Nuclear energy: Why science education matters

(Hat tip: safedrinkingwater.com news)

San Diego County has decided it won't be able to build a desalination plant at the San Onofre nuclear power plant. It's probably just as well that there's no room, and no buildable site for the plant, because county residents would have objected most vigorously.

But San Diego County Water Authority officials said the study didn't do any testing on what might be the biggest obstacle facing the potential project: public opinion, which could be a problem even though engineers say water produced by the plant would never come near radioactive nuclear generators.

Desalination is a power-intensive process. You need a lot of energy to separate salt from water by any process around today. Some future technology may be able to do the job for us, but right now, expect to spend something like $4.50 per hundred cubic feet (one billing unit) of water, just to remove salt.

With so much energy needed to desalinate water, it would be useful to build a plant right next to a generator to minimize transmission losses. You have to pump water uphill to anyone not on the beach, but you'll have to do that anyway. The best source of salty water happens to be the beach.

But the public doesn't want "radioactive water" that's been processed at, or anywhere near, a nuclear plant.

Here's where a good science education would help. I know something about nuclear reactors. I know something about radiation. I know radiation inside the reactor won't affect anything outside the containment and its associated shielding.

I especially know radiation won't follow electricity through wires to wherever it's used, nor will it jump to the water in a desalination plant that happens to be on the same property.

I also know enough about desalination to know there's no need to run water through a reactor or irradiate it in order to remove salt.

We, unfortunately, are perfectly happy with a level of science education that leaves the population knowing next to nothing about very important things, including radiation. When people don't know how anything will behave, they'll imagine things, and what they imagine is often worse than the reality.

Imagine people were as ignorant about how cars behave. Imagine they had no idea how cars really behave, and were terrified that moving cars might suddenly skid out of control into a crowded sidewalk. Suppose a large fraction of the population thought parked cars might start up of their own accord and speed, uncontrolled, into a crowd. Would people even want to take the chance?

Indeed, while this sounds idiotic when applied to cars, it seems to be the way a lot of people think about guns. People look at guns as if they all had hair triggers, and would go off if dropped, or even if jostled, or perhaps even due to the random collision of air molecules against the trigger. And there are enough people with these beliefs in the population to apply serious pressure to regulate guns accordingly.

Sure, knowledge can be dangerous, but not as dangerous as ignorance.