Nukes

Josh Gilder discusses America's fear of nuclear power. He points out that, when compared with other forms of energy, nuclear power in the US has been incredibly safe.

Last March, a tragic explosion in a Texas oil refinery killed 15 workers, though it hardly showed up as a blip on the national news, as fatalities associated with oil production and transportation happen with relative frequency. In comparison, at Three Mile Island in 1979 – the most serious accident in a U.S. commercial nuclear plant – the containment vessel operated as it was designed to and prevented any significant release of radioactivity into the surrounding environment. There were no appreciable adverse health effects to workers or the public.

Indeed, to get any fatalities among nuclear workers at all, you have to add in military nuclear facilities. All these fatalities might equal one refinery explosion. In addition, if we're going to look at health impact, for example, from radiation exposure, the fair comparison is with conditions like black lung in coal miners.

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Radiation is another thing the anti-nuke lobby has programmed us to be afraid of:

Part of our phobia stems from the idea – encouraged by the anti-nuclear lobby – that radiation is somehow alien and that exposure to any amount is an exceptional, and very possibly deadly, experience. In fact, we're exposed to radiation every day: cosmic radiation from the sun, radiation from the Earth itself – particularly radon gas – even from our own bodies, which provide about 10 percent of the typical American's annual radiation exposure of 360 millirem. To put this into perspective, if you're living next door to a nuclear power plant, you receive almost as much radiation – about one millirem – from your television as you do from the plant. The average American receives some 200 times as much from radon gas coming up from the ground, and if you move to a location with a lot of granite rock, like northeastern Washington state, you'll be exposed to about 1,700 times as much.

Indeed, our bodies contain enough radioactive material that, if it were not naturally occurring, we'd have to bury our dead in low-level radioactive waste dumps.

All in all, nuclear power is safer than the alternatives, and much safer than having no energy at all.