Four Simple Questions

Pro-nukes are a diverse lot. They range from hard core climate deniers to hard code climate alarmists. They include button downed engineers and purple haired Tiktok influencers. But there are four anti-nuke positions they all seem to agree on. I have no idea why. So I'm asking you.

Shunning Masking Up

During the plume passage, almost all the dose is from inhaling contaminated air; very little of the dose is direct external radiation. Table 1 shows the ICRP ratios for the three most damaging isotopes in a release.

Reasonably well fitted N95 masks will cut the inhalation dose by a factor of 100 or more. Yet as far as I know, no pro-nuke points out that masking up can come close to eliminating the plume dose. I've never seen it even mentioned.

The EPA talks about staying indoors. A 6 inch concrete wall will cut the gamma dose from outside by little more than a factor of two. But what counts during the plume is the quality of the air inside. If your closed up house has 0.35 air exchanges per hour, probably about as low as you want to go, in about 6 hours, the inside air will be 90% plume air. That six hours will cut the dose a lot if the plume at the house is short lived. But if the plume sticks around for more than six hours, staying indoors becomes increasingly ineffective.

The NRC is far worse. They take immediate evacuation as granted. This is the worst possible advice. Almost all the harm to the public in all the releases to date has been caused by the evacuation.

Pro-nukes either side with the EPA or (gak!) the NRC. They are totally silent on masking up. Can anybody tell me why?

The Spent Fuel Lie

Fresh spent nuclear fuel is extremely dangerous. It is so dangerous that the used fuel elements must be kept under meters of water for about 4 years. Even then the elements must be encased in casks, whose walls are multiple layers of steel and concrete, nearly a meter thick. What makes the fuel elements so dangerous is high energy photons. These particles have the ability to penetrate deep into a human body, damaging cells along the way.

The good news is that the photon emitters in the used fuel disappear rapidly due to radioactive decay, if your idea of rapid is a few hundred years. By year 600, 99.999% of all the photon emitters are gone. The remaining radioactivity is alpha particles and electrons, which have little or no penetrating power.

At year 600, the photon dose rate at the fuel element surface is so low, that according to Department of Energy rules, it can be contact handled, that is, handled without any shielding at all. After year 600, spent nuclear fuel must be swallowed in order to to any damage. After year 600, spent nuclear fuel is just another poison, and not a particularly toxic one.

And it is a very valuable poison. The spent fuel is an extremely high grade uranium ore. About 2% of the ore is fissile material which can be recycled directly back to reactor fuel. About 95% of the ore is U-238, which can be transmuted into reactor fuel in a breeder reactor. Nether recycling nor breeding of fresh spent fuel is economic. But after the photon radiation has died away, the economics are entirely different. The remaining 3% of the ore will contain rare isotopes, some of which will be valuable enough to recover. What's left will be low level waste, which can be cemented in barrels and landfilled.

Spent fuel is at most a 600 year problem. Can someone tell me why nuclear power advocates are not shouting this out at every opportunity? Instead they push horribly expensive, deep geologic repositories, which make sense only if the fuel is exceptionally perilous for hundreds of millenia. They are telling everybody that this fuel is uniquely dangerous for a million years. They are lying. Can anybody tell me why?

Threshold Obstinance

The Linear No Threshold (LNT) radiation harm model is the basis for The Intolerable Harm Lie, which we are told mandates NRC-style regulation. Replacing LNT is necessary if nuclear power is to live up to its promethean promise.

LNT is biological nonsense. LNT claims dose is strictly additive; harm just builds up. In doing so it denies our ability to repair radiation damage. Our remarkable damage repair ability has been documented in countless experiments and studies. It shows up in the fact that a single large dose of 1 gray will make us very sick, and increase our chance of cancer by roughly 10%; while a dose of 1 gray spread evenly over 500 days will result in no detectable harm. LNT makes the preposterous claim that there is no difference between these two dose profiles. LNT is easy to shoot down. Why has it survived?

One big reason is that anti-LNTers do not focus on LNT's ridiculous claim that harm is strictly additive in dose (aka linear). Rather they focus on LNT's claim that we cannot identify a threshold below which there is absolutely zero harm. The problem with this strategy is the LNTers are correct.

We can identify all sorts of situations where there is no detectable harm. We can identify dose rates such that our repair processes nearly always repair the damage. We can even find situations in which the repair processes over-shoot and repair more damage than the dose caused. But we cannot claim with certainty that there is a threshold below which there will always be absolutely zero harm. We most assuredly cannot prove that there is such a threshold dose.

The LNTers have no problem showing the thresholder's claim is unprovable. As long as the criticism of LNT is its claim that there is no threshold is false, LNT wins.¹ Can anybody tell me why an anti-LNTer would attack LNT by going after the only part of LNT that is defensible?

Pro-nukes for the NRC

There are two basic forms of regulation:

1) Reactive

2) Proactive

Reactive regulation attempts to balance an activity's benefits and harm by ensuring that the harmer pays for any third party harm he causes. This is the way we regulate most beneficial, but hazardous activities. It's the way we regulate ocean transportation and high pressure steam, two activities which have transformed the human condition.

Under this system, operators of hazardous activities are required to purchase insurance, which insurance will be used to compensate harmed third parties. The availability and price of that insurance will depend on how safely the insured operates. This sets up a mechanism where the cost of potential third party harm becomes part of the operator's calculations. If (and only if) regulation/law sets the compensation appropriately, we end up with a level of activity and harm which comes close to maximizing overall societal well being. For highly beneficial but inherently hazardous activities, that optimal harm is never zero.

In most such activities, the benefits are spread over an entire population. They are continuous, normal, and no matter how transformative, such as say electric power, they are in a matter of months taken for granted. The harm is episodic, and borne by a few unfortunate souls, sometimes grievously. The more infrequent the harm, the more newsworthy the tragedy for these people is.

This is just how human nature works. It's the way we are hardwired. It is not going to change. Reactive regulation can handle this emotive imbalance. In a casualty, the victims are compensated. In cases of negligence or worse, the perps are fined or imprisoned; but the basic system is unchanged. The approximate balance between benefit and harm is maintained.

Proactive regulation attempts to prevent harm before it happens. In direct proactive regulation, kings, dictators, or politicians mandate behavior. The UK Red Flag Act of 1865 was direct proactive regulation. It required self-propelled vehicles on roads to travel at less than 4 MPH with a man walking 60 yards ahead waving a red flag. The 1974 55 MPH speed limit on the Interstates was a mild, modern form of the Red Flag Act.

Once direct proactive regulation becomes obviously inimical to overall societal welfare, it can be changed. The Red Flag Act was repealed in 1896. Society accepted the tens of thousands of deaths annually from motor vehicle travel in return for the benefits. In democratic societies, where politicians are at least partially responsive to the will of the people, this can happen fairly quickly. The 55 MPH speed limit was changed to 65 in 1987 and completely repealed in 1995. Deaths on rural interstates jumped 9.1%.\cite{friedman-2009} Most states decided the tradeoff was net beneficial.

An increasingly common form of proactive regulation is delegated proactive. This is the situation in which lazy lawmakers decline to regulate directly. Rather they set up a bureaucracy whose mission is to prevent the regulated activity from producing harm. That agency then writes and enforces the actual regulations.

This sets up a conflict between the regulators' incentives and societal well being. The regulator gets no credit for the activities' benefits, no matter how large or how transformative; but he bears the blame for any harm. The regulator's goal becomes zero harm. Worse, when a casualty happens, the regulatory system is deemed to have failed. The system must be strengthened.

This creates increasingly restrictive and expensive regulation. Often such regulation takes the form of rigid procedures and voluminous paperwork, which documents that all procedures have been followed religiously. The goal is to show that, whatever happens, it's not the regulator's fault. But the effect is to stifle technical progress, squash competition, demoralize workers, and divert management. The inevitable problems that result are blamed on the plant builders despite the fact that coal and gas plants get built on time and on budget by the same people. In extreme situations, the activity can be regulated out of existence, regardless of the benefits.

A particularly pernicious aspect of delegated proactive is often the regulator is free to change the rules or write nebulous rules that allow the regulator freedom to impose whatever requirements he feels are needed. Sometimes this takes the form of ALARA. No engineer can design to such rules. No rational investor can allow himself to be exposed to such rules unless he somehow can control the process, perhaps by suborning the regulator. The result is either corruption or stagnation.

Delegated proactive regulation is almost impossible to reverse. Perversely, the bureaucracy becomes larger and stronger with each "failure". The incumbents who have navigated the regulatory maze at great expense, often with the help of bribery, usually legal, sometimes not, become the system's strongest supporters. In democracies which do not control campaign spending, the incumbents, plus wealthy activists who oppose the activity for whatever reason, can bribe politicians to support the regulatory system in the name of safety.

The poster child victim of delegated proactive regulation is nuclear power. Yet most pro-nukes support delegated proactive regulation. They might as well be waving Pro-nukes for the NRC banners. Can anybody tell me why?

1. We must avoid turning the debate into a threshold/no threshold dichotomy. We need only do two things:

1) Show that LNT's claim that harm is strictly additive is false and why. That's child's play.

2) Come up with a alternative model which recognizes our remarkable ability to repair radiation damage, and does not depend on the unprovable threshold claim.