The Gordian Knot Choir

The Gordian Knot News has been accused of preaching to the choir. It is almost certainly true that most of our readers already believe that nuclear power has an important if not dominant role to play in addressing the Gordian Knot. This is indeed unfortunate. To make matters worse, this choir appears to be a most inattentive and unruly lot.

Preacher: Nuclear waste is at most a 600 year problem since the penetrating radiation is gone by then. Keep the used fuel in dry casks for at most 600 years, then extract U-238 and other valuable isotopes, land fill the rest.

Choir: The congregation does not know anything about alpha particles and photons and is too stupid to learn. Just tell them we will bury the used fuel for a zillion years and they will be happy. Sings "Deep disposal saves us all".

Preacher: LNT is nonsense. The easy way to show this is to focus on LNT's farcical claim that 1 gray absorbed in a few minutes is the same as 1 gray spread over a life time.

Choir: Ignore the time dimension. Focus only on acute doses. LNT claims there is no perfectly safe acute dose. We hold there is a threshold acute dose below which there is absolutely no damage. We can't tell you where that threshold is nor why that dose is the threshold. But since there is a threshold, LNT must be wrong. Sings "A Fuzzy Threshold is our Hope".

Preacher: The probability of the next release is 1.00. It's just a matter of when. On an all nuke planet, with 20,000 plants, it would not be long.

Choir: Ignores preacher. Continues to sing the Teeny Weeny Lie hymn. Lyrics include: Chernobyl does not apply to Western nuclear; new technologies make Fukushima impossible; the PRA's say the release rates are now less than one in a billion reactor- years. Refrain: we are smarter than Murphy.

Preacher: Nuclear power plant releases are both inevitable and tolerable. As long as reasonable buffer zones are provided, and kids are prevented from drinking I-131 contaminated milk, most releases will produce no detectable radiation harm to the public. See Three Mile Island, Windscale, Fukushima, even Chernobyl.

Choir: The congregation will never buy that. Every sizable release is a catastrophe in their minds. We’ve spent 70 years drilling that into them. No way we can change that and, if we did, they would not need our music. Chorus of Catastrophic Harm hymn.

Preacher: The key problem is not the sinful congregation. It's the corrupt church hierarchy. It's a regulatory system that is mandated to ignore nuclear's benefits. This regulatory system priced nuclear out of the market during a period in which nuclear enjoyed solid public support. It's an establishment that has learned to profit out of claiming that dose rates that are below background in parts of the planet are so dangerous that the faithful must be fleeced for tens of billions of dollars a year to ineffectively try to reduce those dose rates further. The only solution is to dump this establishment and regulate nuclear like we regulate high pressure steam and ocean transportation.

Choir: Where is your faith? The nuclear regulatory system is flawed, but it is fixable. Just needs a bit of reform. That will take some money. Perhaps another collection. Turning nuclear regulation over to the market, the underwriters, and independent certification societies is heresy. Launches into Faith of our Fathers.

Preacher: In this church, we will sing only traditional hymns devoted to the Gordian Knot and nuclear's role in its solution.

Choir backrow: rousing medley of profane political limericks.