This Week in Nuclear

I was a bit surprised to hear one of your guests talk as if the National Academy of Sciences (the NAS) was a place to go to for information as to how safe uranium mining is.

For instance, quoting one of your guests: “The Coal and Energy Commission… is conducting a series of studies. The first one is a technical one, with the National Academy of Sciences, who is – there couldn’t be anybody better to be doing that type of study – on the health and safety issues associated with uranium mining in Virginia….”

He expressed the hope that the legislature could take information from the NAS, and other information, and determine that uranium mining could occur in Virginia.

He asserted later on in the show that in Virginia, “people, overwhelmingly, when approached about the uranium deposit and the economic opportunity it could bring to the region, overwhelmingly, are supportive as long as the proper safeguards are in place. As long as the National Academy of Science determines what protections need to be in place to protect the safety of the residents and the local environment….”

The reason I wonder at your guest’s statement that the state of Virginia legislature, the citizens of Virginia, and listeners to the podcast should take what the NAS might conclude seriously, is that there are so many nuclear advocates who openly criticize the NAS as a source anyone should pay attention to on other very important matters, i.e. climate change, and ozone depletion.

I have just participated in an exchange with a prominent nuclear advocate who dismissed my references to studies done by the National Academy, data obtained by distinguished NAS members using the facilities of NASA, papers published by NAS members including those published by the only holders of the Nobel ever awarded to anyone studying the atmosphere, by saying “your appeals to authority have fallen on deaf ears”. I think he must have meant that referring to what various authorities published meant nothing to him, as I made no appeals to authority for anything in particular.

He has his own theory, that if true means that the Nobel Committee awarded their prize to Rowland, Molina, and Crutzen, in error. His theory, if true, also means that an important worldwide industry had a number of its products, i.e the halocarbons, the most well known of which is called Freon or CFC, condemned as unsafe. This industry had to invest millions of dollars if not billions, retooling to produce substitutes. This prominent nuclear advocate says he can’t be bothered to actually publish his theory by making the slightest effort to come up with solid enough data to support it, but he knows what he knows, and he has no trouble accusing the scientists who did bother to publish their data and theories, of corruption or error.

Now it so happens that ozone depletion is a serious matter if it were happening, or if it were to happen as a result of industrial activity. It is a serious matter for the general public and legislators to be informed about, if scientists they otherwise might take as authorities are lying about what they have discovered.

The ozone layer protects the planet from UV radiation. If you wonder why your roof wears out just sitting there in the sun, or why your skin burns red if you expose yourself to the sun for too long, consider that there is 100 times as much UV coming into the planetary system that ozone stops from reaching you and your roof, not to mention all the rest of life on Earth.

I have also been subject to openly expressed contempt and ridicule on various blogsites maintained by nuclear advocates, for stating that I accept as authoritative what the various National Academy of Sciences committees have published, and what the President of the National Academy of Sciences, when speaking for the entire organization, says about climate change.

I take the NAS to be the most distinguished scientific organization in the world. Almost ten percent of the members hold the Nobel. I have pointed out that on climate change, the equivalent of the NAS in every country in the world that has such an organization has supported its President or leading executive figure to sign a declaration, as a group of groups, that civilization should take the warnings emanating from the climate scientists seriously, and decarbonize the energy supply powering civilization as quickly as possible.

As I say, merely letting other pro nuclear people know that I believe this has subjected me to open contempt and ridicule. Climate science, I am told, rested on a house of cards that has now crumbled away and no one should take anything said by climate scientists about limiting or eliminating the emissions of the wastes of the nuclear industry’s chief competitor seriously.
The NAS is corrupt and/or doesn’t know anything, and its President, when he writes, as he did recently as a lead editorial in the peer reviewed internationally respected magazine Science, that, regarding climate science after the so called “climategate” incident, “our understanding is undiminished”, is lying. This is what I am told by some nuclear advocates, often enough that I see that there are many of them who believe this. My experience is not an isolated one – I have seen a prominent pro nuclear author comment that she has also observed what I am talking about, i.e. this tendency in nuclear advocates to reject climate science.

And so I think it is a bit ridiculous for nuclear advocates to expect anyone to take them seriously if they say, as your guest said on this podcast, that the people and legislators of the state of Virginia should take any statement that the National Academy of Sciences says about the safety of uranium mining at face value.

This is the Academy that many pro nuclear advocates say is lying about what is known about several fundamentally important issues affecting the life support systems of the entire planet, that would cost many billions if not trillions of dollars to properly address.

It is preposterous to hear nuclear advocates pretend that the general population, or Virginians, or their legislators, should respect an organization so many of their own number do not have the slightest bit of respect for.

One possible contributing factor that makes some who support nuclear energy so easily question whether the National Academy of Sciences is doing, or could possibly do its job, is the difficulties some believe the BEIR studies, done under NAS auspices, have caused for the nuclear industry.

It seems to me, keep in mind here that I am someone who has only recently started a study of the nuclear industry, that people in the nuclear industry have problems with the BEIR assessment of LNT, most recently updated in the BEIR VII report.

“The committee judged … the linear no-threshold model (LNT) provided the most reasonable description of the relation between low-dose exposure to ionizing radiation and the incidence of solid cancers … ”

It seems that this BEIR VII assessment has caused many to believe that an NAS committee can be corrupt, or lie about what a reasonable assessment of what is known about an issue is.

My reading of BEIR VII and of various authors who comment on it is that it is an authoritative assessment of the science. I think anyone can say this even though they were aware that a committee with similar status in France has concluded LNT is not the best model. When I see such disagreement at this level, i.e. national academies disagreeing, I tend to believe more data is required, rather than to immediately decide there must be corruption somewhere.

I don’t see why the assessment of BEIR VII should cause problems for the nuclear industry, except to the extent that regulators, politicians, the general public, etc. misunderstand what the committee is saying.

Its one thing to say the committee finds that the LNT model is the best fit to the data available, and quite another for lawmakers to take that information and insist that regulations governing what to do, for instance, about buildings that are “contaminated” with radiation be written so that enforcement agents must insist on dismantling and disposing as hazardous waste, entire buildings that are less radioactive than the US Capitol where the enabling law was passed.

If BEIR VII’s assessment of LNT is the problem, I would ask, why is there such a stark difference in what the government has required the nuclear industry to do about the radiation it is responsible for and what the government has allowed the fossil fuel industry to do with the far larger total amount of radioactive substances in the nation’s coal ash?

The fact that society and its lawmakers do not take what is known about radiation and keep it in context as they decide how seriously to take low levels of radiation caused by the activities of the nuclear industry, it seems to me, is not caused by BEIR or the NAS – the fault lies in society itself.

Yet I have heard really well informed pro nuclear advocates, for instance Ted Rockwell on one of Rod Adams’ Atomic Shows, rail on about how it seems to him that the BEIR committees are corrupt, or misinformed, or very much mistaken.

What is your view?