Cheap nuclear is healthy nuclear

Figure 1. Helicopter taking reading above TMI vent stack.

Engineers are taught from day one everything's a trade off, that their job is to balance one desirable (eg performance) against another (eg safety). They must find a way to compare apples with oranges. To do that, they are told they must think quantitatively. This indoctrination is necessary because this way of thinking is not natural to humans. Rational numbers are usually traced back to Pythagoras, a mere 2500 years ago. Much before that, all we had was simple counting.

The Greeks were aware of the existence of quantities that were not simply ratios of integers; but they were considered to be so unnatural as to be irrational, meaning not logical. According to Euclid, it was heresy to call these strange quantities numbers. Our current understanding of numbers is less than 500 years old. It is an artificial construct that must be pounded into young minds. In periods of stress, humans revert to simpler, binary thinking. A bad is bad and a good is good. Period.

This can be a problem when it comes to radiation, which is all about the numbers.

About a year after Three Mile Island, the utility, Metropolitan Edison (MetEd) needed to release some krypton-85 from the wrecked TMI2 containment, so that workers could start cleaning up the mess inside. Krypton-85 is primarily an electron emitter with a 10.7 year half-life. Electron emitters have to be ingested or inhaled to go any real damage. Krypton is a noble gas. It does not react with anything. If you breathe it in, you will breathe it out. Thus, the concentration in the lung is the same as the concentration in the atmosphere. The dose coefficient, the ratio between dose rate and krypton concentration, is a tiny 0.0000000000019 mSv/d per Bq/m3. Kr-85 is regularly released by nuclear plants. For this release, no member of the public would get a dose of 0.01 mSv. Thinking like an engineer, the LNT Lost Life Expectancy from 0.01 mSv acute is 3 minutes; the SNT LLE is 3.5 milliseconds.

MetEd held a townhall to explain to the locals what they were doing and why. Two of the attendees were the Gormans, who lived about 1.5 miles from the plant. Beverly Gorman and her husband had two children who at the time were teenagers.

The Q&A session resulted in this exchange, between the Gormans and MetEd VP Robert Arnold.

Mr. Gorman:

I want a straight answer. How much radiation were we exposed to the first two days after the accident?

Arnold says the estimate is 83 millirems (0.83 mSv) and then attempts to compare that to background levels. Mrs. Gorman jumps in:

I dont want any flowery speeches. Can you tell me my children have suffered no physical damage?

Arnold:

We would have to say that your children did receive some radiation from the accident at Three Mile Island. Any radiation could result in some cell damage, whether it is from a school building, the ground where they live. The judgement has to be made if the cell damage is at levels that are acceptable. I dont know anybody who could decide.

Mrs. Gorman:

You are proposing to expose them to more. I have to live here. We don't have the money to move away. I don't think they should be subject to more.

Afterwards Mrs. Gorman was still very upset. Here she is talking to a reporter.

I didn't get a good answer. I want somebody up there to tell me my children did not suffer physically from the TMI accident. Yes or no. That's all I want to know All I hear is rems and millirems. I just want a straight yes or no. It's always a a long drawn out answer. If I can't be concerned about my children's health, then I can let them eat jelly beans for breakfast, and stop worrying about what they eat and how long they sleep. It's all for nothing if they are sacrificed to nuclear energy.

Here's what I think Arnold should have said.

Mrs. Gorman, the answer is no. Our bodies know how to repair radiation damage at these low levels, in the same way they know how to repair a minor cut. Not only will there be no measurable harm, your children are not being sacrificed to nuclear energy. If TMI did not exist, its dependable electricity would need to be replaced by fossil fuel. That fossil fuel plant will cause far more harm than nuclear. Not producing that electricity would cause still more harm. Nuclear is the cheapest source of electricity. Nuclear power is making your kids wealthier than they otherwise would be. And wealth means health. Nuclear means your children will live longer than they otherwise would.

This argument requires that nuclear be cheaper than fossil. If this is not the case, Arnold can't use this argument, and I do not know what to tell Mrs. Gorman.