Here’s a dirty little secret about nuclear power, which is by far the world’s most fear-inducing energy source: Even history’s nastiest meltdowns haven’t been all that bad. That’s partly due to that fact that when I say ’history’s nastiest meltdowns,’ that pretty much includes just two events, Fukushima and Chernobyl.This kind of reasoning is anathema to popular imagination of nukes gone awry—we can’t help but conjure the mushroom cloud. But the truth is, compared to the toll of other energy sources (namely coal) nuclear power’s impact has been relatively benign — with regards to human life, anyways.For instance, Chernobyl, the greatest nuclear tragedy in history, led to a 64 deaths from radiation exposure since the beginning of the disaster. Most of these resulted from firemen and rescue workers rushing to the scene, unaware of how dangerous the radiation was. On top of the radiation deaths, there are “4,000 cases of relatively treatable thyroid cancer, for sure, and the rest is just guesswork.”That’s Christopher Mims writing in the Atlantic about a recent visit to the “excursion zone” where the disaster hit hardest. Now, 64 deaths and 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer is horrifying and tragic. But it’s also, thus far, the ceiling on nuclear catastrophe. Recent health studies on Fukushima—the world’s second greatest nuclear disaster—show that the fallout has been much more mild than was initially expected.Radiation levels are only marginally higher nearby the disaster site, and the workers exposed to higher levels during the cleanup and shutdown efforts have a higher risk of developing cancer than they otherwise would have. Outside the nearby zones, radiation levels are consistent with “background levels” normally detected in the mildly irradiated lives we live everywhere. No deaths have been attributed to the nuclear fallout. Of course, all this is gleaned from public health reports from local government, the WHO, and the UN, the findings of which environmental groups contest.Still, the point is there haven’t been piles smoldering, glow-in-the-dark corpses littered around the countryside. No apocalypse. And yet nuclear power is still scary as hell. But the human toll tallied above is less than what coal does in a day. Worldwide, coal’s air pollution kills hundreds of thousands every year, gives millions cancer and respiratory illness, and millions more asthma.But nuclear power, Mims argues, is different kind of nightmare altogether; it’s an economic one:…it doesn’t hit you until you’re standing in an empty field in the heart of Ukraine — “the breadbasket of Europe” — looking around at what could be some of the most productive farmland on a planet desperate for all the calories it can get: The economic cost of Chernobyl is incalculably huge.
The land around much of Chernobyl will be measurably contaminated for many decades hence, and in some cases, effectively forever. It doesn’t matter that the level of contamination in many areas will be negligible from a public health perspective. Here’s the question to answer: Would you live there? Or if you were a business, would you invest there? And if you were raising crops, do you really think someone is going to buy grain “made in Chernobyl”?
…In other words, it doesn’t matter that nuclear disasters are, in point of fact, relatively harmless in their direct health impacts … What matters is that when a plant blows up, it undoes, by many orders of magnitude, all the economic benefit of all the energy it ever produced.That’s also because cleanup efforts are enormously expensive, and so is building new nuclear projects. And part of the reason building new nuclear power plants so costly is that everybody is justifiably scared shitless of nuclear power. Just by possessing a built-in capacity to have things go so, so wrong, which terrifies the public in the process, the costs of nuclear skyrocket. It’s hard to find investors wants to take on the risk of building a scary-ass nuke plant in somebody’s backyard.These are the compelling reasons, not the immediate human cost, that anti-nuclear proponents should be using in their arguments against conventional nuclear power (though there’s always the allegedly much safer thorium). It’s too scary, which makes it too expensive, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. There’s almost certainly going to be another meltdown—and even if it is relatively benign like Fukushima, it’s going to shock the world (and whichever local economy the disaster strikes) all over again. Bottom line: there are cheaper, less terrifying ways to get carbon-free power.
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