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By Root 840 0

As the Fukushima operator pointed out, a member of the public would have to eat seaweed and seafood harvested just one mile from the discharge pipe for a year to receive an effective dose of 0.6 millisievert: less than a quarter of the 2.7 millisieverts each of us absorbs each year from natural background radiation, with no apparent ill effects. Iodine 131 also has a half-life of only 8 days, so quickly disappears from the scene. Within the confines of the Fukushima plant there are other isotopes which present much greater long-term challenges, but contamination over wider areas is sufficiently low to enable people in the evacuated zone to return and continue their lives without fear of long-term health problems due to radiation. Indeed, I would expect the toxic contamination from the tsunami itself—which swept through industrial infrastructure, fuel tanks, and so on—to present a much more serious problem in the affected areas.

I repeat: Context is everything, and no energy source is without danger. People die in industrial accidents making steel for wind turbines and fall from roofs while installing solar panels. Some analysts have conducted assessments of “deaths per terawatt-hour” that find nuclear to be even safer than renewables as an energy source.59 Even energy efficiency has its downside: Building accidents mean that energy savings from draftproofing Swedish buildings apparently cause more deaths than a similar amount of energy produced by nuclear or hydropower.61 I have limited confidence in these comparative exercises, but it is surely beyond doubt that fossil fuels—of every type—are far more dangerous than nuclear. As a writer at the Atlantic magazine concluded: “We need to take nuclear safety concerns very seriously, but let’s not forget what the baseline for our energy system is.”62

The baseline for 2010, the article pointed out, contained the following energy-related disasters: February 7, a refinery explosion in Connecticut killed 6; March 15, a coal mine fire in Zhengzhou, China, killed 25; March 20, another coal mine collapse in Quetta, Pakistan, killed 45 miners; March 28, a coal mine flood killed 38 in Shanxi, China; March 31, 44 workers died in a mine explosion in Yichuan, China; April 2, an oil refinery blast in Washington State led to 5 deaths; April 5, 29 miners were killed in an explosion in a West Virginia mine. The published list includes 25 serious accidents causing multiple fatalities for 2010 alone, none of which made the news where I live. Presented in this context, Fukushima was a moderate industrial accident—nothing more. It is certainly no argument against the continued, and increased, use of nuclear power, particularly as newer reactor designs mean a much greater degree of passive safety can be employed in future than was the case for the 1960s-era boiling water reactor designs deployed at Fukushima Daiichi.

Fukushima and nuclear safety aside, what about the problem of nuclear waste? To quote Friends of the Earth this time: “Despite more than half a century of nuclear generation, it is still not known how to safely manage its toxic legacy.”63 That radioactive waste is an “unsolved problem,” posing environmental risks far into the future that we don’t know how to deal with, is a central argument of the antinuclear lobby. Yet nuclear waste is actually only an “unsolved problem” because antinuclear campaigners do not agree with the proposed solutions. These solutions are quite simple: Once spent fuel rods are removed from the reactor core, they are stored in cooling ponds until their radiation levels decline sufficiently for them to be stored in dry steel casks. The levels of radioactivity emitted decline by a thousand times in 40–50 years. In the longer term, geological disposal of waste that cannot be recycled or otherwise put to good use (which the vast majority can) is a straightforward engineering challenge that poses negligible risks over the long term. Few people seem to realize that the radioactivity of nuclear waste declines with time; and the more radioactive the waste is to start