Risk of meltdown

By R.M. | WASHINGTON, DC

YESTERDAY I was going to recommend William Saletan's piece in Slate on America's reaction to the situation at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The columnist pushes back hard against calls to freeze nuclear-power development in America. To some, though, the piece must now seem poorly timed—the situation in Japan has since grown more dire, as radiation levels at the plant have shot up, workers have been evacuated and people in the surrounding area have been told to stay inside. But I believe his point still holds, even if his description of the situation is no longer accurate.

Mr Saletan argues that America needs to learn the right lessons from the incident in Japan, consider the relative costs of nuclear energy, and not overreact to a specific crisis caused by two unusually horrific natural disasters.

If Japan, the United States, or Europe retreats from nuclear power in the face of the current panic, the most likely alternative energy source is fossil fuel. And by any measure, fossil fuel is more dangerous. The sole fatal nuclear power accident of the last 40 years, Chernobyl, directly killed 31 people. By comparison, Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute calculates that from 1969 to 2000, more than 20,000 people died in severe accidents in the oil supply chain. More than 15,000 people died in severe accidents in the coal supply chain—11,000 in China alone. The rate of direct fatalities per unit of energy production is 18 times worse for oil than it is for nuclear power.

Even if you count all the deaths plausibly related to Chernobyl—9,000 to 33,000 over a 70-year period—that number is dwarfed by the death rate from burning fossil fuels. The OECD's 2008 Environmental Outlook calculates that fine-particle outdoor air pollution caused nearly 1 million premature deaths in the year 2000, and 30 percent of this was energy-related. You'd need 500 Chernobyls to match that level of annual carnage. But outside Chernobyl, we've had zero fatal nuclear power accidents.

I've been trying to think of a good analogy for a nuclear meltdown. At first a plane crash or terrorist attack came to mind, because they are all rare, but have an outsized effect on public opinion. But this isn't quite fair to nuclear energy, because whereas plane crashes and terrorist attacks have been very likely to result in civilian deaths, nuclear meltdowns have not. Chernobyl is the obvious exception, but that plant didn't meet the safety standards of even the mid-1980s, and the accident there has been blamed on significant errors in operation. The other two major meltdowns at civilian nuclear plants—at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the Lucens reactor in Switzerland—resulted in zero fatalities and had no provable negative health effects. Plants have gotten much safer since those incidents. As Mr Saletan points out, according to one analysis, "plants being constructed by today's standards are 1,600 times safer than early nuclear plants, in terms of the predicted frequency of a large radiation leak."

The incident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant may change this history, but it shouldn't change our calculations about nuclear energy all that much. While we are likely to gain valuable insights for improving the safety of nuclear energy from Japan's experience, the main lesson seems to be that we should avoid building nuclear power plants in areas with considerable seismic activity. In America, that lesson obtains to only a small number of plants. For example, there are four reactors at two plants in California, in San Clemente and near San Luis Obispo. The nuclear plant in San Clemente is built to withstand a 7.0 earthquake, and apparently withstood a 7.2 quake last year. But that sounds less reassuring since Friday's 8.8 quake.

So far, America's politicians have reacted with admirable composure to the events in Japan. As David Weigel reports, "no one in Washington is abandoning support for nuclear power", including the president. Public statements have reflected a weighing of the potential costs of nuclear energy against the very real, but much less spectacular costs of its alternatives. That's a good thing. A great thing would be if these politicians also pushed for better alternatives.

(Photo credit: AFP)