A Letter to Elon

Figure 1. Hanford Cleanup Projected Costs, reference \cite{doe-2022}

Dear Mr. Musk,

May I suggest you take your wrecking ball to the Hanford Reservation, where we taxpayers are paying 2.5 billion dollars a year to push dirt around. The excuse for this expenditure is dangerous radiation. But the average dose rate at Hanford is below the planet average. The worst case dose rate is less than 6 mSv/y, which is exceeded by background dose rates in many parts of the planet, including portions of the Kerala coast where the residents are exposed to up to 60 mSv/y. These people have among the lowest cancer rates in India.

Moreover, all this money is not reducing radiation. It's just moving it around. The Department of Energy estimates it will take between 300 and 600 billion dollars to finish the job. See Figure 1. Since this is a government projection, we can be confident that the high end number will end up low, especially since we have already spent more than 60 billion "cleaning up" Hanford and have essentially nothing to show for it. For more detail, please see You Want Nuclear Waste I'll Show You Nuclear Waste. Hanford is fine the way it is. Just fence off a few areas and post signs saying Don't Eat the Dirt.

And while you are it, you might want to look into something called LNT. LNT is the theory that we don't have the ability to repair radiation damage. The harm just keeps building up. This theory is propping up by a cabal of multi-billion dollar per year agencies including the EPA, the NRC, and large parts of DOE.

LNT is biological nonsense. Nature has endowed us with remarkably effective DNA repair systems. These systems are indisputable. We give out Nobel prizes to the researchers who have elucidated them. These systems can handle dose rates that are hundreds of time higher than normal background radiation. That's the only reason you could go into space. Nature had to equip us with the systems to repair the much worse DNA damage caused by our oxygen based metabolism.

LNT is laughably wrong when radiation doses are received over protracted periods. In the case of the radium dial painters, LNT predicted that the 657 women who received between 2000 mSv and 200,000 mSv had a 100% chance of bone cancer. The actual number was zero.\cite{rowland-1996}[Figure 1] Despite this LNT is "set in stone" according to one EPA administrator. (I'm not normally a snitch; but, for this deskpot, I will make an exception. The guys' name is Jonathon Edwards.)

LNT was not mandated by Congress. The bureaucrats adopted it on their own. That suggests to me, we are an EO away from dumping this abomination of a theory. Maybe you know somebody who could issue that EO?

If LNT were replaced with a biologically sound radiation harm model, not only would the taxpayer save tens of billions of dollars per year; but nuclear power could be regulated much like we regulate ocean transportation and high pressure steam, two developments which have transformed the human condition. Nuclear power would be forced down to its should-cost of less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. Nuclear power would finally realize its promethean promise.

Call me,

Jack