WILSON@huhepl.harvard.edu
In a series of newspaper articles published in 1994, and in a more detailed article in the February 1995 issue of Novy Mir Professor Yablokov, a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, describes what he calls the MYTHS of nuclear energy. There are indeed many myths about nuclear technology mostly because of the secrecy surrounding it and because of many complex technical issues involved. This secrecy was justified in nuclear weapons research and production but it cannot be justified and is even dangerous in the issues of nuclear safety and public health. In the former USSR secrecy in these fields prevailed and the myths were mostly pro-nuclear.
From a standpoint of an "independent expert," Professor Yablokov accuses the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy in creating and advertising the new pro-nuclear mythology that is misleading both the public and the decision makers. We believe that an objective expert must maintain the utmost scientific integrity, and be careful not to give birth to any new myths. Unfortunately replacing one set of myths by another is exactly what Professor Yablokov does. And the new myths are much further from the truth than the old ones.
It is important to clearly understand the magnitudes of pollution issues and to compare them. Otherwise it is easy to be led astray and to replace minuscule risks and dangers by much larger ones. Radiation and radioactivity are ubiquitous; we are all exposed to cosmic rays and both internal and external radionuclides at all times. Professor Yablokov writes as if radiation and radionuclides in the environment were primarily due to nuclear bombs and electric power. This gross exaggeration of simple facts shows his inability or unwillingness to compare the numbers.
Professor Yablokov exaggerates right from the beginning of his paper. He states that proponents of nuclear energy NEVER analyze the arguments of the opponents. The very existence of this article is an attempt to understand his arguments and analyze them praising where praise is due, and criticizing where that is necessary. We have spent many years in this attempt to understand, analyze and explain nuclear issues, and have written many papers. Each of us has criticized the "establishment" in the past. But Yablokov's complaint about proponents of nuclear energy is true of some, and may well be true of many, scientists and engineers in nuclear power industry in all countries.
In his article Yablokov continually talks about "ecological safety" without defining what exactly he is talking about. He is mixing together such separate issues as occupational (workers') health and public health, threat to ecological systems and global climate change, nuclear terrorism and national independence. Let us consider these issues one by one.
Safety of nuclear reactors is the first topic discussed by Yablokov, and includes both occupational safety and public safety. It is important to be aware that there is no such thing as absolute safety, and that an insistence upon it, which can only be a blind insistence, can be counterproductive. We completely agree with Prof. Yablokov's criticism of the statements of Academician Alexandrov, former President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a principal booster of the RBMK reactor. Indeed we have criticized Academician Alexandrov in public in the USSR for over 15 years. Just after the accident at Three Mile Island (which killed nobody) Alexandrov was quoted in Izvestia as saying: "such an accident can only happen in a capitalist country where they put profits ahead of safety." That week one of us (RW) was lecturing at various Academy of Sciences institutes in the USSR. RW commented that this was obviously a political statement and that it was vital that no scientist or engineer believe it. RW went further and commented that there was (and still is) a sloppy attitude to safety in all aspects of Soviet life, and predicted that if this did not change there would be a really bad nuclear accident within a decade. We are sorry that this pessimistic prediction was proven correct. We agree with Yablokov. One Chernobyl is not only enough, it is too many. But that applies to many other accidents also.
Prof. Yablokov's discussion of nuclear accidents, while brief, displays ignorance. This can lead to incorrect, and even dangerous, conclusions. Accidents have multiple causes; and they can be prevented in multiple ways. While his statement that 30% to 40% of all nuclear accidents involve human error is reasonable, to imply that human error is the sole cause, and that improvement of the technology would not help, is very wrong. It perpetuates one of the myths about the Chernobyl accident that was put forward by Academician Legasov at the IAEA in Vienna in 1986 - that operator error was the sole cause. While it was clearly the proximate cause, western experts even at the meeting disagreed and rightly blamed the technology itself as much as or more than the operator errors. It has taken many years for western experts to convince Russian scientists and engineers of the widespread nature of the problem. This seems to have been achieved for the first time at the Sakharov conference in Moscow in May 1991; summarizing the causes of the accident, Professor Adolph Birkhofer explained that a good reactor design compensates for (forgives) bad operator errors. But the RBMK design does not forgive; it punishes the operator for his errors by exaggerating their effect. Andrei Sakharov knew this and saw the problem as a general one for society. He realized that the Soviet system of the 1980s was incapable of managing modern technology; the secrecy prevented engineers from checking each others' calculations and making a good design and learning from mistakes to have a good operation.
Western experts certainly agree that the early Russian reactors, the RBMK and the VVER-440, have safety deficiencies compared with nuclear power reactors in the west. They should be replaced by safer reactor as soon as possible. But western experts have now accepted that Russia and Eastern European countries will run these reactors for their useful lives and are helping both to ameliorate the design deficiencies, and to train operators in preventive safety measures. Contrary to Yablokov's specific claim that correcting the design deficiencies is useless, correction of each design deficiency will, independently, reduce the probability of an accident. Implemented together, they will make this probability negligible and therefore acceptable.
While Yablokov does not discuss the matter in detail, we comment here as we have elsewhere on the effects of secrecy on the understanding of the Chernobyl accident. Western countries have complained about Russian secrecy for 400 years, even before the communist era. Concealment of information about Chernobyl was widespread. More was told to western scientists than to the Soviet people in general and to the Soviet scientists in particular. One of us (AS) was at that time a staff member of the reactor physics group at Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute. Before Chernobyl, he was actively lecturing about nuclear energy under the auspices of Znanie society. After the accident, when the demand for information was at its peak, he was denied access to the data on environmental monitoring and was allowed to mention only the officially published data. We believe that concealment of information was morally wrong, and counterproductive. More briefly, it was stupid.
The long term effects of Chernobyl to the populations of the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are just beginning to emerge. Firstly, contrary to Yablokov's statement the doses to which people were exposed can now be estimated quite well; for the most part they are due to the long lived cesium 137 which can be well measured now. However the short lived iodine 131, which was only measured for some people, dominates the dose to the human thyroid. As we now know, there is a dramatic increase in childhood thyroid cancer, starting in 1991 in the high dose areas in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.
The official report by the USSR that 31 people died in a few weeks after the accident, all firemen or plant operators was almost certainly incomplete. Probably several more should be added from causes not initially admitted by the authorities; military personnel and even those who crashed a helicopter could be said to have died from indirect causes. This is the extent of the direct casualties under occupational safety. However, since hundreds of thousands were involved with cleanup operations, their occupational health and safety must be considered also. The delayed cancerous effect of this class is likely to dominate the occupational safety.
The effect on the public is harder to assess; no one got a large enough dose to get acute radiation sickness; no one died within the first few weeks. But on a usual pessimistically conservative basis, one can calculate the expected effect from the doses. This leads to 20,000 - 30,000 expected cancers worldwide of which about 1000 may be "attributable".
Yablokov is correct that there are better statistical data in the US from which to judge the effect of nuclear reactors on public health, including the effects of nuclear accidents, than in the countries of CIS. But he errs by quoting incorrect US data instead of the excellent data that are available. In particular he is completely wrong in his discussion of the effects of the Chernobyl accident in the USA. We now know that the quantity of radionuclides released from the Chernobyl accident was as bad as any expert had imagined beforehand and therefore that the effect on distant parts of the world was as bad as could reasonably be imagined. In passing we note that the Ukrainians were fortunate in the weather. Much of the initial release of radioactive material went overhead, and was measured in the rest of the world. But it WAS NOT the world catastrophe that Yablokov implies.
Yablokov does not say from which US sources he is quoting but we suspect that he is quoting from articles by Gould and Sternglass who looked at death rates in the USA in summer 1986. We have analyzed these claims carefully, and published our analysis. Firstly, the increase in death rate claimed was for a few months only, and not sustained as would be the case if Chernobyl were the cause. Yablokov mentions iodine 131, which decays over these few months. But iodine 131 displays most of its effects in a delayed manner - as the recent thyroid cancer increases in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia attest.
Contrary to Yablokov's implications, the death rate in the rest of the world DID NOT correlate at all with iodine concentrations worldwide. For example there was a change in the opposite sign in Canada in the summer of 1986. The changes observed were in the range of normal fluctuations. The variations in childhood mortality in the southern states were within historical experience. The data used by Yablokov were arbitrarily selected by Gould, and the use of normal statistical criteria is then completely invalid, and the claims of statistical significance, become utter nonsense. Attribution of any deaths in the USA to Chernobyl was, and is, impossible, even on a statistical basis. This, by itself, suggests to us that Prof. Yablokov does not understand the subject and cannot tell good data from bad.
The article by Yablokov gets wilder when he discusses the effects of normal operation of nuclear power plants. Although he is not specific on this point, he seems to attribute a number of problems to radiation from the power plants rather than to other environmental causes. But he fails to make a case for this and is almost certainly wrong.
The individual nuclear signatures of radionuclides enable us to have extremely sensitive methods of detection. We can detect quantities of some nuclides a million times below any level at which their radiations equal the natural radiations to which we are exposed. This exquisite sensitivity should not be confused with exquisite danger. While the sensitivity of nuclear measurements enabled radionuclides to be measured all over the world, the claims that there were major, or even measurable, effects on health in the USA are plain wrong.
Yablokov claims that much information about effects of nuclear power on ecology have been consciously concealed. This may be true in Russia, but the extension to the rest of the world is not persuasive. The concealment in western countries has been less,and far less for nuclear electric power which has been in the civilian sector. For example Britain regulates emissions through the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to emphasize the independence from the nuclear establishment and the importance of establishing that there is no effect upon agriculture and fish. This ministry maintains an outstanding, open, scientific laboratory at Lowestoft looking at the way radionuclides are released and how they propagate through the environment. This separation of government function may be a useful example for Russia to follow.
Yablokov's discussion on the effects of nuclear power on fish displays considerable confusion. Every thermal power plant has heated waste water. This is often sent to rivers and seas. The heat can have an important effect upon fish. For example, hot water effluent from the Maanshan power plant in the south of Taiwan used to kill thermally sensitive coral until the water discharge channel was modified, and at other plants fishes were deformed. But even the deformed fish had no appreciable radioactivity in them, confirming the conclusion that the effect was due to hot water not due to radiation. This effect, since corrected in Taiwan, could happen in any replacement power plant. In cooler climates, the major effect of the hot water is an increase on the number of fish, as they come to the coolant effluent. This can lead to "fish kills" at the times the power plant is switched off and the water suddenly cools. Smaller fish are also sometimes drawn into the coolant intake and killed in the coolant water pumps. That there are differences in this respect between Russian and Finnish power plants, whether nuclear or not, is a source of concern but not surprising. But we urge caution. Just as in the studies of impacts on human health, the scientific studies must be carried out with proper attention to the demands of statistical independence and integrity, and we know of many examples where this has not been attended to in Russia, so that the Finnish/Russian difference may be spurious.
Even more absurd than Yablokov's claim that Chernobyl increased death rates and leukemia incidence in the USA in summer 1986, is his discussion of incorrect and discredited claims on the effects of nuclear power in ordinary operation in the USA. He does not even quote them precisely. He quotes a report issued by the Department of Public Health in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts about the leukemia incidence around the Plymouth nuclear power plant, a subject which we have examined in some detail. The record is clear. For example Dr. Seymour Jablon of the National Cancer Institute showed that over the last 20 years, the leukemia rate in the town of Plymouth is close to the state average and to the national average. But for a short period in the 1980s the leukemia rate in Plymouth county, excluding Plymouth town, was 20% less than the state average. The discredited report to which Yablokov refers, (which has never been published in a refereed journal) arbitrarily took these years to show that more of the people near the plant got leukemia than those further away. But the attribution to the nuclear power plant is unlikely, and to radiation almost impossible. (Attribution to a nearby fossil fuel power plant is more plausible but also unlikely).
Yablokov's discussion of leukemia morbidity near the Trojan power station in Portland Oregon also suffers from arbitrary data selection and is incorrect. The leukemia morbidity near the Sellafield plutonium separation plant (NOT a power plant) in England is more complex. A small increase of leukemia (8 cases where one might have been expected) was noticed by Professor Gardner among children whose parents worked at the plant. This sounds bigger But is not) if it is called an eightfold increase. But this effect has been seen nowhere else, and had no obvious relationship to radiation anyway. More recent data at other locations finds no such effect, suggesting that radiation could not be the cause. Interestingly, Gardner also noticed an effect of similar size among children whose parents were farmers. This has not been explored, suggesting an anti-radiation bias among those who pay for or perform such studies. Such a bias makes it useless to claim that the frequency of such claims is itself evidence of a problem because the statistics are invalid.
Yablokov rightly states that medical statistics in the former USSR are, in general too poor to enable careful statements to be made. Recent increases in many maladies can be attributed to a near collapse of the health care system that had developed in the communist regime. There are some recent careful studies that have improved the situation in part. In 1990 we were shown data from Minsk showing a two fold increase in leukemia about 1986. It was suggested to us that this increase was due to Chernobyl. But 1986 was too soon for radiation induced leukemias to show up; and there had been little fallout from Chernobyl in Minsk anyway. Now,Professor Eugene Ivanov of the hematological institute in Minsk has carefully studied the question. The increase in 1986 was due to better reporting of the cases to the central authority; when local records were examined, the number of cases between 1980 and 1985 was increased, leaving only a small increase in 1986, clearly not attributable to Chernobyl. A small increase in 1990 in the high radiation exposure region near Gomel was compensated by an equivalent reduction in the high exposure region near Mogilev.
One of Yablokov's most bizarre assertions is that the inert gas krypton 85 could be an important greenhouse gas because it ionizes the air. Here he uses numbers to mislead rather than to enlighten his readers. He is correct that not much krypton 85 is produced naturally, so that the krypton 85 in the atmosphere is mostly from atmospheric bomb tests or from nuclear power. But there are many other agents that ionize the air and the fraction of the ionization of the air from krypton 85 is negligible, just as the dose to people from krypton is much less than the dose from cosmic rays.
Yablokov talks about a 1000 fold concentration of some radionuclides and suggests that this concentration in the ecological system had been ignored and underestimated. Moreover he implies that both the isotope carbon 14, and tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, concentrate by this factor. On both of these he is wrong. The international standards for emission of and exposure to, radionuclides include these concentration factors which have been measured. Hydrogen and carbon are two very common elements in the body, and whenever one of these is ingested or inhaled it quickly mixes and exchanges with all of the rest of the atoms of similar chemistry. This leads to very small concentration factors. (Possibly as much as a factor of five for tritium in some parts of the body).
Yablokov displays considerable confusion also in discussion of plutonium. Fortunately he does not fall into the error of calling it the "most toxic substance known to man" (it is not) but he does exaggerate its dangers. He is correct in saying that it melts at 639 degrees (Celsius) but since Plutonium is primarily dangerous to health when inhaled, it is more important to note that it does not boil until 3235 degrees Celsius - which is rarely achieved except in bombs, fires and a small part of the Chernobyl reactor during the accident. He is correct in saying that it burns - but so do many metals. The main problem is in machining plutonium to make a bomb small fragments fly off and spontaneously ignite. This happens with aluminum and uranium also, but these are less dangerous when inhaled. But Yablokov fails to distinguish between bomb production (where such machining is necessary) and nuclear power plant where it is not.
Nor does Yablokov mention that, at least in the west where there are available records, only one person has died from use of plutonium (and that in an accident in the military sector). This includes much direct handling of the metal in the hands of many scientists in the early days of 1945 when safety precautions were less. Thus the safety record of plutonium is exemplary and exceeds that of almost any other metal. We see no reason why this excellent safety record cannot be maintained.
The proper concern about plutonium is that the amount that has been prepared is enough to make a hundred thousand bombs. Five kilograms is enough for a "critical assembly" and there are a few hundred tons in the civil nuclear power sector. It is vital to be sure that these are adequately guarded against theft, and kept in a form that makes unauthorized use very difficult. This is the subject of several recent important reports of committees of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the American Nuclear Society.
Yablokov pooh-poohs the idea of burning plutonium in a reactor using mixed oxide (MOx) fuel. He is, of course correct, that by including some uranium, some plutonium is produced as some is burned. But there are two important results; firstly, the net result is a reduction so that the total inventory of plutonium is kept under control. Secondly pure plutonium, produced originally for military purposes is thereby diluted with fission products and made less available for bombs. If a complete elimination is needed a plutonium burning reactor, such as a liquid sodium cooled fast neutron reactor, can be designed to burn it up completely. Yablokov does not seem to realize that although present power reactors cannot burn up plutonium completely, future ones can be built to do so.
We have repeatedly urged that a technology not be considered in isolation but by comparison with other technologies. It is here that the environmental advantages of nuclear power become evident. Yablokov seems to recognize this but discusses the smallest of all environmental issues - the very small amount of radioactivity emitted from power plants in ordinary operation. Indeed there is a small amount of radioactivity emitted from all coal fired power plants because of the uranium and thorium in the coal. But the amount varies as does the amount of radioactivity from a nuclear power plant. If one considers only the amount of radioactivity in disintegrations per second, a well run coal plant with particulate suppression emits a hundred times less than a well run nuclear power plant. But the emissions from a nuclear plant are mainly the inert, noble gases which do not stay in the body. They also decay quickly. In contrast the emissions from a coal power plant include a small amount of radium - a bone seeker - and the lifetimes are over a thousand years.
More importantly, the burning of fossil fuels, and the burning of coal in particular, causes enormous problems of air pollution that make radioactive emissions pale into insignificance. These have been known for centuries. That air pollution from coal can kill people became obvious 50 years ago, firstly with an "incident" in Donora, Meuse Valley, Belgium where half the population got sick, and later when 4,500 premature deaths were caused by air pollution in London during December 1952. Although emissions have been considerably reduced worldwide, scientists at Harvard School of Public Health estimate that fossil fuel burning leads to 50,000 deaths each year in the former USSR - more than Chernobyl caused world wide once. Moreover, burning of ANY fossil fuel gives carbon dioxide and the potential for global warming. Nuclear power does not contribute to these, and replacement of ANY fossil fuel plant by a nuclear one therefore improves public health.
Prof. Yablokov is more nearly correct when he discusses economics, but here also he exaggerates. He confuses the cost of the military bomb program with the costs of a nuclear power program. The program for making nuclear electric power was not responsible for the irradiation of the Kazakh population of the Altai or the accidents and population exposures at Chelyabinsk. The economics of nuclear power must be discussed on what it costs NOW. A new nuclear power plant should not have to carry the whole, inflated, cost of MINATOM with its unwanted military complex. Russia must consider these separately. But a look at the economics in the western world can indicate the probable answer for much of Russia.
If the comparative environmental advantages of nuclear power are ignored and if the available labor in MINATOM is charged at world prices, and natural gas is discounted from world market prices, it will be cheaper in the near future to burn natural gas in new efficient combined cycle burners. In this Yablokov is right. But these are considerable qualifications, and omit the legitimate role for a great country to help countries that are less fortunate and to make preparations for the sustainable future that all countries agreed to in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. So far only nuclear fission, ultimately with a breeder reactor, is a demonstrated option for this sustainable future.
When there exists fear there will, in a free society, be those who exploit the fear for their own ends, who feed it and nourish it. Those who search for truth and believe that in truth lies future prosperity, and those who act on this belief, usually try to ignore such exploitation of fear. The exaggerated claims and predictions of doom appear in newspapers, both in the USA and Russia, and in the Congressional Record of the USA or articles by Prof. Yablokov. They appear more rarely in scientific journals. But as Prof. Yablokov himself points out the proponents of nuclear electric power must analyze the arguments of the opponents. A failure to do so will mean a loss to the world of this important energy source. We hope that this article, presented by us to the Sakharov Foundation and through them to the newspapers, will play a small part in this.
ASF Home PageASF page