THE DEADLY DANGER OF METEORS

The debate about nuclear safety is a very uneven affair. There is surely no scientist or engineer who would burden his conscience with unsound recommendations endangering human lives, and the antinuclear crusaders, fertile as their imaginations may be, have yet to come up with a plausible motive why the AEC or any other group should wish to engage in pointless sadism.

On the other hand, the opponents of nuclear power are not constrained by any such responsibility, for they believe, quite mistakenly, that they are saving lives and not endangering them. They therefore feel free to use the most outrageous distortions to oppose nuclear power, conveniently overlooking the thousands of deaths in coal mining, transportation, and pollution associated with fossil-burning plants.

And there is more unevenness. If the nuclear power industry were bound by the standards deemed acceptable in automobile traffic, it would be allowed to slaughter 55,000 people a year. It is also deemed acceptable that 20,000 Americans are killed annually by accidental falls, 1500 by blows from falling objects, and 1000 by accidental electrocution. But none have ever been killed by meteors; and that is also the standard of the nuclear power industry.

The just completed 3-year study on the accident risks in nuclear power plants by a group of 60 scientists headed bv MIT professor N.C. Rasmussen. has come up with some hard numbers of the probabilities involved. These numbers confirm what every open-minded expert knew all along: that energy conversion, by its very nature, can never be absolutely safe, but that nuclear power is far and away the safest of all options. But it can confidently be predicted that the study will make no impression on the anti-nuclear fanatics.

The chart below shows some of the study's results, showing the probabilities of a major nuclear accident philosophically small: at least 10,000 times less likely than the other man-made accidents. The number of persons killed in a potential nuclear accident is comparable to the numbers of persons killed in a potential fall of a meteor.

Now in all the history of mankind there have been only two known cases of meteors large enough to have even the potential of killing a significant number of people if they had fallen on a city or a ship. But since population concentrations are so rare on the entire area of the globe, it is not surprising that they did not do that - one fell in the Arizona desert, the other in the Siberian wilderness.

None of which will impress the nuclear critics. They have already charged that the Rasmussen study takes no account of sabotage. Quite so, for the study deals with the presently used type of nuclear reactor, and what the critics invariably and conveniently do not mention is that the concentration of fissionable material in their fuel rods is so low that it is impossible to make a bomb from them directly. It is possible to breed plutonium from them, but the process is so slow, complicated and dangerous that little need be feared from a saboteur who would choose this form of sabotage. As for other forms, the Rasmussen study considers the coincident occurrence of so many adversities that no saboteur could "achieve" them all at will.