First Nuclear critics, almost invariably are coming from a position of very limited understanding of nuclear power. It is a testimony to the unreliability of nuclear critics that they do not understand the difference between Soviet RBMK type reactors and Western LWRs. Thus we have repeated over and over the inaccurate statement that American reactors could have a Chernobyl type accident. No matter how often the difference is pointed out to them, nuclear critics continue to make the same error. Thus nuclear critics fail to identify their own errors, and feel no responsibility for avoiding them. This tendency is so general in the anti-nuclear ranks that any one who identifies with the position is suspect.
I have yet to encounter a nuclear opponent who was well informed about nuclear safety. Nuclear critics are not familiar with the most nuclear safety basic concepts like defense in depth, negative coefficient of reactivity, passive safety, inherent safety. Nuclear critics are indeed for the most part ignorant of the fact that there are different types of reactors, and that the safety features of different types of reactors are different. When confronted with their lack of information nuclear critics like Harvey Wasserman, fall back on cognitive errors to make their case. Wasserman argues that people were killed by the Three Mile Island Accident. Well they did not die instantly, but something bad happened to them during the accident. They died because of the bad thing that happened to them. Now we know that the three mile Island radiation instruments did not show There were not exposed to a lethal dose of radiation, but they were exposed to a small dose that killed that anyway. Well we think they were exposed to lethal doses of radiation because they died, and we know that they died from radiation exposures because they must have been exposed to radiation, and they died. Other reports claim that the instruments at three mile island show that radiation levels were too low to kill anybody, but we know that must be wrong, because people were exposed to radiation and they died, so radiation must have killed them, and therefor radiation levels must have been high enough to kill people, even though no one knows how high the radiation levels were according to Harvey.
According to Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman, Harvey Wasserman is a genius and a courageous fighter against a government coverup of the Three Mile Island deaths. We know that there was a government coveruo, because people were exposed to radiation and they died and the government said that they did not die because of the radiation exposure, and besides Juan Gonzalez was nearly exposed to radiation and so nearly died, and Amy Goodman once had a tooth x-rayed and she nearly died from radiation, almost. And they all said that the media and the government were covering the deaths up, because they did not say that people were killed by Three Mile Island accident, because they were exposed to radiation and they died. And the courts are covering it up to, that is everyone who was not exposed to radiation and who did not die are covering it up. The people who were exposed to radiation and died are trying to tell the truth, but no one will let them.
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We have been deceived into believing that all radiation is bad because of policy reliance on the “linear no-threshold” theory, or LNT, which states that if large amounts of something cause death or sickness, fractional amounts of the same thing cause proportional amounts of death or sickness. If the LNT were applied to falling as it is to radiation, we might note that 100 percent of those falling onto concrete from 100 feet are killed, but only 50 percent of those falling from 50 feet die. With these data we would linearly extrapolate to say that 10 percent falling from 10 feet and one percent of those falling from one foot would die. Armed with this “linear no-threshold falling theory,” we could confidently assert that jumping rope should be banned on all school playgrounds since statistically anyone making 100 one-foot jumps would die.
Well, you see, it's this way:
If you freeze in the dark because you get your power from a wind turbine and the wind stops blowing, that is only mild death, and not so bad because it is natural.
If you die of lung disease due to particulates released from a coal-fired power plant, that is moderate death, but it could be worse.
If you die of anything after the smallest release of radiation from a nuclear plant, that is certainly severe death (since it is caused by man-made radiation concocted by evil people), and so nuclear power plants must be fought against by every means possible.
In 2000, according to an EU study, radioactive discharges from the non-nuclear industries were estimated to contribute more than 90% of the European population’s total exposure from discharges into the marine region covered by the Ospar (Oslo &Paris) Convention. Oil and gas operations contributed 35.3% and phosphates, 55.4%.
This compared with the contribution to the collective dose rate from discharges of 3.8% from British Nuclear Fuels plc’s (BNFL) Sellafield reprocessing complex, 1.7% from Cogema’s La Hague facilities, 3.3% from weapons fallout, 0.2% from Chernobyl fallout, and 0.1% from nuclear power stations.
From: NUCLEONICS WEEK -May 15, 2003
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