Having spent a good portion of my working life engaged in research about nuclear effects, I am always appalled at the extent of the misinformation presented in the media about those effects particularly after a nuclear power accident. Of more concern is the negative impact such misinformation has on a country’s decision to use nuclear power to generate electricity.
Most scientists, particularly energy experts, have concluded that if society is to achieve a reasonably safe atmospheric carbon dioxide level, carbon-free nuclear energy will have to play a major role in the production of baseline electricity, which constitutes about 40 to 45 percent of daily use. That does not mean that other carbon free energy sources such as wind and solar are not useful in the overall energy mix, only that by themselves they cannot provide baseline requirements without the need of carbon emitting energy sources as backup, or some other yet undiscovered or undeveloped technology to fill in for their variability or substitute for outages.
Radiation emissions from Fukushima Dai-ichi, the Japanese nuclear power plant that was damaged in the recent devastating tsunami, continues to be incorrectly described by the media. While Fukushima is a major economic catastrophe for Tokyo Electric Power, the more serious effect is that the inaccurate radiation information about what the site is emitting is causing the government to scale back its use of nuclear power, its only choice for maintaining a competitive economy.
The misinformation starts with media reports that fail to acknowledge that the accident was caused by a disastrous tsunami and not by a plant malfunction. The media have miraculously shifted the blame from the tsunami to nuclear energy itself. Japan has about 50 other reactors that were not damaged but have been shut down because of public fears.
Based on 50 years of studying Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors by the National Academies’ of Science, radiation levels must reach yearly doses of 100 millisieverts for cancer risk to become statistically perceptible. Two recent studies, one by the United Nations and the other by the World Health Organization, showed that residents and nuclear workers in the region adjacent to the Fukushima plant received yearly doses of between 1 and 15 millisieverts (Nature, May 12, 2012). Yet media coverage even today describe those doses as dangerous or even lethal.
Such overstatements about radiation risks have caused the Japanese public to panic. And the Japanese government has reacted to the panic with several irrational actions. The first was not to start up its other reactors to prevent the need to purchase liquid natural gas from overseas at an unsustainable cost. Then, according to Oxford University physics professor Wade Allison, the government destroyed large amounts of food that was just a fraction above background radiation levels resulting in food shortages and increased costs.
Even more inept, rather than allowing the contaminated waste water that was causing so much concern in the press to continue leaking into the pacific where it would eventually mix with the rest of the oceanic background radiation, the government is constructing a hugely expensive network of super cooled pipes to freeze the ground and prevent the leakage. The reason, Japanese fishermen feared that any short-term, slightly elevated radiation levels in their fish would disrupt their market.
Japan is the extreme example of a country trapped in a conundrum that other countries are also facing, radiation phobia that is preventing that country from making rational decisions about nuclear power. Germany is undoubtedly second on the list. A week after Fukushima, the German government promised to close all its nuclear reactors by 2020 and replace them with wind and solar energy. According to the British science journal Nature (April 11), it has exhausted its suitable sites for solar energy that were acquired at tremendous costs, and now must buy significant amounts of electricity from France, 80 percent of which is produced with nuclear power. Denmark is even more hypocritical. After years of boasting that its electricity was nuclear free, it turns out that it buys more than half of its requirements from Sweden, which is half nuclear. Both Germany and Denmark have the highest electricity rates in Europe while France and Sweden have the lowest.
In contrast, Finland was ridiculed mercilessly by Greenpeace and other environmental groups for building a new nuclear power plant that was $15 billion over budget and eight years behind schedule. A recent analysis by Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., shows that the Finnish plant is forecasted to generate electricity at a cost of 7 cents per kilowatt, while electricity in Germany costs 33 cents per kilowatt.
Misleading claims from environmental groups and alternative energy businesses about wind and solar being ready for prime time, along with incorrect media information about radiation hazards from nuclear power have caused both Japan and Germany to make serious energy mistakes. Energy decisions here in the United States too often are being influenced by this same faulty rhetoric.
Garth Buchanan holds a doctorate in applied science and has 35 years of experience in operations research. Reach him at gbuch@frontier.net.
