Teller and the Two Lies

Figure 1. Edward Teller before Congress

It is probably time to shut this substack down. I’m running out of things to say about nuclear power. This piece delves into esoterica that even I find uninteresting.

In 1959, the AEC and the nuclear power establishment made a momentous policy change. They abandoned the concept of a tolerance dose rate below which harm is undetectable, and adopted the Linear No Threshold hypothesis, which claims that harm is proportional to cumulative dose, regardless of how rapidly or how slowly that dose is received. In other words, radiation harm is unrepairable. It just builds up. The tolerance dose rate model assumes our bodies can repair radiation damage. As a result, harm does not build up as long as we stay below the tolerance dose rate, which up to 1950 was 2 mSv/d.

What's really perplexing about this foundational transformation is that it apparently was done with no discussion. There seems to be no official decision from the AEC. No meeting minutes. No dueling memos. The official history of the AEC, Mazuzan and Walker, 511 tedious pages covering the period 1946-1962, makes no mention of the decision.¹ The book makes no mention of LNT at all.

Okrent reports that at a 1959-04-16 of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, the committee was told that at a recent symposium members of the AEC Division of Biology and Medicine indicated that no threshold existed for biological damage from radiation. Okrent indicates the committee was surprised by this revelation. no threshold is incorrect and misleading code for LNT. That's all I can find. Shortly after that, LNT was established, unquestionable AEC policy.

Why did the AEC quietly embrace LNT? They had funded the Caspari fruit fly experiments which contradicted Muller's ``proportionate harm" claim.² The AEC knew Muller had lied in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. They had funded the 10 year long, 70,000 pregnancy Neel study, which showed no genetic damage to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki kids conceived after the bomb. They knew that LNT had crashed and burned genetically. The AEC funded the bomb survivor leukemia study. They knew the data showed a highly non-linear response. They knew that Lewis had lied in his highly influential Science paper. At the time there was no solid tumor cancer data. Why accept LNT?

And in a outfit whose only output is paper, why was this done with apparently no documentation. I do not know.

But there is another thread to this story. It revolves around Edward Teller. Teller, often called the Father of the H-bomb, was a very different person from his Dr. Strangelove caricature. He had a wide range of interests, an opinion on everything. He was a concert level pianist. He raised the global warming alarm long before it was cool; and he did it to a hostile audience at an API centennial meeting. He was not above hyperbole. He put his warning in terms that Greta Thunberg would applaud:³

It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered.[Teller to API Meeting, Nov 1959]

Teller called for educational reform and a world government. As a Hungarian Jew, he had experienced both Nazism and Communism; and he wanted no part of either. He was prepared to defend democracy with everything from H-bombs to tactical nuclear weapons. He was a self-proclaimed zealot on nuclear power safety, arguing that nuclear plants should be buried underground.

In June, 1947, before there was anything close to a power reactor, the AEC established a blue ribbon advisory group known as the Reactor Safeguards Committee. Edward Teller was made chairman, a position he held for 6 years. Teller invented or at least gave voice -- a very strong voice --- to the Intolerable Harm Lie.

We could not follow the usual method of trial and error. This method was an integral part of American industrial progress before the nuclear age, but in the nuclear age it presented intolerable risks. An error in the manufacture of an automobile, for instance, might kill one to ten people. An error in planning safety devices for an airplane might cost the lives of 150 people. But an error allowing the release of a reactor's load of radioactive particles in a strategic location could endanger the population of an entire city. In developing reactor safety, the trials had to be on paper because actual errors could be catastrophic.⁴[Emphasis mine]

For Teller like Fermi, Weinberg, Rickover and other early nuclear greats, the word ``intolerable" had a double meaning. It was not just the possible direct harm. They thought that any major release would kill nuclear power before it got started. In 1953, Teller warned that a single serious accident could be a ``psychological disaster" that would impede the advance of the peaceful atom.⁵ Whatever the motivation, we must not have a release. This was well before the AEC's embrace of LNT.

The AEC and the rest of the nuclear establishment had accepted the Intolerable Harm Lie a decade before 1959. It was not long before the Intolerable Harm Lie begat the Negligible Probability Lie. Here's the Brookhaven Report (aka WASH740) in March of 1957.

More than two score leading experts in the sciences and engineering specialties participated in this study. We are happy to report that the experts all agree that the chances that major accidents might occur are exceedingly small.⁶[page vii]

Estimations so expressed of the probability of reactor accidents having major effects on the public ranged from a chance of one in 100,000 to one in a billion for each large reactor.[ibid]

Purposely or not, the Brookhaven authors confused the probability of a release at a particular reactor in a particular year with the probability of a release from a fleet of many reactors in say 50 years. The former can be quite small; and at the same time, the latter can be close to certainty. This misleading conflation has been followed religiously by the nuclear power establishment ever since.

Both the Intolerable Harm Lie and the Negligible Probability Lie were established AEC doctrine well before 1959. In 1959, the AEC must have thought LNT changed nothing. The AEC already believed a major release was intolerable. And since we have made the probability of such a release negligible, what difference did it make what radiation harm model was used? So why make a fuss over LNT?

However, both Lies are lies. The probability of the next major release is 1.00. It is only a question of when. When that happens, the radiation harm to the public will range from undetectable to far, far less than the harm from fossil fuels. About as far from intolerable as you can get. But using a harm model that denies our ability to repair radiation damage inflates that harm on paper by many orders of magnitude. And that imaginary inflation has planet-wide consequences.

1. Mazuzan, G. and Walker, J., Controlling the Atom: 1946-1962, University of California Press, 1984.

2. For readers unfamiliar with this history, check out Chapter 4 in the book Why Nuclear Power has been a Flop which you can download from gordianknotbook.com.

3. Since Teller’s warning, atmospheric CO2 has gone from 318 to 420 ppm, an increase of about 30%. Sea level has risen about 22 cm (9 inches).

4. Teller, E. and Brown, A., The Legacy of Hiroshima, Doubleday, 1962. Page 104.

5. Weart, S. The Rise of Nuclear Fear, Harvard University Press, 1988, Page 163.

6. Brookhaven National Lab, Theoretical Possibilities and Consequences of Major Accidents in Large Nuclear Power Plants, WASH-740, March, 1957