The Enemies of Nuclear Power
The opposition to nuclear power is based, not on science, but on a hostility to science, technology and capitalism.
The following editorial has been produced by the Ayn Rand Institute's MediaLink department. Visit MediaLink at http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/.
Released: August 3, 2001
By Travis
Norsen
With rolling
blackouts continuing in California, many people are wishing for a
science-fiction solution, in which discoveries in theoretical
physics would lead to a new energy-producing technology. The fuel
for this technology, as they imagine it, would be abundantly
available, safe, inexpensive and clean.
It may surprise those
people to learn that the only fiction here is the belief that
this is some future fantasy. Actually, the relevant discoveries
in physics happened nearly a century ago, and the resulting
technology—nuclear power—is now almost 50 years old.
But the fact that this valuable technology is playing a
diminishing role in our economy reveals something very important—not
about nuclear power itself, but about the motives of its militant
opponents.
Nuclear power provides
a cheap alternative to fossil-fuel-based sources of electricity.
With comparable capital and operating costs, and a mere fraction
of the fuel costs, it can provide electricity at 50–80
percent of the price of traditional sources. It is
extremely reliable, and is by far the cleanest of any viable
energy source currently known.
Its safety record is
also exemplary. In America today, the nuclear industry
ranks among the safest places to work. It experiences only 0.34
accidents resulting in lost work time per 200,000 worker-hours,
compared with a 3.1 average throughout private industry. While during the past 40 years, hundreds of thousands
have died as a result, directly and indirectly, of coal mining
and other means of energy production, there has not been a single
fatality, or even a serious injury, resulting from the operation
of civilian nuclear plants in the United States. The
annual probability of radiation leakage for the newest reactors
is estimated at less than one in a billion—a
level of safety no other source of energy can even approach.
Why then is opposition
to nuclear power so strong?
The loudest
objection raised by the anti-nuclear groups is that there is
"no safe level of radiation." It is also the phoniest.
The major sources of radiation are natural and ubiquitous: we are
continuously bombarded with radiation from cosmic rays in the
upper atmosphere and from naturally occurring radioactive
elements in the earth. Compared with these background
sources, the radiation from nuclear power plants is negligible.
The average annual
radiation dose received by Americans is 360 millirems (or
"mrems"), about 300 of which come from naturally
occurring sources like radon. By contrast, you would get
only 0.01 mrems per year as a result of living 50 feet from a
nuclear power plant. Even a single annual cross-country
airplane flight exposes you to 3 mrems, while a medical X-ray
gives you a dose of 20 mrems.
Yet the hysterical
claims of the anti-nuclear activists continue to shape government
policy, leading to absurd licensing standards for nuclear plants.
For example, the radiation levels in Washington's Capitol
building (due to uranium in the granite walls) would legally
prevent the structure from being licensed as a nuclear plant.
People who work full time at the Capitol are exposed to radiation
levels thousands of times higher than those produced by nuclear
plants.
Similar irrational
standards apply to the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste disposal site
that is being developed in the Nevada desert. In the
1980s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) insisted that
radiation at the site cause no more than 1,000 deaths in 10,000
years—compared with the thousands of deaths per
year the EPA was then predicting from
exposure to natural radon. Yucca Mountain is now being
further delayed as environmentalists demand that the time scale
be extended to 100,000 or even 1,000,000 years.
No wonder not a single
license for a new nuclear plant has been granted in over two
decades—and no wonder the country faces insufficient
supplies of electricity.
The opposition
to nuclear power represents a political, not a scientific,
viewpoint. The anti-nuclear groups, and the broader environmentalist
movement of which they are a part, are fundamentally hostile to
capitalism and production. They are against nuclear
power, not on any sound scientific grounds, but for the same
reason they consistently oppose logging and oil drilling and dam
construction—because they want to reverse the progress we
have made in conquering nature to serve man's interests.
They do not seek a
better means of generating energy—they want us to
"conserve" and to do with less. Their goal is to turn
out the lights on our industrial society. What the defenders of
nuclear energy need, therefore, is to defend that industrial
society—by upholding man's moral right to produce the wealth
on which his values and life depend.
Travis Norsen, a Ph.D. candidate in theoretical nuclear
physics at the University of Washington, is a senior writer for
the Ayn Rand
Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif. The
Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas
Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Send
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