We Pay a Stiff Premium for Nuclear Fear

The world remains transfixed by the high tech drama playing out at the Fukushima reactor complex in Japan. Talking heads may outnumber actual facts by a wide margin but rest assured, the insatiable appetite of the global media complex won't let the public's temperature cool down any faster than those spent fuel rods.

Will brave workers stuff the nuclear genie back in the bottle before the surrounding countryside is rendered uninhabitable? Was this accident avoidable, and do others await? Are the benefits of nuclear energy worth the risks? Will the nascent U.S. nuclear renaissance be snuffed out as our poll driven president ponders his next energy flip-flop? Most importantly, will the decisions that shape national energy policy be driven by science, reason and rational economics or superstition, fear, and political pandering?

Both advanced technologies and life's most mundane activities come with attendant risks and benefits. Every day we make decisions based on our perceptions of that tradeoff. For example, do you get an annual dental X-ray, take a seasonal flu shot, cross against the light, wear your seat belt, drive faster than the speed limit, go scuba diving, ride your bicycle in traffic, build a house on the beach, or enjoy that Big Mac, cocktail, or cigarette? These decisions can be rational or irrational but in either case we willingly pay the price of our choices.

Some risk-benefit decisions, by their public nature, have to be mediated through democratic institutions chartered with protecting the rights of individuals while balancing the impact on the broader community. What amount of risk is acceptable for third parties to inflict on fellow citizens? For example, is it OK to have planes fly over my house without my expressed permission? Is there some absolute standard of risk no one should be forced to endure or should third party risks be assessed in comparison to other risks citizens regularly assume? Regardless of the legislative answer to these questions, should the most risk-averse or ideologically motivated among us, acting rationally or otherwise, be granted de facto veto power over technological progress via costly and protracted litigation?

In the case of nuclear energy, superstition, fear, and partisan politics carried the day after the Three Mile Island accident, shutting down the U.S. nuclear power industry for three decades. This despite the fact that more people died in Ted Kennedy's car. We have all been paying a stiff fear premium ever since.

How many coal-related deaths from mining and air pollution could have been avoided over the past thirty years had we followed France's example and developed a modern nuclear industry? How many fewer civilian and battlefield casualties might there have been if we were less dependent on using our military to secure supplies of foreign oil? How much further along would we be cutting the production of greenhouse gasses that many believe contribute to global warming?

We will never know.

The magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami that brought the Fukushima nuclear plant to its knees significantly exceeded the design spec for that plant. In retrospect siting backup diesel generators below ground to protect them from airplane crashes, accidental or terrorist driven, proved to be a mistake given the height of the once-in-three-hundred-year tsunami relative to the size of the seawall meant to hold it back. Yes, that turned out to be a bad call. In retrospect the 15 passengers that recently died on I-95 when a bus flipped over taking people home from a night of gambling at the Mohegan Sun casino should have rented rooms and stayed over. Taking the red-eye bus was also a bad call. But in both cases what were the odds a priori?

Beyond the chances of a serious accident rational policy must take into account the consequences should an accident occur. In the worst of all possible cases if the Fukushima fuel rods burn scattering fallout wherever the wind blows, a handful of brave workers may die and the land surrounding the plant will be rendered uninhabitable for decades.

This is very bad. But how does this possible nightmare scenario compare to the absolute certainty that 40,000 people will die this year and every year in auto accidents in the US? Should we shut down our highways to save their lives? Or perhaps pass a law giving first time drunk drivers the death penalty, attacking the single largest cause of traffic fatalities?

For that matter, have we already forgotten the likely 10,000 people that were washed out to sea by the same tsunami that took out the power plant's backup generators? In response to this avoidable tragedy should governments in tsunami-prone geographies forbid all habitation within one mile of the sea?

Of course not. Yet the same culture that likes living by the ocean and accepts highway carnage as the price we pay for mobility lives in irrational fear of even the most miniscule exposure to radiation. It's as if the mystical power of the atom reduces us to gibbering primitives.

By all means let's learn from this and all past accidents to make sure nuclear power plants are as safe as we know how to build them. Let's insist on the highest construction standards and hold plant operators strictly accountable for any accidents. But let's not make the same hysterical mistake we made last time we sacrificed our energy future for the illusion of safety.