Fear is a powerful emotion, and it is easy to stoke the fear by making claims that nuclear accidents have killed huge numbers of people. The Doomsday Machine (18) claims that perhaps one million people have died from Chernobyl and ridi­cules the experts who project that about 4,000 people will eventually die from can­cer. Helen Caldicott claims that enough plutonium was released from Chernobyl to kill every person on earth (17). But, of course, not a single person actually died from plutonium released at Chernobyl, and no plutonium was released from Three Mile Island or Fukushima. These fearmongers ignore the fact that radiation has been intensively studied for decades; we actually know a very great deal about its environmental behavior, human exposures, and biological effects. It is pos­sible to make specific and reliable predictions if you know the dose and the type of radiation. When you consider the actual doses to which people were exposed from Chernobyl or from Fukushima, you can conclude with reasonable accuracy that about 4,000 people (not hundreds of thousands or a million) will ultimately die from Chernobyl and perhaps there might be a couple of dozen people who will die from the Fukushima accident (see Chapter 10). In the United States—the nation that has more nuclear reactors by far than any other nation—there has not been a single death attributed to radiation from a nuclear power reactor.

Of the three major accidents, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were caused by operator error and would not have happened if the operators had not shut off emergency cooling water pumps. Design problems also contributed to the acci­dents, especially at Chernobyl. These accidents were teaching moments, so that current nuclear reactors are much safer and the operator training is much better. Fukushima was, of course, precipitated by the worst earthquake in Japan’s history and by huge tsunamis. There are very few if any nuclear reactors anywhere else on earth that are subject to that specific combination, and none in the United States. Of course, had the seawalls been higher and the diesel generators placed on a higher level instead of in the basement, the nuclear meltdowns would probably not have occurred. It was the tsunamis that caused the accident, not the earthquake alone.

I certainly don’t mean to imply that these accidents were not significant, and I don’t want to minimize the potential cancer deaths of 4,000 people ultimately from Chernobyl and the dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people in Chernobyl and Fukushima. That is a tragedy. And yet, I think it is important to put it in perspective, considering the health and environmental hazards of the alternative that would have been used instead of nuclear power, namely, coal-fired power plants. The truth of the matter is that there are risks from any energy source.

As I described in Chapter 3, the dependence on coal for electricity leaves a trail of dead that goes back for over a century. In the 1930s and 1940s, about a thou­sand miners were killed annually in the United States. Over time, that number declined to hundreds per year in the 1960s and 1970s, 45 per year in the 1990s, and about 35 per year in the first decade of the twenty-first century. But that is just one small part of the total deaths. The air pollution caused from burning coal leads to thousands of deaths annually. Over 2,000 people died from black lung disease annually from the 1970s to the 1990s, and several hundred still die every year. Even worse, the sulfur oxides and nitrous oxides emitted by coal-fired power plants are estimated to kill over 10,000 people annually from respiratory disease. And hundreds of people die annually from wrecks with coal trains. In light of this carnage, it is remarkable that there seems to be more concern about the safety of nuclear power than coal. Can you imagine a single event happening to a nuclear reactor in the United States that actually killed people, as a coal mining accident does fairly routinely? That would most likely lead to overwhelming pressure to halt nuclear power.

It is much worse in China. China gets 80% of their electricity from coal-fired power plants and leads the world in both production and consumption of coal (21). Thousands of coal miners die every year in China. In 2008 there were 3,215 coal mining deaths, down from 3,786 in 2007 (22). And that is just the deaths from mining. Air pollution is extremely bad in much of China, largely from inef­ficient factories getting their power mostly from coal. It is estimated that at least 300,000 deaths are attributed to air pollution each year, largely from burning coal (23).

The United States has over 3,500 reactor-years of experience operating nuclear reactors without a single death. It is of course impossible to say that there can never be a nuclear accident in the United States, but the regulatory procedures are much better than they were in 1979 when the Three Mile Island accident happened. New reactors that are scheduled to be built are of a new generation that are inherently safer, with cooling of the reactor core under pas­sive systems that greatly reduce the probability of a serious accident in case of loss of power.

There is no completely risk-free source of energy—a balance between risks and benefits must be made. Accidents have happened. People have died. But it would have been much worse if nuclear power did not exist and coal pro­vided the electrical power that nuclear has provided over the years. And that really is the choice. Is it worth the risk to build more nuclear reactors to replace coal-fired power plants? In my opinion, it is no contest, and the faster the world builds them to replace coal-fired power plants, the better off we and the earth will be.

MYTH 4: URANIUM WILL RUN OUT TOO SOON AND MINING IT GENERATES SO MUCH CARBON DIOXIDE THAT IT LOSES ITS CARBON-FREE ADVANTAGE

Helen Caldicott and others say that there is no point in depending on nuclear power because uranium will be used up too soon, and what is available will be of such low grade ore that it will produce more CO2 to mine it than what will be mitigated by the power produced in burning it (17, 24). It is true that the entire life cycle for uranium needs to be considered, as it does for every other source of energy. If ore grades are too low, then it does take too much energy to obtain the uranium and generates a lot of CO2. But that is really just an economic argument. Nobody is going to mine ore of such low grade that it would cost more to get it than the market value of burning it. There is plenty of uranium to fuel a nuclear renaissance for the next hundred years at ore grades that are economically (and energetically) feasible.

A case in point is Australia, which has by far the world’s greatest known ura­nium resources. The largest uranium mine in the world is Olympic Dam in Australia, and the ore quality at the Olympic Dam mine is low, just 0.05%, but the uranium is a byproduct, with the principal products being copper, gold, and silver (25). This material would be mined anyway, so the extra cost in CO2 from obtaining the uranium is small.

Another factor that nuclear opponents seem to ignore is in situ recovery (ISR) mining, which now accounts for about one-third of uranium mining. ISR is intrinsically safer and less environmentally damaging and is also more efficient, so less CO2 is produced in getting the uranium from low-grade ores. It only applies to sandstone formations that contain uranium, so there is a limit to how much uranium can be mined by ISR, however.

The other important factor for the long-term supply of nuclear fuel is the potential for amplifying the nuclear fuel supply. This is already being done by several countries that recycle their SNF. This not only reduces the waste disposal problem but increases the fuel supply by about 25%. The long-term (many centu­ries) future for nuclear power depends on building fast neutron breeder reactors that use the most common isotope of uranium—238U—to produce plutonium for fuel. And finally, it is possible that thorium reactors may become a major source of nuclear power in the future.

The truth is that there is plenty of uranium to fuel a nuclear renaissance and it will greatly reduce CO2 emissions by eliminating coal usage.