Department of Physics and Harvard Center for Risk AnalysisHarvard University, USA
In a series of newspaper articles published in 1994, and in amore detailed article in the February 1995 issue of Novy MirProfessor Yablokov, a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academyof Sciences, describes what he calls the MYTHS of nuclear energy. There are indeed many myths about nuclear technology mostly becauseof the secrecy surrounding it and because of many complex technicalissues involved. This secrecy was justified in nuclear weaponsresearch and production but it cannot be justified and is evendangerous in the issues of nuclear safety and public health. In theformer USSR secrecy in these fields prevailed and the myths weremostly pro-nuclear.
From a standpoint of an "independent expert," ProfessorYablokov accuses the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy in creatingand advertising the new pro-nuclear mythology that is misleadingboth the public and the decision makers. We believe that anobjective expert must maintain the utmost scientific integrity, andbe careful not to give birth to any new myths. Unfortunatelyreplacing one set of myths by another is exactly what ProfessorYablokov does. And the new myths are much further from the truththan the old ones.
It is important to clearly understand the magnitudes ofpollution issues and to compare them. Otherwise it is easy to beled astray and to replace minuscule risks and dangers by muchlarger ones. Radiation and radioactivity are ubiquitous; we are allexposed to cosmic rays and both internal and external radionuclidesat all times. Professor Yablokov writes as if radiation andradionuclides in the environment were primarily due to nuclearbombs and electric power. This gross exaggeration of simple factsshows his inability or unwillingness to compare the numbers.
Professor Yablokov exaggerates right from the beginning of hispaper. He states that proponents of nuclear energy NEVER analyzethe arguments of the opponents. The very existence of this articleis an attempt to understand his arguments and analyze them praisingwhere praise is due, and criticizing where that is necessary. Wehave spent many years in this attempt to understand, analyze andexplain nuclear issues, and have written many papers. Each of ushas criticized the "establishment" in the past. But Yablokov'scomplaint about proponents of nuclear energy is true of some, andmay well be true of many, scientists and engineers in nuclear powerindustry in all countries.
In his article Yablokov continually talks about "ecologicalsafety" without defining what exactly he is talking about. He ismixing together such separate issues as occupational (workers')health and public health, threat to ecological systems and globalclimate change, nuclear terrorism and national independence. Let usconsider these issues one by one.
Safety of nuclear reactors is the first topic discussed byYablokov, and includes both occupational safety and public safety.It is important to be aware that there is no such thing as absolutesafety, and that an insistence upon it, which can only be a blindinsistence, can be counterproductive. We completely agree withProf. Yablokov's criticism of the statements of AcademicianAlexandrov, former President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences anda principal booster of the RBMK reactor. Indeed we have criticizedAcademician 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 canonly happen in a capitalist country where they put profits ahead ofsafety." That week one of us (RW) was lecturing at various Academyof Sciences institutes in the USSR. RW commented that this wasobviously a political statement and that it was vital that noscientist or engineer believe it. RW went further and commentedthat there was (and still is) a sloppy attitude to safety in allaspects of Soviet life, and predicted that if this did not changethere would be a really bad nuclear accident within a decade. Weare sorry that this pessimistic prediction was proven correct. Weagree with Yablokov. One Chernobyl is not only enough, it is toomany. 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 evendangerous, conclusions. Accidents have multiple causes; and theycan be prevented in multiple ways. While his statement that 30% to40% of all nuclear accidents involve human error is reasonable, toimply that human error is the sole cause, and that improvement ofthe technology would not help, is very wrong. It perpetuates oneof the myths about the Chernobyl accident that was put forward byAcademician Legasov at the IAEA in Vienna in 1986 - that operatorerror was the sole cause. While it was clearly the proximatecause, western experts even at the meeting disagreed and rightlyblamed the technology itself as much as or more than the operatorerrors. It has taken many years for western experts to convinceRussian scientists and engineers of the widespread nature of theproblem. This seems to have been achieved for the first time at theSakharov conference in Moscow in May 1991; summarizing the causesof the accident, Professor Adolph Birkhofer explained that a goodreactor design compensates for (forgives) bad operator errors. Butthe RBMK design does not forgive; it punishes the operator for hiserrors by exaggerating their effect. Andrei Sakharov knew this andsaw the problem as a general one for society. He realized that theSoviet system of the 1980s was incapable of managing moderntechnology; the secrecy prevented engineers from checking eachothers' calculations and making a good design and learning frommistakes to have a good operation.
Western experts certainly agree that the early Russianreactors, the RBMK and the VVER-440, have safety deficienciescompared with nuclear power reactors in the west. They should bereplaced by safer reactor as soon as possible. But western expertshave now accepted that Russia and Eastern European countries willrun these reactors for their useful lives and are helping both toameliorate the design deficiencies, and to train operators inpreventive safety measures. Contrary to Yablokov's specific claimthat correcting the design deficiencies is useless, correction ofeach design deficiency will, independently, reduce the probabilityof an accident. Implemented together, they will make thisprobability negligible and therefore acceptable.
While Yablokov does not discuss the matter in detail, wecomment here as we have elsewhere on the effects of secrecy on theunderstanding of the Chernobyl accident. Western countries havecomplained about Russian secrecy for 400 years, even before thecommunist era. Concealment of information about Chernobyl waswidespread. More was told to western scientists than to the Sovietpeople in general and to the Soviet scientists in particular. Oneof us (AS) was at that time a staff member of the reactor physicsgroup at Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute. Before Chernobyl, hewas actively lecturing about nuclear energy under the auspices ofZnanie society. After the accident, when the demand for informationwas at its peak, he was denied access to the data on environmentalmonitoring and was allowed to mention only the officially publisheddata. 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 theUkraine, Belarus and Russia are just beginning to emerge. Firstly,contrary to Yablokov's statement the doses to which people wereexposed can now be estimated quite well; for the most part theyare due to the long lived cesium 137 which can be well measurednow. However the short lived iodine 131, which was only measuredfor some people, dominates the dose to the human thyroid. As wenow know, there is a dramatic increase in childhood thyroid cancer,starting in 1991 in the high dose areas in Belarus, Ukraine andRussia.
The official report by the USSR that 31 people died in a fewweeks after the accident, all firemen or plant operators was almostcertainly incomplete. Probably several more should be added fromcauses not initially admitted by the authorities; militarypersonnel and even those who crashed a helicopter could be said tohave died from indirect causes. This is the extent of the directcasualties under occupational safety. However, since hundreds ofthousands were involved with cleanup operations, their occupationalhealth and safety must be considered also. The delayed cancerouseffect of this class is likely to dominate the occupational safety.
The effect on the public is harder to assess; no one got alarge enough dose to get acute radiation sickness; no one diedwithin the first few weeks. But on a usual pessimisticallyconservative basis, one can calculate the expected effect from thedoses. This leads to 20,000 - 30,000 expected cancers worldwide ofwhich about 1000 may be "attributable".
Yablokov is correct that there are better statistical data inthe US from which to judge the effect of nuclear reactors on publichealth, including the effects of nuclear accidents, than in thecountries of CIS. But he errs by quoting incorrect US data insteadof the excellent data that are available. In particular he iscompletely wrong in his discussion of the effects of the Chernobylaccident in the USA. We now know that the quantity of radionuclidesreleased from the Chernobyl accident was as bad as any expert hadimagined beforehand and therefore that the effect on distant partsof the world was as bad as could reasonably be imagined. In passingwe note that the Ukrainians were fortunate in the weather. Much ofthe initial release of radioactive material went overhead, and wasmeasured in the rest of the world. But it WAS NOT the worldcatastrophe that Yablokov implies.
Yablokov does not say from which US sources he is quoting butwe suspect that he is quoting from articles by Gould and Sternglasswho looked at death rates in the USA in summer 1986. We haveanalyzed these claims carefully, and published our analysis. Firstly, the increase in death rate claimed was for a few monthsonly, and not sustained as would be the case if Chernobyl were thecause. Yablokov mentions iodine 131, which decays over these fewmonths. But iodine 131 displays most of its effects in a delayedmanner - as the recent thyroid cancer increases in Belarus, Ukraineand Russia attest.
Contrary to Yablokov's implications, the death rate in therest of the world DID NOT correlate at all with iodineconcentrations worldwide. For example there was a change in theopposite sign in Canada in the summer of 1986. The changes observedwere in the range of normal fluctuations. The variations inchildhood mortality in the southern states were within historicalexperience. The data used by Yablokov were arbitrarily selected byGould, and the use of normal statistical criteria is thencompletely invalid, and the claims of statistical significance,become utter nonsense. Attribution of any deaths in the USA toChernobyl was, and is, impossible, even on a statistical basis.This, by itself, suggests to us that Prof. Yablokov does notunderstand the subject and cannot tell good data from bad.
The article by Yablokov gets wilder when he discusses theeffects of normal operation of nuclear power plants. Although he isnot specific on this point, he seems to attribute a number ofproblems to radiation from the power plants rather than to otherenvironmental causes. But he fails to make a case for this and isalmost certainly wrong.
The individual nuclear signatures of radionuclides enable usto have extremely sensitive methods of detection. We can detectquantities of some nuclides a million times below any level atwhich their radiations equal the natural radiations to which we areexposed. This exquisite sensitivity should not be confused withexquisite danger. While the sensitivity of nuclear measurementsenabled radionuclides to be measured all over the world, the claimsthat there were major, or even measurable, effects on health in theUSA are plain wrong.
Yablokov claims that much information about effects of nuclearpower on ecology have been consciously concealed. This may be truein Russia, but the extension to the rest of the world is notpersuasive. The concealment in western countries has been less,andfar less for nuclear electric power which has been in the civiliansector. For example Britain regulates emissions through theMinistry of Agriculture and Fisheries to emphasize the independencefrom the nuclear establishment and the importance of establishingthat there is no effect upon agriculture and fish. This ministrymaintains an outstanding, open, scientific laboratory at Lowestoftlooking at the way radionuclides are released and how theypropagate through the environment. This separation of governmentfunction may be a useful example for Russia to follow.
Yablokov's discussion on the effects of nuclear power on fishdisplays considerable confusion. Every thermal power plant hasheated waste water. This is often sent to rivers and seas. Theheat can have an important effect upon fish. For example, hotwater effluent from the Maanshan power plant in the south of Taiwanused to kill thermally sensitive coral until the water dischargechannel was modified, and at other plants fishes were deformed. But even the deformed fish had no appreciable radioactivity inthem, confirming the conclusion that the effect was due to hotwater not due to radiation. This effect, since corrected inTaiwan, could happen in any replacement power plant. In coolerclimates, the major effect of the hot water is an increase on thenumber of fish, as they come to the coolant effluent. This canlead to "fish kills" at the times the power plant is switched offand the water suddenly cools. Smaller fish are also sometimes drawninto the coolant intake and killed in the coolant water pumps. That there are differences in this respect between Russian andFinnish power plants, whether nuclear or not, is a source ofconcern but not surprising. But we urge caution. Just as in thestudies of impacts on human health, the scientific studies must becarried out with proper attention to the demands of statisticalindependence and integrity, and we know of many examples where thishas not been attended to in Russia, so that the Finnish/Russiandifference may be spurious.
Even more absurd than Yablokov's claim that Chernobylincreased death rates and leukemia incidence in the USA in summer1986, is his discussion of incorrect and discredited claims on theeffects of nuclear power in ordinary operation in the USA. He doesnot even quote them precisely. He quotes a report issued by theDepartment of Public Health in the Commonwealth of Massachusettsabout the leukemia incidence around the Plymouth nuclear powerplant, a subject which we have examined in some detail. The recordis clear. For example Dr. Seymour Jablon of the National CancerInstitute showed that over the last 20 years, the leukemia rate inthe town of Plymouth is close to the state average and to thenational average. But for a short period in the 1980s the leukemiarate in Plymouth county, excluding Plymouth town, was 20% less thanthe state average. The discredited report to which Yablokovrefers, (which has never been published in a refereed journal)arbitrarily took these years to show that more of the people nearthe plant got leukemia than those further away. But theattribution to the nuclear power plant is unlikely, and toradiation almost impossible. (Attribution to a nearby fossil fuelpower plant is more plausible but also unlikely).
Yablokov's discussion of leukemia morbidity near the Trojanpower station in Portland Oregon also suffers from arbitrary dataselection and is incorrect. The leukemia morbidity near theSellafield plutonium separation plant (NOT a power plant) inEngland is more complex. A small increase of leukemia (8 caseswhere one might have been expected) was noticed by ProfessorGardner among children whose parents worked at the plant. Thissounds bigger But is not) if it is called an eightfold increase.But this effect has been seen nowhere else, and had no obviousrelationship to radiation anyway. More recent data at otherlocations finds no such effect, suggesting that radiation could notbe the cause. Interestingly, Gardner also noticed an effect ofsimilar size among children whose parents were farmers. This hasnot been explored, suggesting an anti-radiation bias among thosewho pay for or perform such studies. Such a bias makes it uselessto claim that the frequency of such claims is itself evidence of aproblem because the statistics are invalid.
Yablokov rightly states that medical statistics in the formerUSSR are, in general too poor to enable careful statements to bemade. Recent increases in many maladies can be attributed to anear collapse of the health care system that had developed in thecommunist regime. There are some recent careful studies that haveimproved the situation in part. In 1990 we were shown data fromMinsk showing a two fold increase in leukemia about 1986. It wassuggested to us that this increase was due to Chernobyl. But 1986was too soon for radiation induced leukemias to show up; and therehad been little fallout from Chernobyl in Minsk anyway.Now,Professor Eugene Ivanov of the hematological institute in Minskhas carefully studied the question. The increase in 1986 was dueto better reporting of the cases to the central authority; whenlocal records were examined, the number of cases between 1980 and1985 was increased, leaving only a small increase in 1986, clearlynot attributable to Chernobyl. A small increase in 1990 in the highradiation exposure region near Gomel was compensated by anequivalent reduction in the high exposure region near Mogilev.
One of Yablokov's most bizarre assertions is that the inertgas krypton 85 could be an important greenhouse gas because itionizes the air. Here he uses numbers to mislead rather than toenlighten his readers. He is correct that not much krypton 85 isproduced naturally, so that the krypton 85 in the atmosphere ismostly from atmospheric bomb tests or from nuclear power. But thereare many other agents that ionize the air and the fraction of theionization of the air from krypton 85 is negligible, just as thedose to people from krypton is much less than the dose from cosmicrays.
Yablokov talks about a 1000 fold concentration of someradionuclides and suggests that this concentration in theecological system had been ignored and underestimated. Moreover heimplies that both the isotope carbon 14, and tritium, an isotope ofhydrogen, 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 beenmeasured. Hydrogen and carbon are two very common elements in thebody, and whenever one of these is ingested or inhaled it quicklymixes and exchanges with all of the rest of the atoms of similarchemistry. This leads to very small concentration factors.(Possibly as much as a factor of five for tritium in some parts ofthe body).
Yablokov displays considerable confusion also in discussion ofplutonium. Fortunately he does not fall into the error of callingit the "most toxic substance known to man" (it is not) but he doesexaggerate its dangers. He is correct in saying that it melts at639 degrees (Celsius) but since Plutonium is primarily dangerous tohealth when inhaled, it is more important to note that it does notboil until 3235 degrees Celsius - which is rarely achieved exceptin bombs, fires and a small part of the Chernobyl reactor duringthe accident. He is correct in saying that it burns - but so domany metals. The main problem is in machining plutonium to make abomb small fragments fly off and spontaneously ignite. Thishappens with aluminum and uranium also, but these are lessdangerous when inhaled. But Yablokov fails to distinguish betweenbomb production (where such machining is necessary) and nuclearpower plant where it is not.
Nor does Yablokov mention that, at least in the west wherethere are available records, only one person has died from use ofplutonium (and that in an accident in the military sector). Thisincludes much direct handling of the metal in the hands of manyscientists in the early days of 1945 when safety precautions wereless. Thus the safety record of plutonium is exemplary and exceedsthat of almost any other metal. We see no reason why thisexcellent safety record cannot be maintained.
The proper concern about plutonium is that the amount that hasbeen prepared is enough to make a hundred thousand bombs. Fivekilograms is enough for a "critical assembly" and there are a fewhundred tons in the civil nuclear power sector. It is vital to besure that these are adequately guarded against theft, and kept ina form that makes unauthorized use very difficult. This is thesubject of several recent important reports of committees of the USNational Academy of Sciences and of the American Nuclear Society.
Yablokov pooh-poohs the idea of burning plutonium in a reactorusing mixed oxide (MOx) fuel. He is, of course correct, that byincluding some uranium, some plutonium is produced as some isburned. But there are two important results; firstly, the netresult is a reduction so that the total inventory of plutonium iskept under control. Secondly pure plutonium, produced originallyfor military purposes is thereby diluted with fission products andmade less available for bombs. If a complete elimination is neededa plutonium burning reactor, such as a liquid sodium cooled fastneutron reactor, can be designed to burn it up completely. Yablokov does not seem to realize that although present powerreactors cannot burn up plutonium completely, future ones can bebuilt to do so.
We have repeatedly urged that a technology not be consideredin isolation but by comparison with other technologies. It is herethat the environmental advantages of nuclear power become evident.Yablokov seems to recognize this but discusses the smallest of allenvironmental issues - the very small amount of radioactivityemitted from power plants in ordinary operation. Indeed there is asmall amount of radioactivity emitted from all coal fired powerplants because of the uranium and thorium in the coal. But theamount varies as does the amount of radioactivity from a nuclearpower plant. If one considers only the amount of radioactivity indisintegrations per second, a well run coal plant with particulatesuppression emits a hundred times less than a well run nuclearpower plant. But the emissions from a nuclear plant are mainly theinert, noble gases which do not stay in the body. They also decayquickly. In contrast the emissions from a coal power plant includea small amount of radium - a bone seeker - and the lifetimes areover a thousand years.
More importantly, the burning of fossil fuels, and the burningof coal in particular, causes enormous problems of air pollutionthat make radioactive emissions pale into insignificance. Thesehave been known for centuries. That air pollution from coal cankill people became obvious 50 years ago, firstly with an "incident"in Donora, Meuse Valley, Belgium where half the population gotsick, and later when 4,500 premature deaths were caused by airpollution in London during December 1952. Although emissions havebeen considerably reduced worldwide, scientists at Harvard Schoolof Public Health estimate that fossil fuel burning leads to 50,000deaths each year in the former USSR - more than Chernobyl causedworld wide once. Moreover, burning of ANY fossil fuel gives carbondioxide and the potential for global warming. Nuclear power doesnot contribute to these, and replacement of ANY fossil fuel plantby a nuclear one therefore improves public health.
Prof. Yablokov is more nearly correct when he discusseseconomics, but here also he exaggerates. He confuses the cost ofthe military bomb program with the costs of a nuclear powerprogram. The program for making nuclear electric power was notresponsible for the irradiation of the Kazakh population of theAltai or the accidents and population exposures at Chelyabinsk. The economics of nuclear power must be discussed on what it costsNOW. 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 economicsin the western world can indicate the probable answer for much ofRussia.
If the comparative environmental advantages of nuclear powerare ignored and if the available labor in MINATOM is charged atworld prices, and natural gas is discounted from world marketprices, it will be cheaper in the near future to burn natural gasin new efficient combined cycle burners. In this Yablokov is right. But these are considerable qualifications, and omit the legitimaterole for a great country to help countries that are less fortunateand to make preparations for the sustainable future that allcountries agreed to in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. So far only nuclearfission, ultimately with a breeder reactor, is a demonstratedoption for this sustainable future.
When there exists fear there will, in a free society, be thosewho exploit the fear for their own ends, who feed it and nourishit. Those who search for truth and believe that in truth liesfuture prosperity, and those who act on this belief, usually try toignore such exploitation of fear. The exaggerated claims andpredictions of doom appear in newspapers, both in the USA andRussia, and in the Congressional Record of the USA or articles byProf. Yablokov. They appear more rarely in scientific journals.But as Prof. Yablokov himself points out the proponents of nuclearelectric power must analyze the arguments of the opponents. Afailure to do so will mean a loss to the world of this importantenergy source. We hope that this article, presented by us to theSakharov Foundation and through them to the newspapers, will playa small part in this.