in Chris' earlier post Obama is an idiot Part VI
I mentioned that Nuclear Power is our best, cleanest option for an alternative fuel source to lessen our dependence on oil.
I came across this article in GQ Magazine (of all places) talking about Nuclear Power - and the misinformation & unfounded fear people have about it. The first thing many people bring up when discussing anything Nuclear is the accident at Three Mile Island. The accident was a case of a lot of different things going wrong at the same time - but all things considered, the outcome wasn't really that horrible. Let's look at the facts:
How much fallout was there?
From a radiological standpoint, the impact is somewhat easier to measure. Radiation is counted in units called millirems. Because the earth is warmed by the largest nuclear reactor of all—the sun—virtually all of us are exposed to a certain baseline of millirems each year, depending on where we live. At higher elevations, like Denver, the sun is closer, and citizens receive about 180 millirems per year; at lower elevations, like Delaware, residents receive only 20 or 30. Building materials can also make a difference: Because of the presence of -elements like radon in many rocks, people who live in brick or stone houses tend to receive 50 or 100 millirems more each year than people who live in wooden houses. Region also has an impact. In areas rich with coal, residents absorb about 100 millirems annually from the ground; in northeastern Washington State, residents get about 1,500 millirems from local minerals; in certain parts of India, as much as 3,000 millirems per year may come from the ground. A cigarette smoker gets about 1,300 millirems per year, mostly from the presence of the radioactive isotope polonium-210, which is found in tobacco (and, recently, in the autopsy reports of Russian spies). Back home in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney gets about 100 millirems every year from his pacemaker. Every time you go in for a dental X-ray, you get 5. Chest X-ray: 15. PET scan: 650. In fact, just by being alive, you generate a little radiation of your own, and most people absorb about 40 millirems each year from themselves.
At Three Mile Island, according to a 1980 inquiry by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the maximum level of radiation that anybody within a fifty-mile radius could have received from the accident was about 100 millirems—the equivalent of moving to Colorado for a year, or into a brick house for two. According to another study, by the Pennsylvania Departments of Health and Environmental Resources, among 721 locals tested, not a single one showed radiation exposure above normal. A similar study by the state’s Department of Agriculture found no significant trace of radiation in the local fish, water, or dairy products, which tend to register minute impurities. And a study released in 2000 by the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh found that, twenty-one years after the accident, there was still no evidence of “any -measurable impact” on public health.
Given the extreme scale of the meltdown at TMI—including an explosion of hydrogen, the liquefaction of radioactive uranium, and the release of a plume of radioactive gas into the air outside—it is reasonable to conclude that the lesson of Three Mile Island is not merely a matter of what went wrong at the plant but also an example of what went right. For so many people and so many systems to fail so spectacularly all at once, without any measurable effect on public health, may be the last, best proof that a system is working.
So, as accidents go, doesn't seem that bad, does it? So why the continued hysteria?
What drives this opposition, in many cases, is the conflation of magnitude with probability. That is, when people worry about nuclear power, what they worry about is the scale of an accident, not the likelihood. In this regard, nuclear power is just the opposite of the nation’s coal-fired plants, where harm to the environment is both ruinous and certain but comfortingly slow. It may take decades or even centuries for the effects of particle soot, acid rain, and global warming to claim a million lives. By contrast, the nightmare scenario with nuclear power is decades of cheap, plentiful, pollution-free energy—followed by a sudden meltdown that wipes out a city. For most people, the reality that coal-based pollutants like mercury and sulfur dioxide are killing us every day—taking as many as 24,000 lives per year, according to nonpartisan researchers (that’s a Chernobyl disaster every eleven hours), while nuclear plants have never claimed an American life—is beside the point.
I really recommend you read the whole GQ article as it contains a lot of great information.
