Recanting the Two Lies: the first steps

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.[Walter Scott, 1808]

The fact that a large release of radiation from a nuclear plant is not only not intolerable but rarely as harmful as a large industrial accident is beginning to seep into the thinking of some nuclear policy makers. But the reaction I’m getting from these people is: we have lied to the public for so long, we can’t change now. They will never believe us; and we will lose what little trust we still have.

They have a point. It is not going to be easy. Not only will we be up against 75 years of our own lies, but the retraction will be vehemently opposed by the neo-malthusian left, and far more importantly by a large portion of the nuclear complex. This includes not only the bureaucracies whose raison d’etre is hyped fear of radiation; but the incumbent industry which has spent billions in climbing over nearly insurmountable barriers to entry. They will vigorously defend their hard won regulatory moat. But the alternative is continued stagnation.

The about face will have to come from outside the nuclear bubble. The Trump administration with its distrust of and lack of dependence on the apparat offers us a rare opportunity for such an outsider attack. The place to start is with the lowest hanging fruit; and that’s the nuclear waste omission.

We have told the public that spent fuel is radioactive for millions of years. This is not a lie, but something just as bad, a misleading omission. What we did not tell them is that the penetrating radiation is effectively gone in a few hundred years. After that you would have to swallow the spent fuel, for it do you any harm. This would require eating rocks.

The argument is simple and irrefutable. Spent nuclear fuel emits three kinds of radiation: alpha, beta, and gamma, Figure 1. Only gamma is strongly penetrating. For practical purposes, the photon (gamma) emitters have decayed away in 500 years, Figure 2. After that, the spent fuel is just another poison. As usual, Ted Rockwell said it best:

America has many real problems. Nuclear waste is not one of them. The real waste problem is the money being spent on silly ideas like million-year isolation vaults. A simple, fenced-off area to store the glass logs would do nicely, with perhaps an OSHA sign reading: do not eat the glass.[Ted Rockwell, 1996]

There is no counter-argument. They can’t hide behind playing statistical games with ambivalent, near-background dose rate profiles. Are they going to deny that the waste emits three different forms of radiation? Are they going to claim that the gamma is not effectively gone in 500 years?

The way to bring this to the front of the public forum is for Trump to sign an EO stopping all funding of deep geological disposal and saying why. In this case, we won’t have to retract a lie; just providing more information. But a lot of people will be asking themselves, what else have these bastards not been telling us?

Allow that to sink in for a couple of months, and then issue the EO replacing LNT with SNT. This will be tougher since we are both recanting and making a quantitative argument. But most people have no idea what LNT stands for. They’ve only know they’ve been told that radiation is very dangerous, even tiny amounts. They don’t realize they have also been told that a large dose received all at once is no more harmful than the same dose spread evenly over years. So we tell them. Say what??

SNT takes away the the standard defense of LNT which is not a quantitative argument, but the statement that you can’t prove there is a threshold. a claim that resonates with the public since it’s true. Instead SNT puts the focus on LNT’s denial of our DNA repair system. LNT says we don’t have a DNA repair system. SNT says we do. Somebody’s wrong. SNT puts the defenders of LNT in the untenable position of denying well established science. And this argument resonates. Everybody can understand the aspirin argument. Everybody can understand the blood donation argument.

The EO need not spell out the transformative changes in policy that this change in harm model implies. That comes later. The EO only says we are going from a model that claims we don’t have a DNA repair system to one that claims we do. Properly drafted the EO will be unassailable. And the days of the Two Lies will be numbered.