The Sun Shines Bright by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780380613908
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1981-10-15T02:20:14+00:00

The Elements

10

The Useless Metal

When the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant went wrong, I came to certain conclusions and found, as often happens, that I was out of step with the world.

The predominant sentiment seemed to be: ‘Aha! Scientists told us it couldn’t happen, but it did. So much for those smarty-pants scientists. Now let’s tear down the nuclear age.’

And yet that’s not what really happened. Scientists never said things couldn’t go wrong. They said enough safety measures had been taken to make the chance of real damage extraordinarily small.

What the antinuclear people said was something like this: ‘Wait! An accident will take place and hundreds of thousands of people will be killed outright and millions will get cancer and thousands of square miles of land will be forever useless.’

So? Three Mile Island seems to have been poorly designed to begin with. People in charge seem to have disregarded certain warning signals and to have been unnecessarily careless. There were mechanical failures followed by human error. There was even theoretical insufficiency since a hydrogen bubble formed that no one had ever predicted.

In other words, it was practically a worst-possible-case kind of accident. What were the consequences?

The power station was put out of action and will stay out of action for a long, longtime, but not one person was killed and there is no clear evidence that anyone was hurt, for radiation escape was low. There may be an additional case of cancer or two as a result and, while I don’t want to minimize this, the number of cancer cases will be far less than will be caused in the same area by tobacco smoking and automobile exhaust.

It seemed to me, then, that the Three Mile Island incident was a case where the scientists’ predictions proved correct and those of the antinuclear people incorrect. And yet the incident was instantly labelled a ‘catastrophe’ by the media and the antinuclears. What would they have called it, I wonder, if one person had been killed?

In any case, when the Philadelphia Inquirer asked me to write a piece stating my views on the matter, I wrote a sardonic article for the April 15, 1979, issue. My pro-nuclear views ran side by side with an antinuclear article by George Wald.

Two weeks later, I was in Philadelphia and a young woman stopped me and said, rather sadly, ‘I was sure that you of all people would be on the antinuclear side. You’re so liberal.’

That saddened me. I am certainly a liberal, but that doesn’t mean I automatically plug in to the official liberal viewpoint. I like to think for myself - a prejudice of mine of long standing.

Still, all that brooding on the subject reminded me at last that I have never written an F & SF essay on uranium. So here goes:

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