carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (08/20/86)
[Michael Stein] > If more proof is needed let >us tyrn the clock back to 1974 and the Rasmussen study. In 1974 the >Rasmussen study gave its draft study. This report was directed by >M.I.T. professor Norman Rasmussen, and involved over 70 man years of >effort. With a total cost of about four million, the Rasmussen >report still today provides about the best study of reactor safety. >For example, in order to compute health effects of radiation >accidents, over 140,000 combinations of accident magnitude, weather >type, and populations exposed were evaluated. The complete Rasmussen >Report is several feet thick. Ehrlich immediately said in an >interview that the report, known officially as WASH-1400, "should be >called WHITE-WASH 1400" 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; and (2) the Lewis Report, prepared by an *NRC-appointed* panel under the chairmanship of Prof. Harold Lewis and published in 1978, largely vindicates the Report's critics. According to Richard Sclove's review of the Lewis Report [*Bull. Atom. Sci.*, Feb. 1979, pp. 46-48]: "...the new study finds that although the Reactor Safety Study [RSS = Rasmussen Report] was a `conscientious and honest effort,' it nonetheless `greatly understated' the uncertainty of its estimates of the probability of severe reactor accidents, poorly described its analysis and results in its Executive Summary, and is generally `defective in many important ways.' The criticism of the Executive Summary is especially important, because it is the part of the RSS most widely read by the public and decision-makers. Among the Lewis Report's specific findings: [...] --The statistical analysis which the RSS performed in conjunction with its use of these logical techniques is flawed -- so deeply, in one instance, that it `boggles the mind.' --The RSS model of the consequences of reactor accidents requires substantial improvement. --The final version of the RSS suffers because its authors either evaded or failed to acknowledge a number of cogent criticisms submitted by peer reviewers of a publicly released draft of the report. [...] One broad topic is, however, conspicuously absent [from the Lewis report]. Although the report includes detailed assessment of the RSS peer review process, nowhere does it discuss the overall process by which the RSS was undertaken or the political manner in which the study was used by the NRC and its predecessor, the AEC. ...it is now known that the RSS was initiated in anticipation of an upcoming congressional vote on whether or not to renew the Price-Anderson Act -- legislation through which the federal government participates in the insurance of commercial nuclear reactors and sets an upper limit on electric utilities' public liability in the even of a major reactor accident. As the Act gradually worked its way through the congressional committee system in 1974-75, the AEC/NRC first briefed members of Congress on a draft of the RSS without disclosing internal criticism by AEC reviewers, rushed completion of the report to coincide with congressional schedules, and then presented the final report to the Congress without mentioning that interested scientists who had asked repeatedly to see the final document had not yet been provided with copies. ..." To conclude my contributions to this debate, I append some quotes: "To the contrary, a government bent on its one and only job -- ensuring the security and civil rights of its citizens -- might not attempt the futile task of keeping nuclear weapons from tyrannical and aggressive governments; ... it might rather take steps to defend itself and its like-minded allies from nuclear attack.... Such a government dedicated exclusively to protecting the security and civil rights of its citizens is, of course, entirely imaginary; real governments spend most of their time attempting to make everybody live at everybody else's expense.... The only effective protection from large-scale nuclear attacks is military strength.... Finally, the United States should vigorously promote and implement the policy that strikes at [nuclear] proliferation in the free world at its very roots: maintain a principled, determined, and credible military posture vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and other potential aggressors so as to make it unnecessary for smaller countries -- in particular Israel, South Africa, and Taiwan -- to seek nuclear weapons for their defense." --Beckmann, "International Nuclear Policy" in *Free Market Energy*, ed. S. Fred Singer. [No comment.] "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. Instead, it was represented as "environmentalists" -- what a good, sweet, and pure connotation that name carries -- attacking "big business" interests (the nuclear industry), which was trying to make money at the expense of the public's health and safety..." --Bernard L. Cohen, "Nuclear Power Economics and Prospects", in ibid. [The above is extracted from pages of polemics which portray nuclear scientists as the hapless victims of political activists with debating and media skills and victims of that all-purpose scapegoat the media, with all the knowledge and reasonableness on one side while the other goes looking for political battles to fight -- any battle will do, apparently. 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. It is attitudes such as are epitomized by Cohen's colossal arrogance that have been a principal source of public distrust of the "experts".] "[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.] "Contrary to the general belief, there is very little factual support for the theory of evolution." --Bethell, current issue of *Nat. Rev.* (8/29/86), p. 43. [Right, Tom, that's why few scientists today accept evolution.] Sorry to distract everyone with long-winded discussions of such trivial topics as the future of the human race. Now you can all go back to debating the important issues of our time, such as whether or not to boycott L. Sprague de Camp. Richard Carnes