A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.
Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.
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Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.
But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.
Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.
I also sympathize with a lot of the concerns of the greens, and I strongly believe that we must move to a more sustainable form of energy over the next several decades. To accomplish this lofty goal, we cannot ignore human nature. As Mark Lynas explains in The God Species, human beings evolved to depend fully on external energy sources for protection, comfort and food. Just as uranium serves a distinct purpose within the earth, so do trees, oil and coal. The latter three we burn prodigiously, upsetting the earth's carbon cycle and polluting the planet. These substances play a distinct role in the environment by capturing carbon and toxins beneath the earth. We've clearly upset it.
We can see how toxic petrocarbons are without even getting into global warming. Burning coal, for example, spreads mercury and other toxins all throughout the biosphere. We find fish and other animals all throughout the world who have been deformed and poisoned by the mercury released by coal. If you don't care much about fish, look at China. The country is facing an epidemic of asthma and other respiratory diseases due mostly to its massive reliance on coal.
Given the damage that our energy reliance has already caused, we have little choice. We must accept our flaws as a species and find ways to make our energy reliance less dangerous. While images of atomic explosions would lead you to conclude otherwise, civilian nuclear technology is surprisingly safe. The UN commissioned report on the effects of Chernobyl, the largest nuclear disaster ever, lists the death toll around 9000. Other nuclear events have much lower casualty rates. According to the WHO, not a single person has died from radiation exposure since the Fukushima event, and at most, two people died because of Three-Mile Island. More people die of respiratory diseases related to pollution each week in China than the total number of people that died from these three major accidents combined. That's only one country, which goes to show the massive scale of the problem that we already face.
We need to adopt cleaner technologies, and we need to do it with a clear understanding of the risks. We have been willing to accept terrible costs for energy dependence because of people's inborn laziness to settle for the status quo. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for disaster. People are already contributing to the greatest mass extinction event since the end of the dinosaurs, and our demands from the planet will only grow over the next century.
Yes, nuclear fallout is scary. This is a positive, since it makes us even more wary of the consequences of screwing up. The nuclear power industry has not had a single accident in the 30 years since Three Mile Island. This is a clear sign of diligence and the relatively strong grasp of a still imperfect technology. But even better nuclear technologies are coming very soon, and this includes the ability to recycle spent fuel from older reactors. Like it or not, these technologies will eventually be the key towards ending our dependence on carbon and finding a more healthy and sustainable relationship with our planet.
