Climate-Change Fight Dies (Again) in Zaporizhzhia

In a little-noticed fact, coal plants are estimated to emit 5,000 tons of uranium and 15,000 tons of thorium a year, about 100 times the amount of radiation that escapes into the environment from the world’s 440 nuclear reactors. If coal plants were made to follow the same rules as nuclear plants or even hospital radiation labs, we’d have no coal plants. The rules deliberately exaggerate the health risks from low-level radiation while requiring certain facilities (but not others) to spare no expense in reducing exposures to the lowest “reasonably achievable” level.

One consequence, after the contained meltdown of three Japanese reactors in 2011 caused by a large earthquake and tsunami, no deaths from radiation exposure were recorded or expected, and yet a minimum of 32 deaths and as many as 2,000 were attributed to the forced evacuation of 150,000 people against an exposure risk equivalent to half a CT scan. Even more absurd, the underlying risk standard that produced this result not only was known to lack scientific backing, it increasingly appears to have been the product of scientific fraud in the 1940s.

But it’s not facetious to say political agencies aren’t going to be caught relaxing a nuclear safety standard as long the first thing Americans think of is the three-eyed fish from “The Simpsons.” “The problem with nuclear is actually quite simple,” the U.S.-based Energy Intelligence Group acutely puts it. “People are afraid of it and this is justified by nearly everything they have heard about it since they were born.”

All this might, but won’t, shed light on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine. The reactors are well contained and shielded, the Russians want the power, not to create a nuclear cloud that might blow back over Russia.

Vladimir Putin

wants to play on Europe’s nuclear fears.

Put all that aside. In a not far-fetched worst case, all six reactors could melt down and one or more containments could fail; nearby spent fuel could catch fire and burn.

The disaster could be as bad as Chernobyl, a power plant so badly designed that it produced an uncontained meltdown without any outside assistance.

But it’s also worth noting that the thousands of cancer deaths expected from Chernobyl based on low-level radiation risk haven’t materialized, including lung cancer and leukemia deaths.

The recognized death toll consists of 60 (mostly firefighters) from acute radiation exposure, plus a likely 50 or so from preventable and usually curable thyroid cancer among millions who were exposed as children to radioactive iodine-131. (Against a repeat, Ukrainian officials have been handing out preventative iodine tablets, but nothing similar has been reported in Russia or Belarus.)

A disaster of historic proportions is already engulfing Ukraine, thanks to the war. An uncontained, Chernobyl-like meltdown would be a catastrophe piled on catastrophe. It would remind us, as nobody needed reminding, that nuclear power plants are sensitive, high-risk industrial installations. But then the U.S. government tells us that U.S. power plants, in normal peacetime operation, kill nearly 3,000 people annually with fine-particle pollution. The estimate is contentious but almost certainly more die in coal-mining accidents every year, especially in China, than the proven deaths from all nuclear accidents combined.

In all likelihood, nuclear power will grow in coming decades but not enough to assuage climate fears. Understandably, in the event of an accident, if thousands of neighbors know they might be forcibly displaced against the risk of a CT scan, the number of plants that can surmount local opposition will be limited.

Events seem to have conspired against us. If there were any chance of reducing long-term CO2 emissions, nuclear was the key. But a risk standard that once seemed exemplary, erring on the side of caution even if lacking in scientific rigor, has proved itself to be a source of risk. I hear a few saying “follow the science” but it will take many more to turn around Western politics on nuclear power.