Vol. 22, No. 11 - Access to Energy Newsletter

The war between technophobes and technologists over nuclear power has been waged primarily upon the battleground of risk assessment. Visions of cities vaporizing beneath mushroom clouds as nuclear power plants run amok are, of course, promulgated by those whose perversions include the politics of fear, but the bottom line in the underlying intellectual debate is evaluation of risk.

Death is not the only parameter determining the quantity and quality of human life, but, being important and easily measured, it is usually central in this debate. Petr Beckmann, in The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear, discussed the number of deaths per quantity of electricity produced for the various sorts of power generation. Nuclear power has by far the safest record. The risk of a death per kilowatt-hour is lowest for nuclear power.

The antinukes claim that a single nuclear accident could change this record because literally millions of deaths are possible in such an accident. In order to make this claim, they close their eyes to physics, since nuclear explosion of a nuclear power plant of present design is physically impossible. Chernobyl adds a different sort of claim - that hundreds of thousands of people could die of cancer and other radiation-induced illnesses even if there were no nuclear explosion. That only a few people died in this accident and that the claims of harm to hundreds of thousands by radiation at Chernobyl are completely mythical has not stopped the propagandists.

Even without deaths to show, however, the technophobes fall back upon something they call the "precautionary principle.'' This "principle'' is seeing wide service in the enviro debate. Global warming is a failing hypothesis, but what if it were true? Nuclear power plants will not kill millions of people, but what if they did? The "precautionists'' want to shut down coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear generated electricity just in case - just as a precaution.

Doomsday scenarios and the precautionary principle are being packaged with the politics of fear and sold as "science'' to the technologically illiterate. This is a very profitable business.

Can this fearmongering be successfully fought by correct and rigorous evaluation of risk? Superficially, the answer is yes. We just need good data on death, injury, and other harm that results from the various technological activities. Where accidents are rare, as with nuclear power, scientists have reasonable means for creating estimated data of sufficient reliability. Based on the past record and correcting for expected improvements in safety measures, we then simply calculate the consequences of future action.

There is, however, one major confounding difficulty. This difficulty is elegantly discussed in the book Risk by John Adams published in 1995 by UCL Press Limited, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. People respond to past accidents and to perceived risks by changing their behavior and thereby confound the calculation of actual risk.

Could it be, for example, that the Russians felt that it was acceptable to build the Chernobyl reactors without containment buildings because nuclear power has such a great safety record? Is the virtually perfect safety record of American nuclear power plants partly a result of the false perceptions of risk generated by the antinuke propagandists? Not wishing to give credit to our enemies, we recoil from answering, "yes.'' This really doesn't matter. Nuclear power has proved itself as a wonderful and wonderfully safe technology.

Adams gives some thought-provoking examples. Seat belt experiments lead to the expected result that fewer people would be killed in auto accidents if they were wearing seat belts. Careful people have always worn them. When, however, seat belts were made mandatory in Great Britain, traffic deaths did not drop. According to the data given in Risk, driver deaths dropped slightly, while pedestrian, bicyclist, and rear seat deaths rose. Drivers responded to the law by driving faster and more recklessly because they felt safer when strapped in their seat belts. Pedestrians did not have additional protection.

Seat belts do, of course, increase efficiency on the highway. They apparently allow greater speeds without an increase in death rate. Transfer of part of the death rate to nondrivers is, however, unjust.

Between 1922 and 1986, the number of motor vehicles in Great Britain increased by a factor of 25, yet the number of children under the age of 15 killed by motor vehicles decreased from 736 per year to 358. Child road deaths per vehicle fell by 98%. This was not a result of safer roads - it was a result of more dangerous roads. Between 1971 and 1990, the percentage of children traveling alone to school dropped from 80% to 9%. As the perceived and actual risk went up, deaths decreased because people altered their behavior.

Motorcyclists are obviously afforded protection by helmets, but, according to Adam's data, helmet laws have not reduced deaths. Mo-torcyclists just drive more recklessly with this extra protection. Even drunk driving laws are tricky, because they give people the false impression that, with blood alcohol below a fixed level, they are safe drivers. In fact, there is great variation in individual alcohol tolerance, and there are few if any people whose driving is not adversely affected by drinking alcohol.

Now, however, the stakes in the game of adaptive human response to risk have been raised to a much higher level. Global social engineers and power-seekers are trying to alter the behavior of the whole human race by means of perceived risk of ozone depletion and global warming. This is an attempt that may determine the freedom or slavery of billions of people for many centuries.

The data show, as we have continually documented in Access to Energy, that these perceived risks are artificial and without experimental basis. Each year that passes brings more evidence that these are nonproblems. The elitists are desperate to get controls on CFCs and greenhouse gases into place before more data accumulates.

Once the controls are in place, they can say that the data shows that we have been saved from these calamities by the controls - that adaptive human response mandated by oppressive world government saved the planet and much of the human race.

If this scam succeeds - if the statists are able to convince the world that they saved it from environmental disaster - then free enterprise and freedom will have suffered a major defeat. As Petr Beckmann would say, "Please don't let it happen!''

The August 4-6 meeting here features, among the 18 speakers, three on the subject of terrorist and military use of biological weapons. Conrad Chester, Michael Baker, and Col. Ernest Takafuji, Commander of USAMRIID and of U. S. defenses against biological weapons, have not been invited to provide light entertainment.

For a recent review of this threat see International Defense Review of Jane's Defense Magazines 28, March 1995 pp 33-42 articles by H. Porteus, C. Beal, and L. Ness.

Conrad Chester has estimated that a beginning graduate student in biochemistry with two helpers, about $200,000 to spend for off-the-shelf equipment and supplies, access to an ordinary science library, and about two years to work could launch a biological attack that would kill most of the people in New York City.

Chester has, however, overestimated the expense. This past week I attended another of the laboratory auctions where we obtain equipment and supplies at prices a non-tax-financed laboratory can afford. This one was the liquidation of a plant genetics company. A mere $20,000 in cash and a U-Haul truck to collect the equipment would have provided all that Conrad Chester's three terrorists would need. In fact, this one auction could have equipped three independent terrorist teams. Moreover, a well-trained biochemist working by himself with this highly automated equipment could probably do the job in one year rather than two.

So what do we do to counter this threat? Learning from the anti-nukes who oppose breeder reactors, we could ban the breeding of bacteria. This will be a little hard to enforce as was illustrated by the odd smell I detected near our kitchen window last night. (The children had disposed of some excess milk by - I really couldn't believe it either -tossing a few pails of milk out of the window.) We could try to get everyone with bacteria-growing equipment to sign a bacteria non-proliferation treaty and agreement to on-site inspection. The children might be willing to sign - but, following the North Korean example, they might hold out for a milking machine and a new barn or at least a few pigs to utilize the extra milk.

We could slap secrecy systems on the science libraries for all documents 100 years old or newer. Everything will need to be classified because no one will be prescient enough to know which knowledge will never be useful for terrorist activities. Not all countries will cooperate, but America could set an example by doing the right thing. Then, with our science and engineering knowledge frozen in red tape, we could sink into an Ehrlichesque dark age, while other countries thrived.

The fact is that the standard efforts to prevent the use of technology for the mass killing of people really do not work. The advance of knowledge cannot be stopped; the possession of technology cannot be prevented; and all attempts to monopolize knowledge and dangerous technologies are doomed to ultimate failure. Moreover, secrecy inhibits public knowledge and diminishes the development and deployment of realistic protective technology.

These approaches only seem to have partially worked for nuclear technology because nuclear technology has been so expensive and complex that the economic barriers to entry have aided non-proliferation efforts. So far, we have just been very lucky.

Ordinary explosives do relatively small amounts of damage; chemical poisons are bulky and difficult to use; nuclear technology has been very costly; and biological technology - by far the most cost-effective and low-tech method for mass murder - has been ignored. This luck will not hold forever.

What then do we do - sign up with the Luddites of "outcome based education'' in the hope that further "advances'' in education will reduce everybody to non-reading, non-thinking vegetables incapable of independent action? This will not work. We will just be replaced by civilizations that do teach their children to read.

There are, I believe, some realistic actions that our civilization can take to truly diminish these dangers.

First, the public should be so sufficiently informed about these dangers, especially in the case of biological and nuclear weapons, that it becomes politically feasible to build a realistic civilian defense system for the United States. Offensive technology can be largely neutralized by defensive technology, and we must have a national mindset consistent with deployment of that technology. A well-built civil defense system can protect people from nuclear, biological, and chemical technology whether the danger is from accident, terrorism, or war and can protect them from most natural disasters at the same time. It can never protect them completely, but it can prevent most deaths.

Second, we must adopt a realistic view of human nature that is unclouded by fear, over-pessimism, or over-optimism. Most people, whether they control governments and armies or control only themselves, are fundamentally decent human beings. This decency can be relied upon more when they act as individuals rather than as members of groups, but it nevertheless assures that most people will never use technology to deliberately harm others. The problem is that, as technology advances, one or a few individuals can do an increasing amount of damage.

Although many wonderful things may lie ahead in the coming millennia, we now have no means with which to change the basic fact of nature that the human population contains some very dangerous individuals and that there is no certain way to restrict the activities of these few or even to identify them without destroying our own freedom.

We can, however, maintain a situation wherein they do the least damage possible. This situation is not necessarily optimized by efforts to ration potentially dangerous items.

Gun control efforts, for example, are pushed along further each time a lone nut kills a few people. A well-armed population, of course, is best prepared to end these incidents quickly by incapacitating the gunman on the spot, but there is yet another argument. I personally prefer my lone gunmen using firearms rather than vans full of explosives in their exploits. They do a lot less damage this way.

If they work their way up to vans of explosives anyway, I prefer those vans to be filled with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil as opposed to some of the really dangerous items they could be carrying. We accept about 100 violent highway deaths per day in the United States, which is about the same as the likely toll from an exploding van. Each death is a terrible tragedy, but a distorted preoccupation with rare events might raise the risk of something much more spectacular.

Imagine turning on the news to learn that several million Ameri-cans, completely unprotected by civil defense, are dying from a biological terrorist attack. There are hundreds of thousands of people with sufficient training and resources to perpetrate this disaster. A few of those people are likely to be far enough out on the tails of the distributions of mental stability and decency to be capable of this action. It is singularly imprudent to deprive these people of guns and fertilizer.

Aside from the damage that they do to human freedom and the great advances in the human condition that they impede, red herrings like mythical ozone holes and melting icebergs misinform the public about the real potential dangers from technology. Well-meaning people dutifully sort their garbage and send money to the enviro organizations in the mistaken hope that they are helping to battle the truly great dangers and risks that face mankind as a result of technological advance. Not only are most of these efforts counterproductive, they divert attention from real dangers.

Edward Teller and Lowell Wood (both also speakers at the August meeting) share a significant part of the credit for moving America into a position to deploy a working antimissile defense. They know that technological advance means that sometime in the future - no one knows when - there may be at least one missile with one nuclear war-head traveling toward one American city. They want the people of that city to have at least a fighting chance. This is also part of the reason that Edward Teller has supported civil defense for half a century.

The great human experiment with freedom, science, and technology that is being carried out during our lifetimes has already partially transformed the world in ways that are in keeping with the highest aspirations of the human spirit. Many of the articles in Access to Energy are intended to weaken attacks upon this great experiment from those who claim that it is too dangerous to continue - especially those attacks that are based upon false claims and untruths.

It would be wrong, however, to say that there are no substantial dangers associated with the advance of science, technology, and human freedom. These dangers are not inherent in technology itself; they are inherent in the negative aspects of human nature. These dangers, moreover, can be so successfully mitigated by protective technology and sensible laws that the risk - reward ratio of further human advance is overwhelmingly positive.

Unfortunately, at the present time, very little attention is being paid to real risks and real risk reduction. This must change. If it does not, then somewhere in our future there may well be a disaster of such enormous magnitude that it, in combination with public ignorance, might divert our civilization into an era of tyranny.

Operation and maintenance costs for U. S. nuclear power plants rose sharply in the 1980s largely as a result of increased staffing to meet safety requirements for security, fire protection, health physics, and other precautions. Increased utilization of capacity (72.5% in 1993) and good management have now brought these cost increases under control as reported in "Cutting O&M costs: a US progress report'' published in ATOM 436 pp 32-36.

Figure 1 shows operation and maintenance costs in 1993 dollars per kilowatt hour of capacity on the left and cents per kilowatt hour generated on the right. The right curve looks better because of increased utilization. Total cost of nuclear power is above 1.6 cents/kilowatt hour, since this does not include capital costs of plant construction.

With anti-technologists chanting about vast numbers of cancer deaths as a result of the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, it may seem politically imprudent to admit to any cancer problem at all. This is not, however, consistent with the truth - which is still solidly on the side of nuclear power. Unfortunately, the accident did spread significant amounts of Iodine 131 in the Ukraine and, equally unfortunately, Ukrainian authorities did not protect children against this by the simple civil defense expedient of iodine supplements.

Iodine accumulates in the thyroid. Supplemental oral iodine taken as described, for example, in Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson Kearny (available from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, PO Box 1279, Cave Junction, OR 97523 for $12.50) saturates the thyroid with iodine and, thereby, inhibits uptake of radioactive iodine.

"Thyroid cancer in the Ukraine'' by I. A. Liktarev, et al, in Nature 375 p 365 (1995), reports that there were 418 thyroid cancers found in children (ages 0-18 at the time of the accident in 1986) in the Ukraine between 1986 and 1993.

The incidence rate for thyroid cancer in children appears to have risen from about 0.7 per million in 1986 to about 4 per million in 1993. This is suspect, however, because reporting has been sharply improved to study the effects of the accident.

Geographical distribution is, however, very suggestive of Cher-nobyl-induced cancer. The authors find a 20-fold gradient in cancer incidence that corresponds very well with distance (adjusted by known contamination patterns) from Chernobyl. Based on this gradient and other data given in this paper, I estimate (subtracting the incidence in zones 6 and 7 from that in zones 1-5) that about 70 extra cases of thyroid cancer have arisen in children as a result of the accident. Incidence falls off very rapidly with distance, so most of the Ukraine is unaffected and no effect at all would be expected outside the Soviet area.

In the 1960s, our need for lab automation required that we link our analytical machinery to the main computer center at Stanford. Computers were maintenance nightmares in those days, so our lab was continually disrupted by outages. As soon as DEC PDP-11 series minicomputers became available, we bought several and vowed never to hook two activities to each other's error rates again. Micro computers have changed the world since then, but we have clung to our prejudices bolstered now only by the minor threat of virus contamination. Our numerous computers communicate only by tape and disk transfer, but now we are finally giving up this idiosyncrasy almost entirely.

Beginning the first week in July, Access to Energy and the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine will operate a World Wide Web site from the laboratory here. Domain names will be althouse.com and oism.org. E-mail addresses will be announced next month. Althouse, the name of a creek near our laboratory, is the business name under which Access to Energy is administered.

Technological advance should continually lower the cost of commodities and services and thereby continually increase the quality of human life. Since cost is a measure of scarcity, the cost of commodities is also a good indicator with which to answer enviro doomsayers who predict dire shortages.

Unfortunately, our government is committed to taxation by dilution of the money supply, which inflates prices and masks decreased costs. U. S. government-caused inflation also robs widows and orphans of their savings - savings that should buy more rather than less over time as a result of technologically accomplished decreased costs.

In Chapter 4 of The True State of the Planet (available from The Free Press, 866 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022 for $12) entitled "The Coming Age of Abundance,'' Stephen Moore documents the sharp decrease in real commodity prices over this century. Figure 2, reproduced from this chapter, shows an average of aluminum, antimony, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, silver, platinum, tin, tungsten, zinc, coal, and oil costs priced in hourly wages to remove inflation.

We show here only this one graph. Moore's chapter is filled with tables and graphs showing the pervasive and ongoing decrease in the real price of almost all individual commodities.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, page 1, June 5, 1995 reports that Paul 'Population Bomb' Ehrlich and Stephen 'Global Warming' Schneider are negotiating another bet on this with Julian L. Simon. Ehrlich lost his first bet with Simon because of the trend in Figure 2. If Vegas makes odds on this bet, we suggest you stay with the winner.

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force! Like fire, it is a troublesome servant and a fearful master.''

- George Washington

As quoted by The New American, June 12, 1995, p 26.

I shall never forget an encounter I had with a black professor at the University of California at San Diego while I was teaching freshman chemistry at that University. This man's black power, Third World message was so different from my own outlook that we might as well have been from different planets - until the subject of the discussion turned to my chemistry course in which I made no effort to tailor standards to minority groups regardless of their backgrounds. His words were: "Your course is tough. I know, I'm tutoring two students in your class. But you are exactly right. Our worst enemies are these white liberals who teach watered-down courses to our people and turn them into permanent second-class citizens.''

Very good reading is the article "The Attack Against Phonics - It could be the most racist act in decades'' by C. M. Richardson in Destiny Magazine, April 1995 pp 51-53. (Destiny, written primarily for black Americans, is available from P.O. Box 1000, Selma, OR 97538.) This article describes the linkages between "The Great American Reading Machine'' which feeds at the trough of tax-financed socialized education and the adoption of "whole language'' and "look-say'' reading (see Stark Raving Mad below) which are enormously profitable for everyone in the Machine except the students. Especially vulnerable are students from environments where alternative help to overcome the burden of whole language is not available.

Science News 147, pp 362-363 June 10, 1995, "Dusting the Climate for Fingerprints - Has greenhouse warming arrived? Will we ever know?'' by R. Monastersy describes efforts by the enviro industry to save its tax-financed research grants from the thermometer. Monas-tersy describes the new concept of greenhouse "fingerprinting'' that is beginning to spring up in numerous scientific journals.

This fingerprinting involves constructing weighted averages of various climate variables in an effort to find unusual weather behavior that can be blamed on global warming. Stephen H. Schneider is quoted as telling Science News "I am beating very hard on the community to drop forever from our vocabulary that pernicious term 'unambiguous detection'.'' Perhaps Schneider has learned from his fellow Stanford doomsayer, Paul Ehrlich, that the public gets a little surly when one's predictions are first unprovable and then demonstrably wrong.

Thermometers, you see, are devastating these people - space-age thermometers on satellites that measure the actual temperature of the earth. See, for example, Access to Energy, 22-9, May 1995, p 3. The earth just is not warming up. In fact, it has fortunately been in a slight cooling fluctuation during the past 15 years. Otherwise, the global warming enviros might already be rationing exhaled human breath.

"Fingerprints'' have the advantage that one can play with the weighting constants until an effect in the politically correct direction is created. Moreover, public reports can then be laced with pretty graphs of undefined parameters which the reader is assured have been designed by experts. It is hard to fool even a whole language student with a graph of falling temperature and a claim that it is getting warmer.

The book Whole Language: What's the Difference by C. Edel-sky, B. Altwerger, and B. Flores p. 19 as quoted in The Blumenfeld Education Letter, P. O. Box 45161, Boise, ID 83711, states:

"From a whole language perspective, reading (and language use in general) is a process of generating hypotheses in a meaning-making transaction in a sociohistorical context. As a transactional process (Rosenblatt 1978; Goodman 1984), reading is not a matter of 'getting the meaning' from text, as if that meaning were in the text waiting to be decoded by the reader. Rather, is a matter of readers using the cues print provide and the knowledge they bring with them (of language subsystems, of the world) to construct a unique interpretation. Moreover, that interpretation is situated: readers' creations (not retrievals) of meaning with the text vary, depending on their purposes for reading and the expectations of others in the reading event. This view of reading implies that there is no single 'correct' meaning for a given text, only plausible meanings.'' Whole language is now popular in socialized American schools. Imagine a student trying to learn mathematics, science, engineering, or even history by creating his own interpretation under the assumption that the author has not written a specific meaning into the text.
Thad Cochran, Republican Senator from Mississippi, writes in the April 4, 1995 Washington Times that "The American Farm Bureau Federation estimates that U.S. agricultural interests spend between $18 billion and $20 billion per year complying with federal regulations. To put things in perspective, that figure is roughly 35 percent of total net farm income in the United States. If this estimate is correct, and if anything it is probably low, farmers spend $2 complying with government mandated regulations for every $1 they receive in price supports.''

"The Media's War on Essential Chemicals: Targeting Chlorine'' by Kenneth Smith with text also by Gordon W. Gribble in Priorities 6 pp 6-11 (1994) published by The American Council on Science and Health, 1995 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10023-5860. Also, ask ACSH to send their monograph "Is There a Cancer Epidemic in the United States?'' Age-adjusted cancer rates have been stable to slightly declining during the past 50 years except lung cancer from cigarette smoking. Most environmental chlorine compounds originate from natural sources and man-made chlorine compounds are not causing the non-existent cancer epidemic.
The Health Physics Society's Newsletter 23 , No. 6, June 1995 pp 2-16 contains 22 letters in a special issue devoted to radiation dose-response models. As numerous articles in Access to Energy have chronicled, the linear, no-threshold model is dead. With it, unnoticed so far by the popular media, has died the basis for fear of low-level radiation. Sometimes, in this sort of shift, a generation of professionals must also die before the truth is accepted. These 22 letters give indication that this will not be true in this case for health physicists.
"When batterer turns murderer'' by I. J. Good in Nature 375 p 541 (1995). First, Good quotes A. M. Dershowitz, O. J. Simpson defense team advisor, to the effect that only about a tenth of 1% of batterers actually murder their wives. Then Good provides the data and calculations to show that this statistic also means that, if a woman is both battered by her husband and also murdered, the probability that the husband is the murderer is about 50%.
Reader's Digest for July 1995 includes "The Recycling Myth,'' pp 105-109 and "Can You Trust Those Polls?'' pp 49-54. The second humorous story on page 85 is great, too. The enviros can ignore the truth when published in science journals and professional newsletters, but they cannot ignore 100 million readers of the Reader's Digest.

"Environmental Implications of Electric Cars'' by L. B. Lave, C. T. Hendrickson, and F. C. McMichael in Science 268 pp 993-995 (1995) and "Pull the Plug'' by E. Peters in The Free Market 13 No. 7, July 1995 pp 3 & 8 published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, AL 36849-5301, telephone (334) 844-2500. Evaluated on the basis of amount of lead released into the air, cost, performance, and general environmental pollution, electric cars are still inferior to internal combustion engines. We anticipate that this will change. When it does, the free market will tell us - not government bureaucrats.