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The title of that article is laughably false. The underlying point it is based on, that under normal operation a nuclear plant releases less radioactive material into the environment than a coal plant, is technically true but grossly misleading. Under normal operation nuclear plants release essentially no radioactive material, the radioactivity concern is concentrated purely into the possibility of something going wrong. Sanity-check I did after encountering this argument a decade ago:
This doesn't mean that nuclear power is overall a bad idea, but it's definitely not because coal is a worse radioactivity concern. From what I've heard this particular misleading talking point has been going around even before it started circulating on the internet, I remember someone telling me that it was going around Stanford decades ago. People should be cautious with counterintuitive factoids like this, because often they spread because they are too good to check.
Fascinating. I have held this to be true for a very long time, but your point seems to check out. The only counterargument I wonder about is if the dispersal is different in a way relevant to health risks. I.e., maybe Fukushima makes the immediate area very irradiated, but the Earth in general is ~unaffected, whereas coal makes the Earth in general relevantly more irradiated.
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I addressed this in the footnote.
It is a quite common myth that living near a nuclear power plant emits radiation during ongoing operations.
But it's not true that "for the energy generated, more radiation is given out by fly ash". You didn't say "so long as nothing goes wrong", so the average amount of radiation released per energy produced includes the risk of disaster. And since nuclear power plants involve significantly radioactive material and coal plants don't, even a tiny risk is enough to push the average way above coal plants. The fact that Fukushima alone released more radioactivity than the fly ash we would get from burning all coal deposits on Earth makes this clear.
Then just say "nuclear power plants release virtually no radiation under normal operation". Don't try to make it sound like nuclear beats coal in terms of radiation, on a technicality sufficiently narrow that both you and the Scientific American article you link (and the people I've seen bring up this talking point before) stumble into outright falsehood. Nuclear beats coal on plenty of metrics, there is no need to compare them in terms of radioactivity besides the appeal of being counterintuitive.
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It’s just hard to process low probablity, high impact events with common heuristics. It’s uncomfortable to mix a very low imprecise number with a very high imprecise number. You either approximate high impact to infinity and swear off nuclear or round off low probability to zero, seeing ‘the norm’ as what usually happens and the high impact event as an outlier. But this sort of scenario requires a norm reversal.
If an exploding nuclear plant releases more than all the routine radioactivity taken together, the ‘outlier’ is more significant than the ‘norm’. If you take a unit of radioactivity emitted by nuclear power at random, 99%+ it’s going to be from an uncontrolled discharge – routine operation radioactivity is irrelevant noise by comparison. Like it’s absurd to try to minimize terrorism in the US by calling 9/11 an ‘outlier’ – if you take a victim of terrorism at random, they’re likely from 9/11. If you care about impact, the small attacks are the outliers. If any data point should be shaved off for deviating from the norm, it’s them.
The problem with radioactivity is that it’s still not measuring impact, it just sounds scary. And coal plants have killed more people than nuclear plants with failures included.
Wouldn’t the rarity of the catastrophic failure matter as well? Other than 3 mile island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, I don’t think there’s been a catastrophic failure of a nuclear plant and we’ve had them for over 50 years. We’ve been using the technology for 18,000 days, or over a million hours with only a handful of failures. At some point the calculations would show an infinitesimal risk that could and probably should be neglected. We don’t include 9/11 type events in our calculations of building safety because the odds of a passenger jet hitting a building is small enough to neglect.
And if the question is generally is it safe, I think given the rarity of these events, we’re taking the release from a catastrophic failure and dividing it by the low odds (best guess one in a million) which is probably not as much as people think.
Which is why you do enough math to sanity-check the comparison. As I mentioned, Fukushima released more radioactivity than would be released by burning all the coal deposits on Earth. Nuclear power plants involve relevant amounts of radioactivity, coal plants don't. The fact that a release like Fukushima happened even once implies the odds aren't low enough to overcome the massive difference in radioactivity. Nuclear has plenty of advantages, and the risk of catastrophic failure is low enough that those other advantages might easily outweigh it, but being less of a radiation risk than coal is not one of them.
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No. My point was, that number should never ever be rounded off to zero, despite our natural tendency to do so. That very very very small, extremely difficult to calculate probability, is the entirety of the problem for nuclear. Round something else up.
If it costs X dollars to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic failure by 1% and the same amount to reduce routine radioactivity by 50 %, then somewhat counterintuitively you should choose the former. And if all your efforts to stop terrorism focus on preventing ‘lone wolf’ type attacks, you are ignoring most of the problem. I think most of the anti-terrorism stuff would have been silly one way or the other, and I like nuclear, but this is just math.
I’ll agree — if you’re the engineering team. Then yes, I want you to make your plant as safe as can be done with the money and time available.
On the other hand, I think as far as public debates, or public policy, a less than one in a million chance is not worth debating and in fact quite often means nothing will get done at all because the chance of something bad happening is not and can never be zero. And if you’re debating whether or not to build a skyscraper, there’s no reason to include “it might get struck by an airplane and collapse” simply because that kind of failure is so rare that brining it up as a part of the debate on building one would skew the debate against even needed buildings or technology. It stagnates society.
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