testing because the plume from the explosion and fire did not enter the upper atmosphere. But the strontium-90 signature from Chernobyl was detected in many areas far distant from the main plume that spread northwest toward Sweden.

It is not possible to determine the level of strontium-90 that is emitted from operating nuclear plants because it is either nonexistent or is so miniscule that it can’t be detected as distinct from the amount released by nuclear testing and the Chernobyl explosion.
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To top it all off, the levels of strontium-90 in baby teeth are not high enough to cause concern in the first place. Many studies have been conducted and they clearly indicate that there is no increase in cancer rates near nuclear plants.
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How Much Radiation Is Good for You?

Odd question, you might think, but not so odd once you know the facts. Antinuclear folks constantly repeat that any amount of radiation is bad for us. The “linear, no-threshold” model holds there is no safe dose of radiation. If this were true, we would have all been dead long ago. There are 60 naturally occurring radioactive substances in the air, earth, and water. We are exposed to these, along with radiation from the sun and the cosmic radiation from outside the solar system, every day of our lives. Radiation from natural sources is one of the driving forces of evolution, causing rare mutations that are usually neutral, sometimes negative, but occasionally beneficial.

Radiation is measured in millisieverts (mSv). The average person in the world receives a dose of 2.4 mSv of radiation per year from natural sources (referred to as background radiation).
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Artificial sources, such as medical X-rays, smoke detectors, and residual nuclear weapons test fallout, can elevate the total exposure to about 3.6 mSv per year. The dose members of the American public receive from industry, including from the full lifecycle of nuclear power generation, nuclear medicine, and research where nuclear materials are used is 0.003 mSv per year. The full lifecycle of nuclear power generation is responsible for 15 percent of this small total dose from industry. The average dose to members of the public from nuclear power reactors themselves is 0.00045 mSv per year, about 1/10,000th the intensity of natural background radiation
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Some regions in Iran, Brazil, India, Australia, and China have very high background radiation. People in Ramsar, Iran, receive 260 mSv of background radiation per year due to naturally occurring radium, uranium, and thorium. This is several times greater than the maximum dose for nuclear workers recommended by the International Commission for Radiological Protection and 100 times the average worldwide. Yet there is no evidence of any ill effects on the populations living in very high background radiation environments. In fact the local people believe the radioactive hot springs in Ramsar promote healthier, longer lives. Many toxicologists and radiologists with PhDs agree with this assessment, that relatively low levels of radiation actually improve our ability to stave off disease and to heal from injury. This hypothesis is called “hormesis.”
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There are three competing hypotheses regarding the health effects of low levels of radiation. The previously mentioned
linear no-threshold
model holds that any radiation above a zero dose is harmful. The
linear threshold
model asserts that there is a level below which no negative effect occurs, and above which a negative effect occurs. Finally the concept of
hormesis
theorizes that below a certain level radiation is beneficial, and then above that level it becomes progressively more harmful.

All organisms, including humans, have cellular repair mechanisms that respond to damage caused to DNA and other cellular components by toxic chemicals and radiation. Many radiologists believe low levels of toxic chemicals and radiation challenge the cellular repair mechanisms, conferring a degree of immunity to future damage, comparable to a vaccination.

It is clear to me that the linear no-threshold model is the least likely to be correct. Even if a near-zero dose of radiation causes damage, the body’s repair mechanisms can fix the damage faster than it is occurring up to a certain point. In other words below a certain level there is no net damage. In summary, low levels of radiation are either not harmful or they are beneficial, while higher levels of radiation are clearly harmful.

It is difficult to prove experimentally which of these two models is closest to reality because the very low levels we are exposed to by background radiation make it impossible to discern any effect either way. So many other more important variables determine our health and well-being that it is impossible to discern whether low levels of radiation are slightly harmful, neutral, or beneficial. In any case it is clear the extremely low levels attributable to nuclear energy cause insignificant damage, if any. On the other hand it is possible that these low doses do have a significant beneficial effect.

Nuclear Terrorism?

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, antinuclear groups latched onto the idea that nuclear plants are “sitting ducks for terrorists.”
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The fact that no nuclear plant has ever been targeted by terrorists is of no interest to Greenpeace and its allies who peddle sensationalism and fear as if such attacks were daily occurrences. There are much easier and more effective targets than nuclear plants: subways, government buildings, symbolic sites of power such as the World Trade Center, military installations, liquid natural gas plants,
etc.