LETHAL FOSSILS

Fortunately, there is a way of weighing risks without involving personal opinions (other than that human lives are worth saving), and that is to compare the potential deaths in a nuclear accident to the deaths (potentia! and actual) due to other methods of generating electric power.

For example, the rupture of the dam of a hydroelectric plant is not only more probable than a major nuclear accident, but it would usually also cost far more lives. The risk (probability times cost) is thus larger even for a hydroelectric plant.

But that risk pales beside the risks connected with fossil-burning plants. One should interject here that unbeknownst to the witch doctors of the anti-nuclear crusade, coal-fired plants are radioactive, too (due to traces of radium and thorium in the coal). In fact, for the same energy produced, a coal-fired plant usually has higher emissions, and there are coal-fired plants that would violate NRC radiation standards for nuclear plants. However, this is an amusing sidelight rather than a real threat.

Potential major accidents due to fossil fuels are a greater risk than nuclear accidents; but this, too, is a minor consideration compared to the actual deaths caused by fossil-burning plants.

The hard figures are nowhere near as accurately known as in the case of radioactivity, for fossil-burning plants put all kinds of poisons into the air, and they are not the only ones to do so. Besides, they cause not only cancer, but also deaths by heart, lung and other diseases. There are so many variables involved that accurate analysis is very difficult, and the results found by various investigators differ by factors of 5 or more. But even the lowest estimates are very high. For example, recording the excess deaths after periods of heavy air pollution and comparing them to the total power consumed, R. Wilson of Harvard and W.J. Jones of MIT arrived at a figure of 3 excess deaths per billion kW-hours supplied by coal and oil fired plants (1965 data), which translates into no less than 50,000 US deaths per year (more than 100,000 deaths according to others), not potential deaths in hypothetical accidents, but 50,000 people who were buried or cremated in 1965, and many of whom might still be alive today if more electric power had been nuclear.

Moreover, this figure is derived by a method which includes only immediately observable excess deaths (most of them due to sulfur dioxide emissions); it does not include the excess cancers, which have a latency period of up to several decades.

But these are only the dead. If coal were substituted for nuclear power even at this early stage, there would be additional victims. For example, 2 million cases of chronic respiratory diseases per year; 16 million person-days of aggravated heartlung disease problems; 750 additional deaths among miners; 500 additional deaths among the public from transporting the excess coal. (Figures based on an analysis by Prof. B.L. Cohen, U. of Pittsburgh.)

You listening out there, terrorists in search of plutonium? There are easier ways of killing far more people. Like supporting the California Nuclear Initiative.