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Why is it that the corrupt and incompetent mainstream media considers every "release" of "radioactive gas" from a nuclear power plant to be newsworthy? That certainly has an negative effect on public perception of the risks of nuclear power.

Many years ago I subscribed to an excellent newsletter called "Access To Energy" by Petr Beckmann, who was also the author of a great book called "The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear."

I'll never forget an amusing article he wrote, discussing a newspaper article about a "radioactive cloud over Denver" due to a release from a nuclear power plant. He did a quick little analysis, and concluded that the readers of that newspaper article probably got more radiation exposure from the ink on the newspaper while reading the article than they received from the "radioactive cloud"!

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Good stuff. Reminds me of a brilliant book I read... good lord... 41 years ago: Petr Beckmann's The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear.

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As you point out, very few have died due to nuclear accidents so obviously this leads to very favorable comparison. But people don't really make that comparison. As we try to understand why people are hesitant in taking on nuclear assets, we should not necessarily assume they are unscientific or illogical. 2 considerations:

1. maybe people consider dislocation of people or serious interruptions to life as equivalent to lives lost. I think I would. The impact of a nuclear catastrophes is less about lives and more about the financial losses associated with land loss, land rehab, dislocation, cleanup, loss of assets.

2. The consequences of nuclear accidents are locally concentrated around the power plant, but your metrics are globally diluted. The people who live there get hit in very real and practical ways when an accident occurs. On the other hand for fossil emissions, the consequences are pretty globally diluted. Comparisons made on a globally diluted basis by a top down master planner are not likely to explain the real decisions made by locally affected people. A master planner would assume that nuclear will save lives overall, but is willing to put some portions of them at higher risk.

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Thanks, Jack.Another great one.

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The problem I have with this is the difficulty presenting it in a way that the general public will assimilate and respond to. The simple fact is that on many matters of meaning both knowledge and understanding are needed. Knowledge may be supplied copiously but understanding is in extremely limited supply.

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I was unaware that Prof. Kerry Emanuel has written an article that also makes the case that nuclear power is too safe. In many respects, his piece is better than mine. You can download it from

https://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Nuclear_Fear_2021.pdf

Dr. Emanuel and I differ on teh wisdom of deep geologic disposal and the role of intermittents, but I think we both agree that without economic nuclear the Gordian Knot does not get solved.

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Interesting, I teach a master's degree environmental economics course and I just covered the equimarginal principle, which you just used. Maybe I'll toss it in as an example.

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"radioactive cloud over Denver". I think you're referring to the Rocky Flats fire of 1957 that blanketed several square miles with radioactive ash. Today houses have been built where much of that fallout occurred and people are afraid/reluctant to live in that area. Of course they're almost certainly getting more radiation exposure from the granite in the soil, and I'm quite sure that no deaths outside the lab have been linked to the fallout, but the carelessness of the management at Rocky Flats are very much responsible for future deaths from fossil fuels due to their impact on the adoption of nuclear energy.

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The claim that the costs included in that graph are marginal costs and therefore ought to be equal seems very dubious. Many of the interventions listed are nearly completely implemented, and the authors of that study say "Cost-effectiveness ratios should be marginal or “incremental.” Both costs and effectiveness

should be evaluated with respect to a well-defined baseline alternative.", which very much sounds like they're using comparisons of the costs at the intervention's current level and the cost of not implementing it at all. I checked an arbitrary reference where it seemed like this might be the case, Main T (1985). An economic evaluation of child restraints. J Transport Econ di Policy, 19, 23-39. which evaluated effectiveness of water chlorination and filtration, and it was. Furthermore, they restrict their attention to purely monetary costs. A marginal increase in childhood vaccination (in the US, which the study also restricts their attention to), for example, would require things like vaccinating children against their parents' wishes, the cost of which is almost entirely non-monetary.

The claim that all the costs should be equal therefore does not apply to the data in that chart. None of this actually detracts from your main point. It is still true that there should be an upper bound on the costs of the interventions that are implemented. I just wanted to refute this particular claim that that data suggests the money would be better redirected to things like seatbelts and vaccines.

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Jack, I do like your work so please don't take this as criticism. I suggest developing a simple way to bring all the risk stuff down to something easily understood by those who don't have time to get into the details.

Look at it from an individual's point of view - an average person will ask what their own risk is if they live within a certain distance of a nuclear power plant. A satisfactory answer would be something like - there is a 1 in 100 chance of being exposed to a leak in a lifetime and the chance of it causing cancer is tiny (a figure would help). Also, the chance of being forcibly evicted from your house is also small (again a defendable figure would help?).

If we could confidently say something like that, with defendable data, and continue to ram it home, then I think it would allay a lot of people's fears.

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Windscale was a huge radioactivity release due to graphite moderator fire, no evacuation but widespread radioactive Iodine release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

Kyshtym was a Russian Nuclear Waste facility that allowed the concentration to get too high and went critical and exploded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster

Kyshtym, Chernobyl, and Fukushima resulted in widespread relocation of exposed population so those are NOT going to show up in your stats unless you track down relocated persons.

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