Elise the Ethical

Is nuclear power safe? No; there is no such thing as perfectly safe energy. But it is far and away the safest form of large-scale energy conversion. Yet the same laws that predict a laughably small probability of nuclear disaster also predict that if one waits long enough, such a disaster will one day happen. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in 5 million years; the only thing we know is that in a very long series of such disasters, the average interval between them would be of the order of millions of years.

On the other hand, the lives saved by nuclear power are saved today and every day. This is dutifully ignored by the anti-nuclear crusaders; a century ago, they would presumably have outlawed anesthetics because an overdose could kill (and has, in fact, killed on occasions).

But consider the alternative. What about safety? Explosion of a large oil storage tank of the type used by many utilities would cause loss of life comparable to a nuclear disaster, but the former is far more probable. The death rate in coal mining due to accidents and disease is, per net electric power produced, no less than 50 (fifty!) times higher than in uranium mining. Of course, the Sierra Club is interested in fish, not in people, and miners dying of black lung will help to achieve the goals of the Zero Population Growth organizations.

The environment, then: A nuclear plant produces less than l% of the radioactivity that every member of the Environmental Defense Fund gets from Mother Nature and medical equipment anyway; and its stacks produce no air pollution - it has no stacks. Wastes? If the entire US electric capacity were nuclear, the volume of nuclear wastes per US consumer per year would amount to that of an aspirin tablet. For coal-fired plants, it does (not would) amount to a whopping 320 lbs of wastes per person, of which some 90% is in the ash pile; the rest is spewed into the air. Conservation? If all of the present US power were supplied by nuclear breeders, the volume of uranium ore mined annually would occupy a space of 200 by 200 feet by length 75 feet. For coal, the annual mined volume is 200 by 200 feet by length 75 miles! Obviously, the Friends of the Earth are no friends of the earth.

Destruction of the environment by the environmentalists is, of course, old hat; but here is a new one on us: ethics. Plutonium, to us, is something that can give people light and warmth. To Elise Gerard, writing on "Ecology and Ethics," it is "named for Pluto, the god of hell," which is about the most truthful statement in a hair-raising string of misquotations, halftruths and gossip used as facts. Her hysterical bilge would be of no interest except for the repeated references to ethics; the article, in fact, was published by a suborganization of the American Ethical Union.

Elise the Ethical beats the alarm about the alleged risks of people who might die through nuclear accidents, nuclear theft or inept waste disposal, but she is not worried about the people who are dying due to lack of nuclear power. In 1964, the deaths attributable to the use of coal and oil through accidents, cancer, lung disease, etc. amounted to 19,000, and the carnage continues. These are not people who might die; they are people who are dying now. And their lives can be saved: In the total consumption, every single percentage point of fossils replaced by nuclear power now saves about 200 lives a year.

Consciously or not, Elise the Ethical opposes that trend.

How ethical can you get?