Foolproof by Greg Ip

Author:Greg Ip [Ip, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2015-10-13T05:00:00+00:00

The less familiar an activity or threat and the more dread it inspires, the greater the risk it is perceived to be. (Source: data provided by Paul Slovic)

Although hundreds died during the evacuation following the Fukushima nuclear accident and the tsunami that caused the accident, the power plant meltdown itself has not yet been implicated in any deaths. Compare that to the litany of deaths in recent years from conventional energy sources: eleven when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico; twenty-nine miners in the Big Branch coal mine explosion in 2010; eight in a natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, California, in 2010; six when a gas-fired power plant exploded in Middletown, Connecticut, in 2010; forty-seven in the town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, when a train carrying seventy-two tank cars of crude oil crashed and set the town’s center on fire.

That’s only the direct toll from accidents. Far more people die indirectly, for example from pollution or radiation exposure. Researchers from Stanford University reckon that 130 people will die due to cancer caused by radiation released in the Fukushima disaster (that’s their best guess in a very wide range of 15 to 1,300). The final death toll from the Chernobyl disaster by one estimate could reach 4,000 (other estimates reach 93,000), though as of 2006, only 47 deaths were conclusively linked to its radiation. Yet these figures, too, pale in comparison to the deaths attributed mainly to the pollution belched into the air each year by wood, oil, gas, and coal: more than 7,000 in the United States alone, and potentially millions worldwide.

In the wake of Three Mile Island, American regulators began cracking down on safety violations at power plants, and in 1985 the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally operated electric utility serving the South, temporarily shut down several nuclear reactors. Edson Severnini at Carnegie Mellon University found that as a result, electricity generation from coal-fired plants operated by the TVA rose, and those plants’ counties experienced more pollution and more babies with lower birth weight.

Former NASA scientist James E. Hansen, one of the loudest voices in the scientific community warning of global warming, and his colleague Pushker A. Kharecha have tried to quantify the relationship between nuclear power and mortality. They figured that between 1971 and 2009, the use of nuclear power had prevented 1.84 million deaths by avoiding the burning of coal and natural gas and the resulting air pollution. In Germany, the figure was 117,000. They then asked how many deaths would be prevented if nuclear power were not phased out. They concluded that between 2010 and 2050, if nuclear power replaced natural gas, 420,000 to 680,000 deaths would be avoided. If it replaced coal, the number of lives saved rises to between 4.4 million and 7 million. These numbers don’t reflect any additional harm from climate change such as heat waves, floods, droughts, and food shortages. Without nuclear power, it would be far harder to hold carbon emissions to what they consider a safe level.

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