RISK ASSESSMENT BY SOCIAL NEEDS

Neil Orloff, director of the Center for Environmental Research at Cornell University, has recently suggested three reasons for the vast discrepancy between the hazards that arouse fear and those confirmed by scientific evidence (WSJ 12/3/84). Though he makes the point for chemical pollutants, they are obviously just as valid for radioactivity or, for that matter, any other perceived danger that can be blamed on technology, and I have slightly generalized (and shortened) his formulation:

1.) provides a simple explanation for dreaded diseases such as cancer and exonerates the victims from responsibility for their personal decisions (diet, alcohol, smoking); they can blame it all on a simple, unavoidable and unfair event;

2.) helps maintain people's image of the sanctity of nature, for many are upset by the discovery of thousands of chemically toxic, carcinogenic, and radioactive substances in nature;

3.) provides an outlet for a variety of anti-business attitudes, particularly for the resentment of the power and perceived indifference of large corporations.

I believe the third of these, using concern for the environment as a crusading horse against capitalism, to be the strongest (and often unconscious) motive.

Wishful risk assessment and denial is well illustrated when compared with a new study by Dr Herbert Inhaber, the Canadian scientist now working at Oak Ridge Natl. Lab who authored a well-known study comparing the risks of various energy sources, and whose work was attacked by the personal, meritless and irrelevant polemics of "science" manipulator John Holdren [AtE Nov 79, Jul 83; Holdren has since been paraded on Soviet radio and TV, together with his moral equivalents from the Physicians "for" Social Responsibility, as a peaceloving and upright scientist who condemns US efforts to defend itself.)

In the new study Inhaber compares energy risks not per unit energy produced, but by total hazard (millions of man-days lost) in the year 2020, assuming only that present energy-related trends will continue until then. His paper was presented at the IAEA meeting in Julich last April and is summarized in Power Engineering, Aug. 84. No longer is coal the biggest energy-related hazard: it is exceeded, by a full 40%, by radon in energy efficient homes. [Only automobile hazards are bigger. They are also energy-related, but not tradable: by producing more and cheaper energy, homes need not be made as tight, but automobile accidents will not be significantly affected.] "This does not require the assumption of houses as tight as the proverbial drum by then," writes Inhaber, "but only a doubling of the relatively leaky houses of the 1970s."

What better or more drastic illustration that the image polishers in the EPA (who avoid the radon issue like the plague) cater not to the real needs of the environment, but to the media-reinforced prejudices of the electorate?

In fact, they cater to more than the three points on Orloff's list: not only do EPAcrats go on crusades against trivial dangers that people want to be dangerous, but they cover up the genuine dangers that people do not want to know about.