mvs@meccts.UUCP (Michael V. Stein) (08/22/86)
[I said ] >>...With a total cost of about four million, the Rasmussen >>report still today provides about the best study of reactor safety. [Long quote from Carnes mentioning the Lewis Report...] >...Mr. Stein somehow manages to avoid mentioning that (1) the Nuclear >Regulatory Commission [NRC], the body that had commissioned the >Rasmussen Report, repudiated the Report's Executive Summary in >January 1979 and stated that it no longer considered the Report's >risk elements reliable; ... Although the Lewis Report rejected the *executive* summary of the WASH 1400, they also said: Despite its shortcomings, WASH-1400 provides at this time the most complete picture of accident probabilities associated with nuclear reactors. The fault tree/event tree approach coupled with an adequate data base is the best available tool with which to quantify these probabilities. This is exactly why I said what I did. >To conclude my contributions to this debate, I append some quotes: [What follows next is a quote by Beckman essentially espousing the theory that the best way of preventing a war is to be prepared for the possibility.] I am certain that Beckman's views on defense are influenced by the fact that he is an escaped scientist from the communist regime of Czechoslovakia. Yet your views, or Beckman's views, on defense have *no* relevance to a discussion of the risks associated with electrical power sources. [Excerpted quote by Cohen, showing his and other scientists frustration when dealing with professional activists..] > ...."When people wanted to hear from scientists, the [anti-nuclear] > attackers supplied their own: there are always a few available to > present any point of view. Who was to know that they represented > only a tiny minority of the scientific community. The battle was > *not* billed as a bunch of scientifically illiterate political > activists attacking the community of nuclear scientists, which was > the true situation. .... In responce, Carnes writes: > ...But scientific-technical debates are not decided by taking a poll of > the experts, as Cohen seems to want; nor should public policy issues > affecting millions be decided by handing the decision over to an > elite of experts and sidestepping democracy, as he also seems to > want. Get serious. Cohen is not saying that energy decisions should be left to physicists. Instead his frustration is with the political opportunism on the nuclear power issue. This frustration is most keenly felt by those in the field who try and contribute to the public debate. As Dr. A. David Rossin of the American Nuclear Society writes: Skepticism is healthy. I believe our nation is far better off than it was, because over the past three decades children have been encouraged to question. Blind acceptance is a thing of the past. But blind oppostion is arrogant and just dangerous as blind acceptance, perhaps more so. If there is a maturity to public debate on nuclear power, it will become evident when the public, and more important, the media who provide them with information, openly apply the same level of skepticism to the anti-nuclear activists as they do to the nuclear industry. Again, the debate is on the risks of energy production. The debate *isn't* on the maturity level of the nuclear debate. This next quote I had better include in its entirity: > "[From the fact that the US population will continue to grow for some > decades] it is often quite wrongly concluded that there is a > population explosion in the US. This is like fearing a flood because > the river level is still slowly rising after the spring run-off, when > a look at the dry mountains would reveal that what is really > threatening is a drought." --Beckmann, quoted by Tom Bethell in > *National Review*. [Get serious. If the current below-replacement > fertility remains constant, the US will remain overpopulated (given > current consumption patterns) for well over a century, for the US > population will continue to consume its environmental and ecological > capital at an increasing rate for decades and inflict much more > environmental damage per additional person than the typical > additional Indian or African. Yet Beckmann is worried about > *underpopulation*, even though no one can predict what will happen to > fertility rates, much less that they will remain below replacement.] I wonder if you even bothered to read the above quote before writing it down. Beckman is stating that the fertility rate is the key, not population trends. Population trends are merely the effect and are not the important issue. He certainly isn't saying that underpopulation is a problem... Of course the point is that even if what you are saying was true, it still has *no* relevance to this debate. [Final polemic by Carnes is a quote by someone named Bethel that there is little factual support for evolution.] I thought it was funny when people argued for the end of American nuclear power when the Chernobyl accident occurred. Now I guess Mr. Carnes is arguing that because someone doesn't believe in evolution that we should end nuclear power! From the very first message written on nuclear energy, I and others have asked for evidence showing how either coal or oil are safer than nuclear power. I have not seen any such arguments. Instead we have dealt with side issues. The first major argument was that commercial nuclear power was inexorably linked with nuclear weapons. As has been shown, this is not very valid. There are about eight ways of enriching nuclear fuel and reprocessing spent fuel rods is the most difficult. This is why *none* of the countries with atomic weapons got the "bomb" from a commercial nuclear reactor. In fact they all seem to have built research reactors to get their plutonium. The next major point was the toxicity of plutonium. Although there are plenty of sensationalism about the dangers of plutonium, the truth is that it is a hazardous material, like many, that we deal with in our society. One advantage of it is that, since it is slightly radioactive, very small amounts of it can be detected. When these two major points died down, Mr. Carnes went on the offensive with direct personal attacks on Dr. Beckman and Dr. Cohen and indirect personal attacks on anyone else who opposed his will. Hoping to later claim that the entire energy debate for the world centers around the work of these two researchers, he tried discrediting them. Thus, people have had to waste several hours writing messages to refute some strange energy claims from Ehrlich. (As I have had to show in nauseating detail, Ehrlich can hardly be considered an expert on energy issues.) I certainly wish that the nuclear issue did not have to be so polarized. Nuclear power is not an all or nothing answer. Nuclear power is simply an energy source. The best empirical and theoretical knowledge we have is that it is far safer than the alternatives of coal or oil. (By safer, I mean safer in mining, transportation, routine operation and waste disposal.) This fear of "nuclear" is unfortunately extending to other areas. (There have been proposals to change the name of the medical technique of "nuclear magnetic resonanse" to magnetic resonance - which is an inaccurate title.) But as Richard Carnes has noted, safety should not be the only criteria deciding energy policy. As the United States learned in the 1970's having your energy sources controlled by non-friendly countries is a dangerous path to follow. The coal miners strike several years ago, did not cripple this country precisely because we had sources of power like nuclear that weren't dependent on their control. Sometimes the environmental impact of attaining the fuel source is very costly, such as with coal. Some fuels are volatible and can explode with *mind-boggling* force - this is a clear risk when dealing with liquidified natural gas. Other fuels have only a limited span before we run out of all known reserves. All of these sorts of issues have to come into play when discussing energy policy, and I wish we could have gotten into them more here... -- Michael V. Stein Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation - Technical Services UUCP ihnp4!dicome!meccts!mvs