Whole Earth Discipline

by Stewart Brand

  “Because a single new accident could destroy the entire nuclear industry worldwide,” Tim Flannery argues, “lots of work has gone into minimizing the risk of accidents. As a result, new nuclear technology is relatively safe.” Bill McKibben makes a different point: “Nuclear power is a potential safety threat, if something goes wrong. Coal-fired power is guaranteed destruction, filling the atmosphere with planet-heating carbon when it operates the way it’s supposed to.”

  McKibben’s pragmatism suggests we reassess our fears in light of real risks closely examined, and that begins with noticing how fear works. An article in Psychology Today, “Ten Ways We Get the Odds Wrong,” lists some of the elements that play out in nuclear dread:We fear spectacular, unlikely events. . . .

  We underestimate threats that creep up on us. . . .

  Risk arguments cannot be divorced from values. . . .

  We love sunlight but fear nuclear power. . . . The word radiation stirs thoughts of nuclear power, X-rays, and danger, so we shudder at the thought of erecting nuclear power plants in our neighborhoods. But every day we’re bathed in radiation that has killed many more people than nuclear reactors: sunlight. It’s hard for us to grasp the danger because sunlight feels so familiar and natural.

  We should fear fear itself. Though the odds of dying in a terror attack like 9/11 or contracting Ebola are infinitesimal, the effects of chronic stress caused by constant fear are significant.

  • Particularly germane to nuclear is “Risk arguments cannot be divorced from values.” Because Hiroshima and the cold war threw everything atomic into the Absolute Evil category, our feelings about nuclear energy are tainted by our revulsion about nuclear weapons. Thus the chemical release of the Bhopal incident in 1984 is treated as far less consequential than the radiation release from Chernobyl, even though over six thousand died from Bhopal versus fifty-six from Chernobyl (forty-seven workers, nine children). Through fear of radiation and expected birth defects, the World Health Organization reported, couples in the Chernobyl area had thousands of abortions. But no human birth defects have been found to result from Chernobyl—nor, by the way, from Hiroshima. As for disease, the low-dose-radiation expert John Gofman declared that “the number of fatal cancers to come over the years and decades ahead as a direct result of this accident will not be lower than 500,000.” In fact it was less than 1 percent of that figure.

  “It is roughly estimated that the total number of deaths from cancers caused by Chernobyl may reach 4,000 among the 600,000 people having received the greatest exposures.” So says the Chernobyl Forum’s report, which was exhaustively researched by seven UN agencies and published in 2006. Its findings are summarized online at the ever-illuminating GreenFacts.org site. About 100,000 of the 600,000 most exposed would die of cancer in any case, if Chernobyl had never happened. For every 100 of the normal cancer victims, four may die earlier because of Chernobyl radiation. Statistically it is a nonevent—epidemiology can’t detect it.

  The real damage to people in the region, according to the Chernobyl Forum report, is from poverty and mental stress. “The most significant public health impact of Chernobyl has been on mental health,” says Luisa Vinton, who headed the forum, in the video Living with Chernobyl (2007). “The conclusion we’ve come to is that fear of radiation is a far more important health threat than radiation itself.” The report asserts that what the region around Chernobyl now needs more than anything else is economic stimulus.

  • The report also mentions that “the Exclusion Zone has paradoxically become a unique sanctuary for biodiversity.” In a fascinating book, Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl (2005), Mary Mycio observes thatIt is one of the disaster’s paradoxes, but the zone’s evacuation put an end to industrialization, deforestation, cultivation, and other human intrusions, making it one of Ukraine’s environmentally cleanest regions—except for the radioactivity. But animals don’t have dosimeters. . . . The Rhode Island-sized territory has become a fascinating and at times beautiful wilderness teeming with beavers and wolves, deer and lynx, as well as rare birds such as black storks and azure tits.

  The rare white-tailed eagle now thrives in the area, and Europe’s only remaining native megafauna, the long-endangered European bison and Przewalski’s horse, have been introduced successfully. In 1994 two biologists from Texas Tech, Ronald Chesser and Robert Baker, began fifteen years of research on radiation effects in the animals in the Exclusion Zone. In the famously radioactive Red Forest (where all the pines had been killed by fallout, though the birches survived), they started with wild mice.We were surprised to find that although each mouse registered unprecedented levels of radiation in its bones and muscles, all the animals seemed physically normal, and many of the females were carrying normal-looking embryos. This was true for pretty much every creature we examined—highly radioactive, but physically normal. It was the first of many revelations.

  They did find elevated levels of genetic mutations in voles and reported their results in a 1996 cover story in Nature. Right after it was published, they got an automated sequencer, and instead of refining their findings, it completely refuted them—nothing genetically significant was going on in the voles. With anguish, they retracted the Nature paper. Robert Baker concludes on his home page that as far as the Chernobyl animals are concerned, “the elimination of human activities such as farming, ranching, hunting and logging are the greatest benefit, and it can be said that the world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster is not as destructive to wildlife populations as are normal human activities. Even where the levels of radiation are highest, wildlife abounds.”

  That is an interesting statement: “The world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster is not as destructive to wildlife populations as are normal human activities.”

  I predict there will be a Chernobyl National Park. It has the perfect ingredients. It is a major historic site. When 330,000 people moved out and wildlife moved in, it became one of Europe’s finest natural preserves. The UN Development Programme has called for ecotourism development there. With the exception of a few well-known (and fading) hot spots, radioactivity has dropped to normal background levels. Already reforested, the ghost town of Pripyat, which once housed 50,000, is a poignant reminder of the cost of design folly—the Chernobyl reactors had no containment structures. The site of the reactor itself is a grim monument which, once the final protective shield is in place, may last as long and as evocatively as Stonehenge.

  • Several inappropriate Absolute Evils distract rational discussion about nuclear safety. One is cancer. Jim Lovelock, whose degree and early career were in medicine, wrote in 2004, “We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all-pervasive carcinogen, oxygen.” Cancer researcher and entrepreneur William Haseltine explains another inevitability: “Cancer is a disease of aging. It’s going to be hard to prevent cancers, because they are so intrinsically tied to the aging process itself.” The surest way to prevent cancer is the traditional method: Die younger of something else.

  Radiation acquired its Evil reputation mainly as a legacy of the atomic bomb. Our horror at Hiroshima is transferred, like referred pain, to the only thing we can directly influence, which is nuclear power. For a sense of the legacy effect, compare other dangerous infrastructure-scale energy forms. Gasoline is intensely explosive, killing thousands routinely in auto accidents and elsewhere. Natural gas blows up houses, flows through vulnerable pipelines, and travels around in bomblike ships. Grid electricity is lethal all the way to your light fixture, electrocuting any who touch it carelessly, and setting no end of fires. The great Green hope, hydrogen, has reactivity that weakens pipes, volatility that makes it the most leak-prone of gases, and an ignition point so low that a cellphone can ignite it; and it burns with an invisible flame. Another fond hope, vast quantities of carbon dioxide to be captured at coal-fired plants and piped to under
ground sequestration, introduces yet another dangerous gas to the energy inventory. In 1986 a dense cloud of CO2 belched out of Lake Nyos in Cameroon, flowed downhill at 20 miles an hour, and suffocated 1,700 villagers and 3,500 livestock up to 15 miles away. Known all too well to miners as “choke damp,” carbon dioxide kills instantly in any concentration greater than 15 percent.

  Radiation from nuclear energy has killed not a single American, but of all these energy by-products it is the only one we dread. Nuclear radiation as used in medicine for diagnosis and treatment has saved countless lives, while exposing all the patients to levels of radiation that are many times what is illegal in the nuclear power industry.

  • An abiding issue that should not abide much longer concerns the accumulated effects of low-dose radiation. In the 1970s I ran occasional screeds on the subject from Helen Caldicott and the late John Goffman in CoEvolution Quarterly, until I read about an experiment comparing the health of lab rats exposed to mild radiation with rats not so exposed. Instead of getting sick, the dosed rats did better than the control rats; radiation was good for them. I published no more on the subject.

  Decades later, in 2007, I asked Jim Lovelock for his views on low-dose radiation. “The jury is still out, is my answer,” he said. “There are two schools. One school says low dosage is good for you. It’s called hormesis. There’s growing evidence for that; it looks quite interesting. The other one says that low dosages are more dangerous. The evidence that impresses me is this: In some parts of the world, in India and Iran, the natural background radiation is huge. The life expectancy of people in those places is the same as anywhere else. There’s no evidence of anything nasty going on.”

  Because background radiation everywhere is considerable, the only way to prove or disprove the standard “linear no-threshold” model, which insists that all levels of radiation are harmful to some degree, is to run experiments in a place with no background radiation whatever. That is exactly the plan with a proposed ultra-low-level radiation biology laboratory in the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) nuclear repository deep in a New Mexico salt formation.

  Background radiation levels in the salt chambers a half mile down are a tenth of surface levels, and shielding can reduce the radiation to near zero. Comparative experiments with cells, tissue cultures, and transgenic mice highly susceptible to cancer should determine once and for all which of the three theories of low-dose radiation is right. Is it the no-threshold theory? Or, if there is a threshold beneath which radiation damage is negligible, what is the threshold? Or, if the hormesis theory of biopositive effects from low-dose radiation turns out to be correct, what is the most advantageous dose level, and what are the mechanisms of benefit—DNA repair, scavenging of toxic agents, removal of damaged or cancerous cells, or something else? (The hormesis expert T. D. Luckey reportedly finds about 6,000 millirems a year to be the optimum dose level for health.)

  At stake are hundreds of billions of dollars. If the standard no-threshold theory is wrong, as most scientists suspect it is, then the U. S. government has been overspending by orders of magnitude on nuclear cleanup, and it will overspend surreally on heading off trace contamination from projects such as the Yucca Mountain repository. The Environmental Protection Agency relies on the no-threshold model to require that nuclear sites do whatever it takes to expose the nearby public to no more than 15 millirems of radiation a year. That is half a mammogram (30 mrem), a fifth of the range of normal U.S. background radiation (from 284 mrem in Connecticut to 364 mrem in Colorado), a sixty-sixth of a CT scan (1,000 mrem; 62 million are done every year in the United States), and an eightieth of one year of smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day (1,300 mrem; there are 45 million smokers in the United States). People in Ramsar, Iran, live with a background radiation of 13,000 millirems a year with no apparent health consequences. Astronauts are allowed 25,000 millirems per shuttle mission.

  It appears to me that the main public safety issue around nuclear power is what Luisa Vinton and the United Nations agencies found at Chernobyl: “Fear of radiation is a far more important health threat than radiation itself.” The lesson of Chernobyl is double: one, be careful; two, be careful what you fear.

  That nuclear’s high capital cost is the leading complaint from everybody opposing it is due to the prodigious efforts of one man. Amory Lovins, founder and head of Rocky Mountain Institute, has been slicing and dicing the arcana of nuclear-power finance for three decades, to formidable effect.

  Lovins is an old friend and colleague. In CoEvolution Quarterly, I purveyed his perspective on energy efficiency and praised his books. One time at a Hackers’ Conference, I saw him blow away that hard-to-dazzle audience with his discourse on how conventional cars spend most of their energy getting out of their own way, how the nested nuances of his Hyper-car design could deliver spectacular energy efficiencies, and how those savings in aggregate would transform the world energy economy. In his writings and talks, Lovins has a pungency of phrasing that rivals the silver-tongued economist John Maynard Keynes. “If,” he says offhandedly in an interview, “you build an efficient, diverse, dispersed, renewable electricity system, major failures—whether by accident or malice—become impossible by design rather than inevitable by design.”

  The Lovins brief against nuclear (or what one opponent calls his “obsessive ongoing vendetta against nuclear”) makes the following case. Private capital is the most objective judge and proof of which energy forms are best, and in that arena, nuclear always loses and micropower always wins, and that’s why micropower is soaring throughout the world while nuclear is stalled. By micropower Lovins means efficiency, cogeneration (also known as CHP—combined heat and power), small hydro, and renewables such as wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal. “The cheapest, most reliable power is typically produced at or near customers.” To Lovins, government intervention to assist nuclear because of climate fears is actually counterproductive because it tilts investment away from the micropower alternatives, which are faster and cheaper to deploy and more effective against climate change. “In no new nuclear project around the world is there a penny of private capital at risk.”

  In 1986 a TV interviewer asked Lovins about the future of nuclear power. “There isn’t one,” he replied. “No more will be built. The only question is whether the plants already operating will continue to operate during their lifetime, or whether they’ll be shut down prematurely.” At a debate in 2007 he declared, “Nuclear is dying of an incurable attack of market forces despite what the industry wants you to believe.”

  • In 2007, as Lovins was speaking, the following was taking place. Around the world, thirty-one reactors were under construction. In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was bracing for an expected seventeen new nuclear plant applications (they were still on track in 2009), while Canada was preparing for new reactors in Alberta and New Brunswick (that one is to sell part of its power to Maine, which shut down its only nuclear plant in 1997). In Europe one nation after another was reversing course on nuclear. Green Finland started construction on a huge, 1.6-gigawatt plant, then added another. Green Germany quietly decided to keep its seventeen reactors working rather than shut them down as previously announced. Green Sweden did the same with its ten reactors while expanding their capacity. Green Belgium decided likewise with its seven reactors. Italy had shut down its four reactors in 1987, after Chernobyl, and soon became Europe’s largest energy importer, mostly from nuclear France; in 2007 it began a program to build four new reactors. Gordon Brown’s Labor government in England made the decision to upgrade all of its nineteen reactors and build new ones. Ireland, Norway, and Poland were planning their first reactors. France, already getting 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear, began building new reactors and expanding its comprehensive nuclear operations to serve a global market through its $7 billion public corporation, AREVA. Russia set off on the same path, planning to double its number of reactors, currently thirty-one, and sell to an internatio
nal market with its new $8-billion state-owned holding company, Atomenergoprom.

  In the developing world, Russia’s interested potential customers include “Vietnam, Malaysia, Egypt, Namibia, Morocco, South Africa, Algeria, Brazil, Chile and Argentina,” according to the New York Times. The article added that “Western investors, including such heavyweights as Citigroup, are seeking ways to bet on the Russian nuclear power industry.” Now building nukes for the first time are Albania, Belarus, Turkey, Iran, the United Arab Emirates (two 1.6 gigawatt reactors under way), Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and Bangladesh; considering doing so are Syria, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, and the Philippines; and expanding on the nukes they already have are Ukraine, Hungary, Bulgaria, Armenia, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan. (You can keep track of the count at Wikipedia’s entry, “Nuclear energy policy.”)

  India, with seventeen reactors now providing 3 gigawatts of power, plans to expand the capacity tenfold to 30 gigawatts.

  After ordering two reactors from Westinghouse, China signed a $12 billion deal with AREVA—said to be the largest in the history of the industry—and is aiming to grow its nuclear capacity to 70 gigawatts by 2020. It has eleven reactors working, five under construction, thirty planned, and eighty-six proposed.

  Japan, the largest user of nuclear power after the United States and France, with fifty-five reactors in operation, is planning eleven new reactors by 2017. The government wants to transform its electricity mix from 30 percent nuclear now to 60 percent nuclear by 2050.