The Final Intolerable

The word intolerable has had three quite different meanings in the context of nuclear power.

Intolerable 1. Intolerable because a release would kill nuclear power.

Very early on, the founding fathers believed that a sizable release was intolerable because it would kill nuclear power before it got started. Edward Teller put it this way:

We recognized that a single accident in an industrial nuclear reactor could wreck hopes for the peaceful atom.\cite{teller-1979}[p 160]

Rickover knew that his many opponents in the Navy would jump on any release to squash his program. He became fanatical in his efforts to prevent a release and he had direct access to taxpayer money to implement his quality assurance efforts. When he was given control of civilian nuclear, that apparat was transferred to commercial nuclear, but without the same need to gets subs into the water, Rockover's primary goal. The commercial regulators' primary goal is preventing a release, ``without regard to economic and social costs" to quote an NRC chairman. In fact, the establishment uses a stronger phrase. They call nuclear safety our overriding priority.

Table 1. Four largest non-bomb releases in the West

It turned out the founders were wrong. Early nuclear power experienced a number of releases including:

1) Both the Borax-1 reactor in 1954 and Borax-2 in 1955 were purposely tested to destruction, resulting in significant releases.

2) The Windscale Fire in 1957, which resulted in the third largest release ever in the Free World, a release which was roughly 3000 times as large as Three Mile Island, Table 1. There were no evacuations voluntary or involuntary. The only public disruption was the confiscation and disposal of I-131 contaminated milk for about two months. The option of converting the milk to cheese and allowing the iodine to decay before putting it on the market was discussed. It was rejected on PR grounds. This was a mistake. Could have been a good teaching moment.

3) The 1961 SL1 screw up which killed 3 people.

None of these early releases had a measurable impact on the progress of nuclear power.¹ Nevertheless, I believe this definition of intolerable had a very important impact on nuclear history. In 1959, the AEC quietly adopted LNT. Uncharacteristically, this was done with apparently little discussion and, as far as I can tell, nil documentation. LNT was contradicted by a large fruit fly study, a big genetic study on 70,000 bomb survivors pregnancies, and the bomb survivor leukemia data. All three of these studies had been funded by the AEC. The AEC knew that LNT was nonsense.

This should have been a very big decision, with dueling memos, impassioned speeches, and mountains of paperwork. There was none of the above. My assumption is that the thinking was, if a release is already intolerable on project survival grounds, what difference does it make if it's also intolerable on other grounds. LNT changes nothing. We are already doing everything we can to prevent a release.

Intolerable 2. Intolerable because a release would kill tens of thousands of people.

In the 1950's, the Rockefeller Foundation and other opponents of atom bomb testing massively hyped the dangers of radiation, resulting in a new meaning for intolerable. Any sizable release would kill so many people and leave such vast areas uninhabitable that it cannot be allowed to happen. This definition of intolerable depended on the Linear No Threshold (LNT) radiation harm model. LNT was devised by fruit fly geneticists who believed that damage to genes was unrepairable. So the only thing that counted was the total amount of radiation that was received. How rapidly or slowly the dose was incurred was irrelevant. This hypothesis was proposed by people who did not know DNA existed. They did not even know what a gene was, other than a theoretical construct that explained some experimental data.

We now know that genes are just short pieces of our DNA that encode specific bits of genetic information. We now know that our oxygen based metabolism damages our DNA at more than 25,000 times the rate of average background radiation. To survive this carnage, Nature had to provide us with a DNA repair system that can easily handle dose rates that are hundreds of times larger than background radiation. The result is that any radiation harm to the public associated with releases as large as Fukushima will be undetectable, even if there are no evacuations.²

Despite the fact that LNT contradicts well established, indisputable biology, despite the fact that LNT's predictions are off by many orders of magnitude when very large doses are spread over protracted periods, --- the radium dial painters being the most dramatic example --- LNT remains the basis of our radiation regulation. It is defended fiercely by a nuclear establishment which depends on public fear of radiation to extract taxpayer money to fail to solve problems that either don't exist or have obvious, cheap solutions.

Their main tactic is to focus only on situations where the impact of radiation is so small it is statistically impossible to distinguish one radiation harm model from another, and then claim there is no reason for changing the status quo. They are strongly abetted by industry incumbents who have invested billions and whole careers creating a regulatory moat, by navigating a paperwork maze produced by massively exaggerated fear of radiation. They need that moat to defend their inefficiencies and shoddy quality. This definition of intolerable is still very much with us.

Intolerable 3. Intolerable because a release would result in hundreds of billions of dollars in tort claims.

The Three Mile Island meltdown forced the nuclear utilities to recognize a third meaning of intolerable. American nuclear plants are required to carry 500 million dollars in third party liability insurance. But under the American tort system, all sorts of indirect effects are compensatable, even the most tenuous.

After the Deepwater Horizon blow out, a bar in Key West was awarded $600,000 in lost business. The spill never came within 700 miles of Key West. If the bar actually lost some business (doubtful), it was due to the lurid, vastly exaggerated coverage. Despite its impressive name, Florida City is a tiny strip of gas stations and cheap motels on US 1 south of Miami. It is 9 miles from the nearest water, Biscayne Bay. Florida City got $1.01 million after Deepwater Horizon. The claim was for lost business because less people were passing through going to the Keys. BP's total bill for a big oil spill was over $65 billion. The only people that were physically harmed were the guys on the rig.

Three Mile Island, a trivial release for health purposes, generated $71 million in paid claims, half of which went to lawyers. According to Table 1, Fukushima was very roughly 200,000 times larger than TMI. (71 million times 200,000 would be 14 trillion dollars.) Japan has a far more disciplined tort system than the US. But last time I checked, the compensation for Fukushima was at $73 billion and counting. Ten years after the release, UNSCEAR could detect no radiation harm to the public, nor do they expect to detect any in the future.\cite{unscear-2021} If we have a Fukushima sized release in the US, we could easily see a trillion dollars in claims for a release that causes no detectable radiation harm to the public. Under Price-Anderson, the nuclear utilities would be on the hook for at least 14 billion dollars of those claims. For them, a release that causes no detectable harm to the public is intolerable on dollar grounds.

Takeaway

Intolerable(1) is no longer with us. If Chernobyl could not kill nuclear power, no release will.

Intolerable(2) is still being assiduously propagated by the nuclear power establishment for their own self-serving reasons. But intolerable(2) depends on LNT. Fortunately, we can easily be rid of LNT. LNT was not mandated by Congress. It was adopted administratively by the AEC/NRC and then the EPA. LNT can be expunged by an Executive Order. All it takes is someone convincing Trump to sign that EO.

The way things are going intolerable(3) might be the final intolerable. But it only takes one intolerable to make nuclear uneconomic. We must avoid intolerable(3). That means we must eschew the American tort system. The only way to do that is a firm, government mandated radiation exposure compensation plan based on each individual's dose rate profile. The UCert Manual describes what that system could look like in considerable detail. Implementing this plan will require Congressional action. In a lawyer dominated Congress, this won't be easy. But we can start. Ask your Congressman and his/her opponent(s) where they stand on this issue, and vote accordingly.

1. Even the much later and far, far larger Fukushima and Chernobyl releases did not kill nuclear, despite the fact that Chernobyl was just about the worst nuclear power plant release imaginable. One reason was the radiation harm to the public ranged from statistically undetectable at Fukushima to possibly several hundred, easily preventable thyroid cancer deaths at Chernobyl.

2. Two caveats:

1) This statement assumes adequate https://gordianknotbook.com/download/nuclear-plants-need-buffer-zones} {buffer zones. A large nuclear reactor should be at least 2 kilometers from the nearest permanent residence.

2) Kids must be prevented from drinking milk whose radioiodine level is above legal limits. The only reliably documented radiation harm to the public at Chernobyl was by this pathway. Iodine concentrates in the tiny thyroid gland multiplying dose rates to that organ by roughly a factor of 1000. Radioiodine effectively disappears in 10 weeks.