Perceptions of safety, illusions of danger

A few days ago TEPCO announced that it would be releasing contaminated cooling water into the ocean, water that has been treated to remove radioactive substances so that it is below the legally permissible level of radioactive contamination.

This is necessary because water has been accumulating from efforts to continue cooling the three melted down reactors and the radiation will be reduced through a new process that removes 60 different kinds of radiactive substances. The resulting release will be orders of magnitude less radioactive than is necessary to cause harm to humans, and will then be diluted by nothing less than the Pacific Ocean, so that the radioactivity will be diluted billions of times more, to way, way below normal background levels of radiation in seawater.

You will not be able to find a respectable scientific source stating that this release will endanger the environment in any way. Yet the Japan Times article, as well as other pieces in the net, is followed by comments implying some kind of crime being committed by TEPCO.

This small example neatly illuminates much of the difficulty the nuclear power industry faces in dealing with public perception of safety. The excessive standards of safety and reporting forced on the industry do little to allay fears. On the contrary, they seem to merely enforce the perception that nuclear power is dangerous. Coal power plants, which emit radiation as part of their normal operations, never make any announcements about this at all. Behind all this is the false assumption that nuclear power is inherently more dangerous than other forms of energy production.

That this assumption has nasty add-on effects should hardly be surprising. One of the most important is that the extraordinary standards of safety that are forced upon nuclear power result in massive cost overruns in plant construction. ANS cafe has an extraordinarily informative post on this topic, finding that much of the cost of plant construction originates in unrealistic and self-defeating standards of Quality Assurance.

It is ironic that 'cost' is one of the main reasons given by anti-nuclear campaigners as to why nuclear power cannot provide electricity for the entire world. If those anti-nuke proponents were willing to rationally compare safety standards in terms of health effects across differenct forms of energy production, the costs of nuclear power plant construction could drop dramatically. Construction costs in China, for example, are a fraction of those in the West, much of which cannot be explained merely by the lower cost of labour.