The Top 10 ProNuclear Arguments... Answered

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Now, let's come to the claim that a nuclear power plant itself releases only 3/10 of a millirem per year. Were that radiation dose—coupled, of course, with other fuel cycle emissions—truly always so small, I would hardly waste my time concerning myself with the hazards of nuclear power. But the proof that advocates of this energy source have no confidence whatsoever in their estimate of the plants ' releases lies in their behavior with respect to the legal radiation standards.

As late as 1979, nuclear power plants were, legally, allowed to bombard the public with 170 millirems per year. When my colleague Arthur Tamplin and I proposed a tenfold reduction in that standard, the nuclear industry and pronuclear government agencies fought us tooth and nail. Now it has to be regarded as the acme of strange behavior for an industry to say, "Look, we're never going to give you more than 3/10 of a millirem per year" . . . and then demand that the permissible standard remain more than 500 times as high as that limit! So I would say that as long as the industry fights against reducing legal standards to a level comparable to the 3/10 millirem per year that nuclear power advocates claim is the maximum dose per plant, any member of the public can dismiss such ludicrously low estimates.

(The legal standard was changed in 1979. It now permits 25 millirems per year of ionizing radiation to be passed on to the general public, under normal operating conditions! The Catch-22 here is that if anything occurs to make the operating conditions "abnormal", a nuclear facility is permitted to release an increased—and unrestricted—quantity of radiation.)

ARGUMENT 2: People living in high altitude cities, such as Denver, receive twice as much natural radiation as do those living at low altitudes . . . yet the residents of such cosmically bombarded locales don't display double the average incidence of cancer.

GOFMAN: The answer to this favorite pronuclear argument is that the cosmic radiation hitting the people in Denver probably does cause an increase in the number of cancer cases per capita. (One should not expect to find twice as many cases of cancer, of course, because radiation is not the only cause of the disease.) But to statistically demonstrate such a reality, we would first have to know [1] that the medical reporting of disease categories was equally accurate in that city and the sealevel community to which Denver was being compared, [2] that the people who are considered "at risk" in both communities had all lived at the same location all their lives, and [3] that any other carcinogenic factors—aside from background radiation—were identical in both areas. (Undoubtedly they would not be identical.)

The fact is that no expert in the field of vital statistics would be prepared to contest the point that Denver residents may be experiencing an increased cancer incidence rate as a result of cosmic radiation . . . when compared with otherwise equivalent people at sea level.

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