Three Mile Island

Greens and nuclear power

The Telegraph

Tom Chivers attempts and fails to understand greens opposition to nuclear power:

I don’t like the idea of being “fundamentally opposed” to one of the most obvious available options for keeping our lights on. If it is shown to be safe and economic, then we should use it. It’s not a moral issue; it’s just one more tool, which we can use well or badly, safely or unsafely. Also: how can an energy technology be “elitist”? I literally don’t know what that means. Is it elitist because it’s hi-tech and third-world countries can’t easily make their own? Well, so are iPads, then, and Toyota Priuses. Or does the word “elitist” just mean “bad” in Green-land, in the same way that “natural” means “good”? [Edit: I can’t believe I didn’t pick up on “undemocratic” as well. Since when are power stations democratic institutions?]

As for it not being renewable: well, neither is sunlight or the wind, if you’re taking a sufficiently long view. Eventually the Sun will consume the last of its hydrogen and expand into a red giant, probably blasting the Earth to its constituent atoms as it does so. But that’s quite a long way off, so we don’t worry about that. In the shorter but still decently long term, even if no more uranium deposits are found (although they will be) and no more efficient ways of using it developed (although they will be), “total identified resources are sufficient for over 100 years of supply”, according to the IAEA. That ain’t nothing.

“Carbon neutral” is a bit of a red herring as well in this case. It’s true, nuclear power is not carbon neutral. But it’s much less carbon positive, if that makes sense, than fossil fuels. The perfect is the enemy of the good, as the saying goes: just because something isn’t the best possible, doesn’t mean you should ignore it if it’s an improvement over what is available. Furthermore, there is potential to improve the carbon emissions of nuclear; if it is made economically attractive to do so, companies will do it themselves. Targeted carbon taxes, or an auction of carbon credits, would work; certainly the latter did for industrial sulphur dioxide emissions.

Of course once rpesented with all that the Green types fall back on the “safety” issue. But that too is a fatuous argument:

It’s about safety. Nuclear power is unsafe. Look at Chernobyl, look at Three Mile Island, look at Fukushima. It’s dangerous, as the Greens say, and its cost, dangers and waste will be “passed on to future generations”.

But as Prof Paddy Regan says in our paper today, that’s false. Chernobyl killed about 50 people (28 people in the immediate weeks after; an estimated 19, according to the WHO, died of radiation-induced cancers in the following 20 years). Three Mile Island killed, and indeed harmed, precisely nobody. And Fukushima was the most ridiculous of all: as a vast earthquake and tsunami killed 15,000 people, the world’s attention was focused on a meltdown in a 40-year-old reactor which, again, killed no one at all.

How many have died from other energy sources?

Meanwhile, in the last 40 years, tens of thousands of people have been killed by failures at hydroelectric dams; hundreds more have died in coal mines, and of course thousands every year in the US alone from respiratory problems caused by fossil fuels. But the fear of “radiation”, evident in the nonsense scares about “electrosmog”, trump the very real dangers of other energy sources.

Right so how about we get ourselves some nuclear plants and have cheap abundant energy, please.

Some real perspective

Since the awful earthquake and terrible tsunami the media have largely ignored the thousands of deaths instead focussing on a small power plant where not a single person has died, nor will a single person has died. Predictably too the green eco-fascists who foisted global warming upon us all and carbon taxes are now railing against the very technology that produces the least greenhouse gases, has killed far less than any other power generating technology and ironically is the greenest source of power there is by their rules.

While they posture against Nuclear power stations they forget that more people have died in Ted Kennedy’s car than in American nuclear accidents. We have also seen the more stupid amongst our MPs rail against nuclear power. i just hope they never get cancer and need a bit of nuclear medicine to put them right. Funny thing is though they protest against nuclear power but not a single one of them has come out against the building of new cyclotrons in New Zealand.

We need to get some perspective rather than rely on mis-informed headline writers of the mainstream media. The BBC fortunately has a great article about the imagined risks of Fukushima compared with real risks that exist already.






Ohhh scary…the MSM even used the word fallout multiple times in their scare-mongering stories.Meanwhile we all, well not all, remain oblivious to the risks of just living in our natural environment from radiation. Radiation that doesn’t come from broken power stations. Radiation that seeps from the ground naturally.




So in the UK alone more than a 1000 people die of cancer from Radon. What about the deaths from 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl, Nagasaki and Hiroshima?





Riiiight….so we have zero deaths in 3 Mile Island, less than 50 deaths so far in Chernobyl but not likely to exceed 3000 and only 690 of the 87,000 survivors of Hirshima and Nagasaki have died due to radiation. Are we getting any perspective yet?



Oh dear. You have more chance of dying from radiation as a result of medical treatment than you do living next door to a nuclear power station. Great. Where are the politicians rushing to shut dow those killing CT scanners?

So based on evidence rather than emotion it would seem the headline writers have scared a good proportion of the population for something that they shouldn’t be scared of.

Michael Hanlon, the Science Editor of the Daily Mail goes even further. He suggests that “what has happened in Japan should in fact be seen as a massive endorsement of nuclear power“. He isn’t wrong either.

Anyone reading the oceans of coverage given to the Japanese catastrophe could be forgiven for thinking that the biggest story, among all the terrible, terrifying heart-rending stories that have emerged in the last week, is that of the impending nuclear apocalypse, invocations of Chernobyl; the ultimate atomic nightmare.

Radiation levels are said to be rising, a nervous Tokyo looks to the northern skies and waits.

There is frantic talk of melting fuel-rods, cooling tanks boiling dry, of American warships edging back from the coast fearful of a few stray Becquerels drifting their way, helicopters dousing the errant reactors with seawater in a last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe.

Yes, anyone else noticed?

But this concentration on the nuclear angle is overstated, a peculiar misreading of the real situation. It illustrates a perverse desire to ignore what is by far and away the biggest real story here – the thousands, most probably tens of thousands, of Japanese people who have been drowned, crushed, entombed in mud, burned alive and swept away by that black tide of death that came sweeping through towns like Sendai and Minamisanriku last Friday afternoon.

The real story is of whole communities literally sluiced away, families shattered, economies ruined. This is, truly, a disaster on a biblical scale, a true apocalypse not the hysterical nuclear-version alluded to by, among others, Gunther Oetinger of the European Commission (who is talking of an ‘apocalypse’), the French government (which has told its nationals to evacuate Tokyo), German Chancellor Angela Merkel (who has put Germany’s nuclear programme on hold) and many other people who should know better.

Our own government is included in the worry-worts and panic artists and they should hang their heads in shame.

Because the other real story, which is a much happier – yes happier – one, is how the Japanese nuclear plants have performed magnificently in the past few days despite being hit by a disaster vastly greater than they were designed to withstand.

What has happened in Japan should in fact be seen as a massive endorsement of nuclear power. But of course, people being what they are, it will not be.

Think about it: despite being faced with a Magnitude 9 Great Earthquake which knocked the whole island of Honshu several feet to the west, a 35ft tsunami and the complete breakdown of the infrastructure, a handful of rather ancient atomic reactors have remained largely intact and have released only tiny amounts of radiation.

There have been some dramatic explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, but casualties have been light; maybe a dozen blast-injuries and a handful of cases of suspected radiation sickness. And remember: thousands were killed by the tsunami.

And how many by issues at the power station? So far none!

As the tsunami and its victims are pushed off the front pages to be replaced by telephoto shots of sinister white buildings, hovering Chinooks and evocative explosion clouds, you could be forgiven for thinking that we are staring into the atomic abyss.

At a press conference at the Royal Institution on Tuesday, nuclear scientists speculated that indeed it could, that if the reactor cores could not be cooled then we could be looking at a rerun of the Three Mile Island disaster. And that, surely, would be terrible?

Well, not really. The accident at the eponymous nuclear plant in Pennsylvania took place on 29 March 1978. That day, a partial core meltdown in Reactor Core No 2 led to local then national panic. There was talk of a China Syndrome, the title of a schlock disaster movie released coincidentally that year which dealt with a reactor meltdown leading to a blob of molten nuclear fuel burning its way through the Earth to emerge on the other side (i.e, from the US to China).

In the end the meltdown was contained, and there was no breach of the reactor containment vessel and certainly no China Syndrome (which turns out to be a myth in any case).

As with Japan today, a small amount of radioactivity was released but this resulted in zero deaths and no measureable increase in illness. In fact, one epidemiological study concluded that the net effect of the world’s second-worst nuclear accident was to give everyone living within 15 miles of the plant a radiation dose equivalent to one chest x-ray.

All right, so the official worst-case-scenario is a disaster which kills zero people, but these nuclear boffins can get it wrong, right? What would happen if Fukushima does a Chernobyl?

Yes OMG what about if Fukushima turns into another Chernobyl?

The thing is, even Chernobyl did not do a Chernobyl. This was, by far, the worst nuclear accident in history (a Category 7) and yet the most astonishing thing about Chernobyl is just how uncatastrophic even this mega-disaster turned out to be.

After the explosion, the world waited. For the cancers, for the gruesome birth defects, terrible radiation burns. Up until the mid-1990s, the generally accepted death toll (including that quoted by the Ukrainian Health Ministry) was in the region or 125,000. As time wore on, these figures plummeted.

In fact, 31 people were killed when the reactor blew – 28 from radiation exposure and three scalded to death by escaping steam. In addition, 134 people received high radiation doses and several dozen of these have subsequently died, although several of unrelated causes. A few hundred people, maybe a few thousand, may die prematurely in years to come, mostly from untreated thyroid cancers, but it is becoming clear that the original assessment was wildly pessimistic.

Yes, wildly pessimistic and horribly inaccurate. An awful like the repeating coming out of Fukushima.

As is the news coming from Japan.  The cooling-system failures that have seen the Fukushima reactors go into near-meltdown are being addressed by the engineers on site. Seawater is being pumped in to dissipate the residual heat, helicopters are dousing the reactors from the air, and water is being blasted onto them from the ground.  But if this does not work there is a risk that one or more of the cores will melt, possibly even escaping their concrete containers.

But, but the media says it is an apocalypse! What should we do? Well perhaps we should listen to the British Government experts rather than our silly government.

What then? How bad could it get? Well, Britain’s excellent Chief Scientist, Sir John Beddington, couldn’t have explained it more clearly. This is what he said in a transcribed conversation with the British Embassy in Tokyo.

I’ll quote him in full because it summarises perfectly what is really going on in Japan:

‘If the Japanese fail to keep the reactors cool and fail to keep the pressure in the containment vessels at an appropriate level, you can get the dramatic word ‘meltdown’. But what does that actually mean?  What a meltdown involves is [that] the basic reactor core melts, and as it melts, nuclear material will fall through to the floor of the container. There it will react with concrete and other materials. That is likely… remember this is the reasonable worst case, we don’t think anything worse is going to happen.

‘In this reasonable worst case you get an explosion. You get some radioactive material going up to about 500 metres up into the air.  Now, that’s really serious, but it’s serious again for the local area.  It’s not serious for elsewhere … if you then couple that with the worst possible weather situation i.e. prevailing weather taking radioactive material in the direction of Greater Tokyo and you had maybe rainfall which would bring the radioactive material down – do we have a problem?



There you have it:  the voice of reason. But this is not what you have been reading, and this is not what the politicians are saying. To reiterate: if you say at least 20 miles from the Fukushima Complex, even if all the reactors blow up, you will be fine.

Yes there you have it. But the Greenie wankers will have none of this. They want all nuclear power stations turned off because they are “unsafe”.

None of this will matter of course to a resurgent anti-nuclear movement. After Three Mile Island which killed – remember – no one at all, America’s nuclear industry was paralysed. This is set to happen again, on a larger scale, just when the world has woken up to the fact that to combat the twin evils of climate change and an impending energy crisis we are going to need a massive revival of fission power.

In a way, the speed with which the nuclear angle has come to dominate coverage of the Japanese catastrophe is understandable. The earthquake and tsunami could not be comprehended. Tales of survival will emerge but, in essence, the story of the great Black Wave is over. The towns are gone, the people are dead. We need to ‘move the story on’, to use the media’s dread parlance.

But the nuclear crisis is all too comprehensible, and on-going. Our fear of the rogue, effervescent atom, the invisible, DNA-mutating ultra-poison appears to be primordial. By concentrating on the atomic plants we make this story about the works of Man, not of Nature, and thus write ourselves back into the centre of a narrative in which we, in truth, have played merely the role of hapless and helpless bystanders and victims.  Scaremongering and hubris; an unhappy combination.

The luddites can’t have it both ways. They can’t demand that we shut down Nuclear power plants without suggesting real alternatives, not ones that damage the environment more than nuclear power does, or ones that kill more people like the coal powered stations. If they want to tax us for emissions then they have to let us build emission free stations and so far the cleanest and safest of those is nuclear. Nothing else comes even close.