mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (04/20/84)
Discussions on energy needs, resources, and production methods often
are conducted like discussions of religion, ethics, or political morality:
with no fundamental agreement on the basis of argument. Probably
there can be no basis for agreement on these other topics, but energy
questions are amenable to research. Facts can be brought to bear, and
numerical analyses can be useful. There are many areas in which the facts
are not known and the theories oversimplified. Fundamentally, energy
questions are an aspect of ecology -- very complex feedback mechanisms
extending over time scales from microseconds to megayears. There is no
need to label people "pro-nuke" or "anti-nuke" as if that were a piece
of evidence bearing on the viewpoints discussed.
I seem to have been cast on this net in the role of a "pro-nuke" fanatic.
It is true that I believe the the rapid expansion of nuclear power is
essential to the survival of our civilization, but I arrived at this
position through no act of faith. Originally, I was an "anti-nuke,"
believing that the dangers of nuclear waste outweighed any benefits
nuclear energy might provide, believing that conservation and the use
of renewable resources would adequately cover our needs for energy,
and so forth. In fact, I believed almost all the arguments used by the
anti-nuclear movement (and probably before that movement became as
fashionable as it now is).
What changed? In my mind, what changed was the weight of evidence on
the consequences of the various alternatives; the costs and benefits
of using or not using each technology, and of using more energy or less
as a whole. I have come to recognize that we live in a world of natural
constraints that we disregard at our peril. These constraints include
the everyday perils of different technologies as well as the worst-case
perils, the probabilities of events as well as their desirabilities.
I give great weight to the following: "Small accidents throughout the
world kill ... 4 billion people in 2000 years. This is "acceptable"
in the sense that society will continue to exist... But if a single
accident were to kill 4 billion people .... This would be unacceptable
even if it happened only once in 2000 years (Risks of Risk Decisions,
Chauncey Starr and Chris Whipple, Science 6 June 1980, 1114-1119)."
I prefer the risk of a reactor being vaporized by a terrorist H-bomb
to the risk of a catastrophic rise in world temperature because we
burned too much oil. I prefer it also to the risk of war over declining
energy resources, which could also exterminate life on the planet.
I am posting in a separate article a list of some relevant references
from a single journal, Science, over the last few years. They are by
no means all of the relevant articles (in fact, I can't at the moment
find the one I most want, which deals with the production-cycle risks
of all technologies -- I suspect I put it somewhere "safe"), but they
are not selected for any bias toward one technology or another. These
references themselves refer to many other comprehensive reports, some
of which will be publicly available.
Let me finish with a plea to both sides of this discussion. No one
wants the world to die of radioactive pollution, or of overheating.
No one wants to go back to living in caves, or to go to war over the
energy supplies whose lack might lead us back to the caves. There are
lots of intricately interconnected problems relating to energy. Energy
can be used to create light as well as heat. Please try to use your
own energy to shed light rather than heat on the discussion. It's too
important for reliance on emotion and an adversarial manner.
--
Martin Taylor
{allegra,linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt