Honesty is the best policy

This is basically a rehash of the Two Lies piece; but, inspired by Professor Emanuel’s use of the air travel comparison, here’s my take on why commercial airplanes are “safe” and nuclear power is “dangerous”.

I've collected an informal database of commercial airplane casualties. It purports to include all 1960 and later non-terrorist crashes involving 50 or more fatalities. It includes an incomplete scattering of casualties involving as few as 10 fatalities. The database contains 488 casualties with a total of 45,812 deaths. 1625 of these deaths were people on the ground, neither passengers nor crew. People who just happened to be in the wrong place.

We are averaging about 8 major crashes per year. Each crash receives a great deal of publicity. In the country where it occurred, it dominates TV and the news for at least a day or two. In just about every case, the crash reveals flaws in design --- occasionally serious --- or poor judgement, or lousy management. Crashes don't just happen. People are imperfect. Yet flying commercial is regarded as ``safe".

Over the same 60 year period, we have had three highly publicized, nuclear power plant casualties. In one of these, nobody was hurt, let alone killed. In another, if there will be any eventual public harm due to radiation, it will not be reliably observable. In the third, the increase in cancer to the public confidently predicted by the radiation protection mafia has failed to materialize. Thirty-five years later, the only detectable public harm has been to kids that drank contaminated milk, which may result in as many as 200 premature deaths. Yet nuclear power is regarded as ``dangerous".

In both cases, the individual risk is extremely small. Your chance of being involved in a fatal commercial airplane crash is about 0.2 per million per flight.¹ If the planet went entirely nuclear for all its electricity, your chance of having your life shortened by nuclear power would be about 1 in five million per year.² Of course, the shift to nuclear power would materially increase your life expectancy relative to any other dispatchable source of electricity.

So what's the difference? I believe it's honesty. Commercial airlines are out front about the risk. They put a plastic placard in front of every seat with instructions on what to do in a crash. They make us sit through a safety demonstration before every take off. They say ``We are so certain there will be more deadly casualties that it's worth installing two expensive orange boxes on every commercial aircraft. These boxes are designed to survive a crash that kills everybody on board. The only purpose of these boxes is to help us figure out what caused the horrific casualty so we can make intelligent fixes." The public applauds this attitude, and accepts the industry's risk numbers.

The losses associated with an occasional aircraft crash are tolerated in return for the benefits of air travel. The benefits of cheap, reliable, pollution free, CO2-free electricity are incomparably greater than the benefits of air travel, the losses are less, but nuclear power is too dangerous?

Here's the problem. The nuclear power establishment has told us the Two Lies, two tragic whoppers:

1. The Intolerable Harm Lie: Any sizable release of radioactive material would be an unacceptable catastrophe.

2. The Negligible Probability Lie: But don't worry. The probability of such a release is so low that we can just assume it won't happen. In telling this lie, the complex has tied itself into linguistic knots. We can't say a release is impossible. So it's ``not credible" or ``virtually inconceivable" or ``so small as to be almost negligible" or ``vanishingly slim". Whatever the wording, when a release occurs, public trust is lost for decades.

The Negligible Probability Lie is preposterously stupid for three reasons.

1) Obviously false. It was proven false at Three Mile Island, again at Chernobyl, and again at Fukushima. We've had at least five reactor-releases in about 20,000 reactor years. A healthy, decarbonized, all nuclear planet will requires at least 20,000 gigawatts per year. Twenty thousand large power plants.

Based on the performance to date, on such a planet we will have five releases of radioactive material each year. Even if we can reduce the release rate by a factor or 10 or 20, which we have no right to assume until we prove it, we would still have a release every few years.

2) Prohibitively expensive. Preventing any and all releases is impossible. There is no limit to the amount of money you can spend attempting the impossible. More precisely, the limit is when you price nuclear power out of the market. We reached that limit pretty quickly.

3)Tragically Unnecessary. The Negligible Probability Lie is a product of the Intolerable Harm Lie. This lie was first promulgated by the Rockefeller Foundation and its allies as part of their campaign against nuclear weapons. Tragically, it has been embraced by the nuclear power establishment, in part because it justifies their expenditure of scores of billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars per year on problems that either don't exist or have simple, cheap solutions. But we have seen that even a very large release, sensibly handled, has a Lost Life Expectancy similar to a bad airplane crash. The Intolerable Harm Lie is as false as the Negligible Probability Lie. An occasional release is not only tolerable; it is societally optimal.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not in favor of nuclear power plant releases anymore than I'm in favor of aircraft crashes. But the planet will be a far better place with abundant, cheap, reliable, pollution-free, CO2-free electricity and an occasional release than without both. But such a planet will not happen, unless the nuclear establishment renounces both these lies.

1. Pastzor, R. Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents, 1959-2018, Boeing Commercial Airplane Company, April, 2019

2. Markandya, A. and Wilkinson, P., Electricity Generation and Health, Lancet, Vol 370, September, 2007.