A long list of antinuclear activists like Helen Caldicott (33, 34) and Amory Lovins (15, 35, 36), as well as organizations such as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Union of Concerned Scientists have been trumpeting the message for decades that nuclear power is bad for the envi­ronment and for humans and that catastrophe is just around the corner. And yet, their dire predictions have not come true. Other environmental activists—includ — ing Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Patrick Moore, the former head of Greenpeace, and James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia the­ory—have changed their minds and have concluded that nuclear power is safe and essential if we are to reduce the production of carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels and thus minimize global warming (37-39). So who is right?

The arguments most often made against nuclear power are that it is too expen­sive, it is too dangerous, it produces deadly waste that will be with us for hundreds of thousands of years and produce environmental damage, mining for uranium is too hazardous and generates so much carbon dioxide that it does not really help solve global warming, and it is a target for terrorists. But most of these concerns are based on myths about the hazards of radiation, both from accidents that have occurred and from the storage of nuclear waste. I have already discussed the cost of nuclear power in this chapter. The rest of the book is devoted to exploring these other issues.

A number of questions come to mind: What exactly is radiation? What are the biological effects of radiation? How does radiation cause cancer, and how danger­ous is it really? How much radiation are we naturally exposed to? What happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, and what are the consequences? What is nuclear waste, and can we safely deal with it? Is there enough uranium available to expand nuclear power dramatically, and can it be safely mined?

Our story begins with radiation—what is it and where does it come from? It’s a fascinating story, full of amazing scientific discoveries that boggle the mind, so stick with me.

NOTES

1. The power production of nuclear reactors is commonly stated as GWe for the amount of electrical power they generate. That is because, as with coal and natural gas plants, much of the total energy dissipates as heat. The electrical component is about one-third of the total power, so a 1 GWe power plant actually produces about 3 GW total power, which is sometimes given as GWt (thermal).

2. See Chapter 10 for more details about reactors.

3. Millirem (mrem) and mSv are measures of a dose of radiation. See Chapter 7 for details about dose.

4. Fusion is even more concentrated energy, but it is not on the horizon for an avail­able energy source.