Talking to People about Nuclear Power, Stage 1

From time to time, I get asked what's the best way to talk to people about nuclear power? We are not dealing here with cultural idealogues or misanthropic Malthusians. We are talking about well-adjusted, sensible human beings who have been fed the Two Lies. As a result, they have long held, honest concerns about nuclear power; but for one reason or another are willing to discuss those concerns. In many cases, we are talking about your friends.

Here's my approach. The props are a dosimeter and the attached figures. Start with a question: what is your main concern about nuclear power?

The possible answers can be divided into stages:

Stage 1. Safety

Stage 2. Economics

Stage 3. Proliferation

This post will address only the safety concerns. There is no point in worrying about economics if nuclear safety is unacceptable. A later post will speak to the economic issues. Unless you are sitting in the Princeton faculty club, you will probably never get a Stage 3 response; but we will eventually get to that as well. You can download the Stage 1 slide deck from Stage 1 Figures. You will have to log in, go to the Downloads page, and select Slides for Talking Nuclear, Stage 1.

The possible Stage 1 responses are a) nuclear waste, and b) a meltdown and a big release of radiation.

Nuclear Waste

If his answer to your question is ``nuclear waste'', you're in luck. This is the easy one. Explain the distinction between penetrating (photons) and non-penetrating (alpha particles) radiation, Figure 1. Stress how dangerous the spent fuel is when it is pulled out of the reactor because of the photons. Then point out the penetrating radiation is essentially gone in 600 years, Figure 2. After that the spent fuel is just another poison, You would have to swallow it for it to you any damage. This turns a zillion year problem into a several hundred year problem. Make sure he understands the vertical axis is logarithmic. The photon dose rate at year 600 is about three millionths of what it was at year 1.

Only then talk about the volumes involved. If all your electricity for a year came from nuclear, the volume of your waste would be 4 used fuel pellets, Figure 3. Storing the stuff for 600 years is feasible. We would use dry casks. Show some pictures of dry cask pads and cask hugging, Figures 4 and 5. If the US were to generate all its electricity from nuclear, a 600 year decay time means she would have to devote at most 21 square miles --- about the size of Manhattan --- to dry cask storage. This is based on the Histore system, Figure 6. which needs one acre to store 580 tons of used fuel. After that the material is Low Level Waste, which can be diluted and landfilled.

If and only if you have successfully made it this far, then you can bring up the value of the U-238 and some of the other isotopes, mainly to make the points that

1) Deep geologic disposal is not only unnecessary, but stupid.

2) The material is too valuable to leave in dry casks for 600 years.

Figure 1. Penetrating and Non-penetrating Radiation.

Figure 2. Dose Rate at Fuel Element Surface

Figure 3. Your yearly nuclear waste would be 4 of these pellets.

Figure 4. Connecticut Yankee Dry Cask Storage Facility.

Figure 5. Cask Hugging at Palo Verdes. Credit: Paris-Ortiz-Wines

Figure 6. Histore Pad. 580 tons of used fuel per acre.

Meltdown and Release

If her response to the major concern question is ``Chernobyl and Fukushima'', your job is tougher. You must counter the nuclear establishment's Catastrophic Harm Lie. I usually start with: do you know how much radiation you are getting right now? When she says no, tell her. Far better have a dosimeter handy and measure the ambient dose rate. Depending on where you are, the dosimeter will read something like 0.1 microSv/h or 0.0024 mSv/d. Point out at altitude on a commercial flight her dose rate will be 20 times higher, roughly 0.05 mSv/d.

There are areas with still higher dose rates. Compare the Guarapari Beach rate, Figure 7, with whatever is on your dosimeter. Show her Figure 8. Point out that if the US Capitol were a nuclear power plant it would be shut down. Make sure she notices the Kerala bar. In all these high dose rate regions, the cancer rates are the same or lower than in low dose rate areas. In Kerala, 70,000 people were studied for 15 years. High dose rate villagers had a slightly lower cancer incidence than low dose rate, Figure 9.

How is this possible? Each of us are being blasted with millions of particles per minute which have enough energy to damage our DNA. Fortunately, our bodies know how to repair radiation damage. Without this ability, we would not be here. Spend a little time discussing how radiation damages our DNA and how it is repaired, Figure 10. At the cellular level, the repair period is a few hours. At the organism level, the repair period is a few days. Try to be precise in your language. Harm is not damage. Harm is unrepaired damage. I always screw this up.

Then get into the situations where people have been subject to dose rates that are far above background. Work your way up the dose rate ladder in Table 1, starting from the bottom. The Keralans, the Taipei apartment dwellers, the dial painters, Albert Stevens, Eben Byers, Chernobyl milk kids, Chernobyl first responders, Louis Slotin and Harry Daghlian, and finally the atom bomb survivors. The conclusion is we get out of the green and start to see increased cancer only when the dose rates get above 20 mSv per day. At that point, our repair systems begin to get overwhelmed and start making mistakes.

But it's hard for any member of the public to get even 1 mSv/d in a nuclear power plant release. Show her Table 2 which summarizes the four major non-military releases we've had so far. (Actually Windscale was military but instructive.) One point to make from this table is the massive differences in scale. Chernobyl was very roughly a factor of a million larger than Three Mile Island.

Work through Table 3. Three Mile Island was a non-event as far as radiation harm was concerned. But NRC lies and blunders turned it into a fiasco.

Windscale was 1000 times larger than TMI, but interestingly there was no disruption. The plant leveled with the locals and the locals trusted the plant managers in part because they had played an active role in the community. There's a lesson here,

Few if any member of the public at Fukushima would have received more than 1 mSv/day, even if there had been no evacuation. A 2021 UN report states

No adverse health effects among Fukushima residents have been documented that are directly related to radiation exposure from the FDNPS accident. The Committee's revised estimates of dose are such that future radiation-associated health effects are unlikely to be discernible.

Few members of the public at Chernobyl received a whole body dose rate of much more than 1 mSv/day. In 2019, 30 years after the explosion, Harvard Medical School did a study of Ukrainian cancer mortality rates. The mortality rates in the districts adjacent to Chernobyl were statistically the same as the districts farthest from the plant.

The kids near Chernobyl that drank badly contaminated milk are the sole tragic exception to the no public harm result. If children drink I-131 contaminated milk in the first few weeks after a release, the dose rates to the thyroid can be well above 100 mSv/d. Almost all the ingested iodine ends up in the tiny (<10 grams) thyroid gland. This multiplies dose rates by a factor of 1000. The only good news is I-131 has a half-life of 8 days. It is effectively gone in two months.

At Chernobyl, we saw a dramatic jump in child thyroid cancer, resulting in some 4000 extra cases. Thyroid cancer is treatable and has a low fatality rate. But we could eventually see something like a 100 premature deaths as a result of the release. Tragically, this loss was preventable. All that was required was to take the contaminated milk off the market for a couple of months, as was successfully done at Fukushima.

Bottom line: even a Chernobyl-like release is roughly equivalent to a bad airplane crash in terms of loss of life due to radiation. We tolerate an occasional airplane crash in return for the benefits of air travel. The benefits of reliable, non-intermittent, pollution free, very low CO2 electricity are immeasurably greater than the benefits of air travel. Among those benefits are the lives that would have been taken by the alternative power source. In many situations, nuclear will save far more lives than it takes. Ask her: is an occasional release tolerable in return for those benefits? Make sure she knows it's an honest question, not a rhetorical one. It's her decision.

Always say dose rate, never dose. When she says, but UCS/Greenpeace/my history teacher says Chernobyl killed 10,000/50,000/100,000 people, you point out those hypothetical, unobserved, numbers assume we have no repair systems. Therefore, it does not make any difference if the dose is received in a few minutes or evenly over a life time. You can call this nonsense. Point out all the people in the bottom half of Table 1 who received cumulative doses far larger than the dose that killed people in the top half with no detectable effect.

Do not preach hormesis. That will take the discussion down a counter-productive rabbit hole. You're telling me a radioactive release is good for me? You've lost her.

Do not claim there is a threshold below which there is absolutely zero harm. She will jump all over that with:

1) where exactly is that threshold?

2) what's so special about that number that there is zero harm below it and positive harm above it?

3) can you prove there is zero harm below your threshold?

You've lost her.

If she's clever enough to ask you: does this mean there's a dose or dose rate below which there is absolutely zero harm? You say no. We can't say that. What we can say is there are dose rates below which there is no detectable harm. A risk that you cannot detect is hardly a risk at all.

Above all, do not repeat the Negligible Probability Lie by claiming that new technology X will prevent releases. She's probably smart enough to know that preventing all releases is impossible. She'll probably ask you what happens if the Russians drop a precision guided, bunker buster on Zaporizhzhia. Worst of all, you are implying that any release is intolerable. You are promulgating the Catastrophic Harm Lie. You've lost her for good.

Take a Break

If all has gone well, your skeptic will have a bunch of new questions, most importantly, isn't nuclear power too expensive, and does it not take too long? This is a good time to take a break. Maybe have a beer or a glass of wine. You've gotten through Stage 1. The next stage is not going to be this easy.

Figure 7. Dose Rate, 30 microSv/h, 0.72 mSv/day, Guarapari, Brazil. Credit: Robert Stone

Figure 8. Background Dose Rates.

Figure 9. Cancer Incidence, Kerala

Figure 10. DNA Damage. For NPP release purposes, mGy = mSv.

Table 1. High dose rate populations.

Table 2. The Big 4 Releases.

Table 3 Big 4 Impacts. Buffer Zones are imperative. Buffer Zone at Fukushima was 1+km, at Chernobyl, 3 km.