Life over the last decade or so seems to be one big game of How Worried Should I Be?
Terrorist attacks? Probably not all that worried.
Anthrax attacks? Well, my post office was in all likelihood served by one of the affected distribution sites, so maybe I’ll put on a pair of gloves on my way to the mailbox.
DC Snipers? Eh, I like taking the back roads.
Hurricanes, floods, forest fires, pandemics, oil spills, revolutions, economic collapse --.there are all sort of things out there to put one’s knickers in a twist these days. (And that’s even before you turn on the Discovery Channel to learn about super-volcanoes and mega-quakes and rogue asteroids and gamma ray bursts and who-knows-what-all else.)
So here we are, and on the other side of the planet, there’s a nuclear power plant damaged by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that has killed thousands and left more than a million survivors without homes or hope. The plant is belching radiation and plutonium and who knows what else, and that steam and smoke and gunk is hitching a ride on the Westerlies, arriving, like an unwelcome guest, sometime today.
It occurred to me earlier this week that before I set out to the local health-food emporium to beat some hippy mama over the head for the last bottle of potassium iodide or started fashioning a little tinfoil suit for my kitten, I decided to figure out How Worried I Should Be, and came up with...not much. If I lived in Japan, I’d be worried. But here in Virginia, it looks like Kitty and I will possibly see a higher-than-normal-but-nowhere-near-dangerous exposure to radiation.
Radiation. That’s the key word, isn’t it. Simple, everyday, plain-vanilla pollution is believed to be responsible for upwards of 40% of deaths in the world each year, but we barely pause when someone says “sulfur dioxide” or “particulate matter”. Three billion people still rely on solid fuel -- wood, animal dung, biomass, coal -- for their daily cooking needs. Black carbon emissions have been found to be a major contributor to global climate change, but nobody is talking about outlawing campfires.
The Christian Science Monitor posted a story this week on how the global panic over the disaster is almost inversely proportional to the actual risk. We misremember past nuclear disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, making them more deadly and more dangerous than they actually were. We overreact to the threat posed by relatively small doses of radioactivity.
Much of this fear, says Dr. Jerrold Bushburg of the University of California-Davis, comes from pop culture. Look at the comics, he says: Peter Parker, bit by radioactive spider, becomes Spider-Man; Bruce Banner, absorbs radioactive waves, becomes the Incredible Hulk; hum-drum Japanese lizard, exposed to nuclear detonation, becomes Godzilla. (The list goes on.) “It gives you subliminal messages about the capacity of radiation to do harm,” Bushberg told the newspaper.
That’s not quite right. For one thing, Godzilla isn’t really scary, and Spider-Man and the Hulk are not villains. More importantly, pop culture reflects the anxiety of the times as much as it drives them. When it comes to All Things Nuclear, most Americans formed our feeling during the Cold War.
I think most of us who grew up between the 1950s and the 1980s wondered if we’d live to actually grow up; we suspected our childhoods would end in a bright blast of fission because some idiot somewhere burped and caused another idiot to press a button. How many times did we all hear about how missiles would reach us X minutes after a launch, and a strike on [insert major city here] would kill so many millions in an instant? There was no hierarchy of exposure in most of these scenarios: you either died instantly or you suffered in some post-apocalyptic doomscape.
Growing up in the 1980s, my peers and I were fed a steady diet of movies like Red Dawn and WarGames and The Day After, and that awesomely cheese-tastic Orson Wells “documentary” on Nostradamus that had some vaguely ethnic guy in a sparkly blue turban blowing us to smithereens by the end of 1994. In northern Vermont, we also knew we were just across Lake Champlain from Plattsburgh Air Force Base, a primary target for the Russians, and that we’d most likely vaporize instantly, along with the lake.
Thirty years on, when you hear words like “radioactivity” and “fallout,” you can’t help but think back to the fears of those times. It’s contributing to the run on Geiger counters and potassium iodide tablets, gas masks and chemical suits, even though countless scientists and public health officials have assured, time and again, that there is no scenario under which radiation levels from Japan will be high enough to hurt anyone here.
Nuclear energy is a powerful force with some very dangerous downsides, as the Fukushima Daiichi disaster is so spectacularly showing. We need to have a full and honest debate over the continuing use of nuclear power plants and to advance renewable alternatives. But you can’t have a full and honest debate from a place of not-quite-rational fear. Hopefully, we’ll be soon be able to move past the fear and plot our best course to our energy future.
Terrorist attacks? Probably not all that worried.
Anthrax attacks? Well, my post office was in all likelihood served by one of the affected distribution sites, so maybe I’ll put on a pair of gloves on my way to the mailbox.
DC Snipers? Eh, I like taking the back roads.
Hurricanes, floods, forest fires, pandemics, oil spills, revolutions, economic collapse --.there are all sort of things out there to put one’s knickers in a twist these days. (And that’s even before you turn on the Discovery Channel to learn about super-volcanoes and mega-quakes and rogue asteroids and gamma ray bursts and who-knows-what-all else.)
So here we are, and on the other side of the planet, there’s a nuclear power plant damaged by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that has killed thousands and left more than a million survivors without homes or hope. The plant is belching radiation and plutonium and who knows what else, and that steam and smoke and gunk is hitching a ride on the Westerlies, arriving, like an unwelcome guest, sometime today.
It occurred to me earlier this week that before I set out to the local health-food emporium to beat some hippy mama over the head for the last bottle of potassium iodide or started fashioning a little tinfoil suit for my kitten, I decided to figure out How Worried I Should Be, and came up with...not much. If I lived in Japan, I’d be worried. But here in Virginia, it looks like Kitty and I will possibly see a higher-than-normal-but-nowhere-near-dangerous exposure to radiation.
Radiation. That’s the key word, isn’t it. Simple, everyday, plain-vanilla pollution is believed to be responsible for upwards of 40% of deaths in the world each year, but we barely pause when someone says “sulfur dioxide” or “particulate matter”. Three billion people still rely on solid fuel -- wood, animal dung, biomass, coal -- for their daily cooking needs. Black carbon emissions have been found to be a major contributor to global climate change, but nobody is talking about outlawing campfires.
The Christian Science Monitor posted a story this week on how the global panic over the disaster is almost inversely proportional to the actual risk. We misremember past nuclear disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, making them more deadly and more dangerous than they actually were. We overreact to the threat posed by relatively small doses of radioactivity.
Much of this fear, says Dr. Jerrold Bushburg of the University of California-Davis, comes from pop culture. Look at the comics, he says: Peter Parker, bit by radioactive spider, becomes Spider-Man; Bruce Banner, absorbs radioactive waves, becomes the Incredible Hulk; hum-drum Japanese lizard, exposed to nuclear detonation, becomes Godzilla. (The list goes on.) “It gives you subliminal messages about the capacity of radiation to do harm,” Bushberg told the newspaper.
That’s not quite right. For one thing, Godzilla isn’t really scary, and Spider-Man and the Hulk are not villains. More importantly, pop culture reflects the anxiety of the times as much as it drives them. When it comes to All Things Nuclear, most Americans formed our feeling during the Cold War.
I think most of us who grew up between the 1950s and the 1980s wondered if we’d live to actually grow up; we suspected our childhoods would end in a bright blast of fission because some idiot somewhere burped and caused another idiot to press a button. How many times did we all hear about how missiles would reach us X minutes after a launch, and a strike on [insert major city here] would kill so many millions in an instant? There was no hierarchy of exposure in most of these scenarios: you either died instantly or you suffered in some post-apocalyptic doomscape.
Growing up in the 1980s, my peers and I were fed a steady diet of movies like Red Dawn and WarGames and The Day After, and that awesomely cheese-tastic Orson Wells “documentary” on Nostradamus that had some vaguely ethnic guy in a sparkly blue turban blowing us to smithereens by the end of 1994. In northern Vermont, we also knew we were just across Lake Champlain from Plattsburgh Air Force Base, a primary target for the Russians, and that we’d most likely vaporize instantly, along with the lake.
Thirty years on, when you hear words like “radioactivity” and “fallout,” you can’t help but think back to the fears of those times. It’s contributing to the run on Geiger counters and potassium iodide tablets, gas masks and chemical suits, even though countless scientists and public health officials have assured, time and again, that there is no scenario under which radiation levels from Japan will be high enough to hurt anyone here.
Nuclear energy is a powerful force with some very dangerous downsides, as the Fukushima Daiichi disaster is so spectacularly showing. We need to have a full and honest debate over the continuing use of nuclear power plants and to advance renewable alternatives. But you can’t have a full and honest debate from a place of not-quite-rational fear. Hopefully, we’ll be soon be able to move past the fear and plot our best course to our energy future.
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Comments
Of course, if we made sure our kids got a decent science education, maybe they'll be able to think for themselves, sans Spidey and the Hulk.
For many people, radiation has connotations of absolute evil -- there is no time to consider how much radiation, or what type, as a poison it's in a category all by itself. That's reflected in the silly nostrum that "there's no safe level of radiation", which has been repeated so often in alternative media recently.
And because "radiation" conjures up such deep-seated fears, a radioactive headline is sure to sell newspapers and draw viewers. It's hard to say whether mass media has caused the general level of ignorance about the actual effects of radiation, or simply profited from that ignorance. It's a feedback loop.
I'm happy to have evolved and grown up in a radioactive universe. Just as well, since there's no other universe available.
If we should apply rational standards, let's apply them across the board. Otherwise we're sending mixed messages.
But why worry?
As they say, a disaster like that makes that area uninhabitable, a place of insidious silent death imperceptible to those without proper instrumentation. I often have nightmares about it since humans and other living things have no senses that alarm to the dangers and they exist for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, something our cultures and civilizations cannot deal with except to flee them totally. Earth becomes an alien planet. Uninhabitable.
Nope. What you need to be afraid of, among other things, is “radioactive contamination.”
Six reactors are involved, along with the nuclear waste stored above each reactor (which is the main problem). No one knows what will happen if there’s a full meltdown because this situation is unprecedented. Chernobyl and TMI involved only one reactor each.
“We misremember past nuclear disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, making them more deadly and more dangerous than they actually were.”
Wrong again. Greenpeace estimates 93,080 people died. And there were health consequences for many others. Obviously, it’s hard to get exact numbers when many cancers occurred years later. Go here to learn more:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/planet-2/report/2006/4/chernobylhealthreport.pdf
Also, a new study that came out this month shows that the increase of thyroid cancers in Chernobyl continues to go up and that risk doesn't seem to abate over time:
http://www-.usmedicin-e.com/news-/2011/03/1-8/long-ter-m-study-sh-ows-cancer--up-among--chernobyl--survivors.-html
The 20th century was the "century of oil" whereas the 21st will be the "century of water", just as scientists predicted 30-40 years ago. Just watch what's about to happen to water supplies in the southwestern USA.....it's just a matter of time before they run out....dwindling water supplies are a reality, yet two grotesquely obscene and totally unnecessary means of wasting huge amounts of water are meat production and nuclear energy! Look it up for yourselves, as I used to tell my students!
what i don't want to see is commercial construction of nuclear power plants. this is a place where you don't want 'eye on the profit margin' engineering.
you point is moot. Most of the more modern reactor are designed such that the water is recycled in producing electricity. That is, water is used to cool the nuclear fuel rods, the rods evaporate the water during cooling, the steam produced turns turbines that make electricity and then the water is re-condensed using secondary cooling water. The secondary cooling does not need to be fresh nor drinking quality. It just needs to be cooler than steam.
So over many decades, such a system might lose a little bit of water, but not nearly enough to put any serious on water resources.