HOW SAFE ARE WE?
Click on the chart, to see a larger version of it.
At the top you will see all the ways you can have an accident. Car crashes, Dam failures, airplane crashes, what have you. The fact they are at the top of the graph, means they happen often. The fact that their line extends to the right, means lots of people are getting hurt.
Now go down to the bottom, and see two lines at the lower left corner. The two are meteor strikes, and nuclear plant accidents. A nuclear plant meltdown is expected every 20,000 years of reactor operation. A big meltdown, that would involve public harm, is expected every ten billion years. That's once each 10,000,000,000 years. You are slightly more likely to be hit by a meteor.
(by the way, asteroid 2004 MN4 is approaching the earth, and is likely to hit on September 21, 2029. It is half a mile across, and may make the human race extinct when it hits.).....Original MN4 Article.....There is one chance in 233 that it will hit. There is one chance in 7,300,000 that Indian Point will have a meltdown. And while 2004 MN4 hurtles toward us, its doing nothing for us at all. Indian Point is running your air conditioners, and wide screen digital HDTV sets, as well as our air traffic control center computers.
Professor Bernard Cohen has compiled various dangers, by how many days of life expectancy they are taking off your life. He adds this up in days of life expectancy, which he calls LLE. Here are the numbers, which he compiled from general statistical tables-what insurance companies use.
LOSS OF LIFE EXPECTANCY (LLE) DUE TO VARIOUS RISKS
Activity or risk* ............ LLE (days)
Living in poverty ............ 3500
Being male (vs. female)............ 2800
Cigarettes (male) ............ 2300
Heart disease* ............ 2100
Being unmarried ............ 2000
Being black (vs. white) ............ 2000
Socioeconomic status low ............ 1500
Working as a coal miner ............ 1100
Cancer* ............ 980
30-lb overweight............ 900
Grade school dropout ............ 800
Sub-optimal medical care* ............ 550
Stroke*............ 520
15-lb overweight ............ 450
All accidents* ............ 400
Vietnam army service ............ 400
Living in Southeast (SC,MS,GA,LA,AL)............ 350
Mining construction (accidents only)............ 320
Alcohol* ............ 230
Motor vehicle accidents ............ 180
Pneumonia, influenza*............ 130
Drug abuse*............ 100
Suicide*............ 95
Homicide*............ 90
Air pollution*............ 80
Occupational accidents............ 74
AIDS*............ 70
Small cars (vs. midsize)............ 60
Married to smoker............ 50
Drowning*............ 40
Speed limit: 65 vs. 55 miles per hour*............ 40
Falls*............ 39
Poison + suffocation + asphyxiation*............ 37
Radon in homes*............ 35
Fire, burns*............ 27
Coffee: 2 cups/day............ 26
Radiation worker, age 18-65............ 25
Firearms*............ 11
Birth control pills............ 5
All electricity nuclear (UCS)*............ 1.5
Peanut butter (1 Tbsp./day)............ 1.1
Hurricanes, tornadoes*............ 1
Airline crashes*............ 1
Dam failures*............ 1
Living near nuclear plant............ 0.4
All electricity nuclear (NRC)*............ 0.04
*Asterisks indicate averages over total U.S. population; others refer to those exposed.
If we compare these risks, we see that having a full nuclear power program in this country would present the same added health risk (UCS estimates in brackets) as a regular smoker indulging in one extra cigarette every 15 years [every 3 months], or as an overweight person increasing her weight by 0.012 [0.8] ounces, or as in raising the U.S. highway speed limit from 55 miles per hour to 55.006 [55.4] miles per hour, and it is 2,000 [30] times less of a danger than switching from midsize to small cars. Note that these figures are not controversial, because I have given not only the estimates of Establishment scientists but also those of the leading nuclear power opposition group in this country, UCS, (Union of Concerned Scientists).
I have been presenting these risk comparisons at every opportunity for several years, but I get the impression that they are interpreted as the opinion of a nuclear advocate. Media reports have said "Dr. Cohen claims . . ." But there is no personal opinion involved here. Deriving these comparisons is simple and straightforward mathematics which no one can question. I have published them in scientific journals, and no scientist has objected to them. I have quoted them in debates with three different UCS leaders and they have never denied them. If anyone has any reason to believe that these comparisons are not valid, they have been awfully quiet about it.
When I started my investigations into the safety of nuclear energy in 1971, I had no preconceived notions and no "axes to grind." I was just trying to understand in my own way what the fuss was all about. Rather early in these efforts, I started to develop these risk comparisons. They convinced me that nuclear power is acceptably safe with lots of room to spare. If I am a nuclear advocate, it is because developing these comparisons has made me so.
To be certain that this all-important bottom line is not missed, let me review it. According to the best estimates of Establishment scientists, having a large nuclear power program in the United States would give the same risk to the average American as a regular smoker indulging in one extra cigarette every 15 years, as an overweight person increasing his or her weight by 0.012 ounces, or as raising the U.S. highway speed limit from 55 to 55.006 miles per hour, and it is 2,000 times less risky than switching from midsize to small cars. If you do not trust establishment scientists and prefer to accept the estimates of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the leading nuclear power opposition group in the United States and scientific advisor to Ralph Nader, then having all U.S. electricity nuclear would give the same risk as a regular smoker smoking one extra cigarette every 3 months, or of an overweight person increasing his weight by 0.8 of an ounce, or of raising the U.S. highway speed limit from 55 to 55.4 miles per hour, and it would still be 30 times less risky than switching from midsize to small cars.
POSTSCRIPT:
THEN WHY HAVE WE ALL HEARD SOMETHING ELSE?
In its early days, NRC contracted with Sandia lab to compute the danger of nuke plants to the public. At that time no computer program existed to do the computations, so Sandia used huge "dumbness margins" in making its assumptions. In those days----the days of the sliderule,... engineers relied on what was called a "safety margin". They couldn't really accurately compute how strong a building or a bridge was, so they figured it out, and then doubled the result, just to be sure. Then they doubled it again--just to be double sure. This resulted in a lot of fat, ugly, overbuilt bridges and buildings that will probably last a million years.
Sandia did the same thing.
In its CRAC2 report, it intentionally WAY overestimated how dangerous nuke plants might be. Its assumptions were----OK, lets assume the containment is TOTALLY gone, and the reactor vessel has disappeared somehow, and we have an earthquake, with a tornado...and that everybody ran away and left the plant untended, and turned off ALL the safety systems on their way out. How many people could get hurt?
Needless to say, they got some big numbers. Later on , NRC withdrew the report as obsolete, and superseded it with NUREG-1150, and instructed scientists to never use CRAC2 again, because modern computer programs could now realistically compute how dangerous (or safe) the place was, without making all the wild negative assumptions that CRAC2 had used to substitute safety margins for real knowledge. (incidentally, the engineering world went through this change also, which is why buildings are now more beautiful).
So guess what Riverkeeper's Edwin Lyman did?
To make Riverkeeper's anti nuke campaign seem credible, Lyman intentionally went back in time, added all of Sandia's unrealistic negative safety margins back in by resurrecting the now-obsolete CRAC2 math. He had to know it was a fantasy calculation, because NRC has warnings all over its website to that effect, but in full knowledge he was perpetrating a huge scientific lie, and a huge backward step in methodology, he issued it in 2004, as if it were a modern calculation, and Riverkeeper's purple fantasy campaign was built on all of its maliciously, intentionally incompetent negative assumptions.
It was like your doctor telling you he was going to operate on your appendix using the operating room tools and methods used in the Civil War. CRAC2 was not a lie when it was first done, because it was the best workup available at that time. However, to dust off a civil-war hacksaw, and start hacking into a hospital patient with it in 2004 would certainly result in a long jail term, for the malicious quack doctor who attempted it.
So it is with Lyman.
The man deserves jail time, for what he has done to the public. It was NOT a difference in opinion, and it was NOT an honest whistle-blowing scientist, catching NRC in some lie. It was a devious delinquent propaganda hack, purposely returning to discredited math, and presenting it as truth. I feel very, very sorry for Lyman, and what is left of his "scientific" non-career.
With Lyman's criminal bullshit swept aside, all the lurid scenes of NYC being Hiroshima on the Hudson can be seen as total fantasies. Actually Dr. Herschel Specter, a man who helped invent the math, has calculated for us, that in that once in 10,000,000,000 year meltdown, 3 people could die, and you could evacuate by walking 2 miles away at normal walking speed. The EPA says to just go in your cellar. Outside of 2 miles away, there is absolutely no danger.
But don't wait for it to happen.
You'll be waiting 10,000,000,000 years.
