Nuclear fall in: Why I'm becoming a pro-nuke nut (SciAm) [View All]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=split-decisionor-nuclear-fall-in-wh-2010-08-16">Nuclear fall in: Why I'm becoming a pro-nuke nut
John Horgan: Cross-Check

My belated education in nuclear energy continues. I just read Power to Save the World: The Truth about Nuclear Energy by Gwyneth Cravens, a petite, energetic novelist and journalist. Cravens contacted me after seeing my chat with Rod Adams, a nuclear-trained Naval officer, on Bloggingheads.tv last May (which I followed up with a post). I recently met Cravens during a tour of the Indian Point nuclear power plant in New York State, which she arranged. I'm feeling a lot better about living near Indian Point, less because of what I learned during my tour (although plant employees were quite informative) than because of Power to Save the World.

The 2007 book describes how Cravens morphed from a nuke-fearing greenie who in the 1980s opposed the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, where she lives, into a proponent who believes that we need nuclear power to save us from global warming and other adverse effects of fossil fuels. Cravens repeats the refrain that the risks of nuclear energy have been exaggerated; nuclear power, both civilian and military, hasn't killed a single person in the U.S. over the past half century. But she fleshes out these statements with surprising (to me) details.

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—Fifty plant and emergency workers died of acute radiation exposure in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the U.S.S.R., the worst nuclear accident in history. The explosion contaminated more than 200,000 square kilometers with radioactive fallout, but radiation in parts of this zone is now lower than in Finland and other regions of the world with naturally high radiation. The International Agency for Research on Cancer estimates that radiation releases from Chernobyl caused a slight increase in thyroid cancer but adds that "smoking will cause several thousand times more cancers in the same population." So far, there have been no excess deaths among the 200,000 "liquidators" who helped clean up the mess from Chernobyl compared with controls.

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I've always had a knee-jerk distrust of nuclear advocates, just as I have of right-wing Congressmen, psychiatric-drug shills and string theorists. But I trust Cravens and the experts she interviewed—including physicists, engineers and epidemiologists—over many years of reporting. If you're agonizing over whether to support nuclear energy, read Cravens's book and see if you find it as persuasive as I do. I also welcome (and expect) challenges to the assertions above.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=split-decisionor-nuclear-fall-in-wh-2010-08-16">Read the whole article at Scientific American Online.