The Auto-Genocidal Tragedy of US Nuclear Power, Part 1

Based on the sales of Make Nuclear Cheap Again, I am convinced the choir is illiberate. They may be able to read; but they are not able to read books. It’s a common failing. My son and his wife are both high school teachers at an expensive private school. Their college degrees claim they are literate; but, if you go in their house, you will find a big stack of kid books for the three year old (which he devours) , and that’s it. Their own reading appears to be confined to screens of various sizes. So here is a presentation of the GKG thesis for the illiberate. If it looks a lot like a slide show, that’s because it is. The actual slide deck can be found at Auto-Genocidal Tragedy. To keep the size of the emails semi-manageable, I’ve serialized the deck into three episodes.

This story is a classic tragedy. A providential Nature bestows a nearly boundless blessing on the human race in the form of a source of electricity, which is hundred thousand times more dense than any of her other offerings. This source uses little of the planet’s precious resources. It takes up almost no land. It produces almost no pollution. It emits almost no CO2. It produces a minuscule amount of waste. It is reliable and dispatchable. But in a fit of fear and ignorance, humanity swallows a well-meaning lie from the scientists it trusts, and rejects this gift, dooming the species to poverty and eventual extinction.

It’s an apocalyptic tragedy. We begin in the Garden of Eden, western South Carolina.

This is the 2.5 gigawatt Oconee plant in South Carolina. These three reactors were built for just over 350 million dollars between 1967 and 1974. That is $1141 per kilowatt in 2024 dollars. They took about 6 years to build. Thanks to nuclear’s insane energy density, Oconee can produce reliable, on-demand, zero pollution, very low CO2 electricity at less than 3 cents/kWh in today’s money. Oconee’s average capacity factor over the last 5 years is 98.2%. These plants and their sisters have operated for over 60 years, harming exactly nobody from radiation. All three of these reactors have been licensed into the 2050’s. Oconee and its cooling pond Lake Kewauee has turned a depressed part of western South Carolina into a second home and tourist magnet.

When Oconee was built, nuclear power was in its infancy. Between 1975 and 2025, the real cost of nuclear should have dropped substantially. This is the 3.2 gigawatt Hinkley Point C plant in SW England. These two reactors will cost over 55 billion dollars, over 15 times the cost of Oconee in real terms. They will take 12 to 14 years to build. Hinkley Point C’s electricity will cost at least 12 cents/kWh at the plant gate. About three times the cost of coal.

This is an species-wide tragedy. Oconee style 3 cents/kWh power should have spread virally across the planet. The poor would have been immensely wealthier. Millions would not have had their lives shortened by fossil pollution. We would not only have a nearly all nuclear grid; but 3 cents/kWh power would have resulted in the electrification of a substantial portion of transportation and industrial processes. We would have been half-way to net zero. How did we manage to blow this providential opportunity?

Once we swallowed the Intolerable Harm Lie (see below), we opted for top down imposition of perfection. This was to be accomplished by elaborate paperwork based Quality Assurance programs. A key element of this program is the N-Stamp, which certifies that the vendor has implemented such a program. The paperwork requirements to obtain and maintain an N-stamp are so onerous and disruptive that few vendors choose to jump through all the hoops, leaving nuclear plant builders with few legal bidders.

Shaw Industries in Lake Charles was the holder of three of the prized N-stamps. Shaw was chosen to make the sub-modules for Vogtle 3 and 4. When the sub-modules got to the site, they were so far out of spec they could not be erected. They had to be scrapped or undergo extensive rework. But the paperwork was clean.

After WW2, the Democrats were strong supporters of nuclear power. Big government liberals such as Stuart Symington, Scoop Jackson, and Al Gore Sr. saw nuclear power as an opportunity to expand public owned power. Support for nuclear power was Plank 1 in JFK’s 1960 platform. However, the left wing of the party was passionately anti-bomb and in favor of stopping bomb testing. They were led by the Rockefeller Foundation, whose management felt personally responsible for the bomb due to their support for the Manhattan Project greats, and in particular Lawrence’s cyclotron which proved that uranium enrichment to bomb quality was possible.

An essential weapon of the anti-bomb forces was the LNT (Linear No Threshold) harm model. LNT is based on the assumption that radiation damage to our DNA cannot be repaired. The harm just keeps building up. Therefore the only thing that counts is the total dose. How slowly or rapidly that dose is incurred is irrelevant.

Under LNT, the opponents of bomb testing could accumulate the tiny dose rates from fallout over hemispherical populations and over decades, and claim that bomb testing was invisibly killing millions. The Rockefeller Foundation decided that LNT was the key to stopping bomb testing. Their problem was that radiologists who had observed radiation effects on humans for 50 years had determined that there was no detectable harm as long as the dose rate was less than 2 mSv/d. This was called the tolerance dose rate. 2 mSv/d was far, far above the tiny dose rates associated with fallout. So the Foundation turned to geneticists who had discovered that very large doses delivered over a short time caused mutations in fruit flies.

The Foundation put together a committee of fruit fly geneticists, most of whom they had funded, and to whom they promised more funding, in return for claiming that genetic harm was proportional to dose, ) regardless of how rapidly or slowly the dose is received. This was based on the assumption that gene damage could not be repaired.

The prestigious journal Science published a doctored version of their report with no peer review. The NYT immediately follow with a front page article proclaiming radiation a peril to mankind. It later turned out the committee had convincing evidence that contradicted LNT for fruit fly mutations which it chose to ignore. They also ignored strong evidence of repair in mice.

After the Science article was published, the results of Neel’s ten year study of 70,000 pregnancies of atom bomb survivors became public. There was no detectable effect on kids conceived after the bombs had been dropped. The genetic harm theory crashed and burned.

After the Neel Study had destroyed the theory of genetic radiation damage, Ed Lewis another fruit fly researcher came to the rescue. He claimed on the basis of his study of leukemia in the atom bomb survivors, that the real problem was radiation damage to our DNA leading to cancer. Further the response was linear in total dose just like the genetic theory..

The top table shows the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission’s study of bomb survivor leukemia. The response is highly non-linear with the people in Zone D showing a decrease in cancer relative to the Zone E control group. The bottom table shows Lewis’s analysis of essentially the same data. To hide the non-linearity, Lewis lumped Zone D into the control group. He knew what he was doing and felt compelled to say “the average [Zone D] dose is under 5 rem [50 mSv] and is thus so low that zone D can be treated as if it were a control zone”[Lewis, Science, 1957] In 1957, Science published this lie with a glowing review.

But if there is no difference between 0 dose and 50 mSv received in a short time, the response cannot be linear. Lewis’s enormously influential paper was not only deceitful, it was inconsistent.

We have compelling evidence that at least some of the geneticists on the RF committee were at least partially motivated by greed and the desire to fund their research. But Ed Lewis made no attempt to profit from his temporary fame. In fact, he shied away from talking about his “discovery”. For 45 years he was a much beloved professor at Caltech. Moreover, his lie was completely transparent. Anyone of several hundred scientists could have pointed it out. Scientists normally jump at the chance to point out somebody else’s mistake. None did.

The AEC had funded the Caspari fruit fly study that contradicted the Committee’s fruit fly claim. The AEC had funded the multi-million 1960 dollar ORNL mice study that clearly showed repair despite attempts to hide this result. The AEC had funded the multi-million 1960 dollar Neel Study. Even Lauriston Taylor waited until 1980 before denouncing LNT. He was about 25 years too late. Look at Taylor’s strange wording. You do not normally call a model a “use”. Taylor knew LNT had been a tool in the battle to control the bomb. I’m confident he included himself in that “immoral use”.

The reason why there was no push-back against LNT was fear of the bomb. Ed Lewis and his fellow scientists are the well-meaning villains in this tragedy.

TO BE CONTINUED