Chernobyl has made people hypersensitive to nuke plants

By Gwynne Dyer

"The danger is that what we are doing, especially if the Chinese burn all of their coal, is putting so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as to raise the possibility of a runaway warm- up to a new stable state. I don't mean it will kill everything off, but it will be a new stable state where global temperatures are more like an average of 25 Centigrade, which would make an awful lot of the planet desperately uncomfortable."

-- James Lovelock, August 1995

LONDON (JP): James Lovelock is probably the most important scientist of his generation. Twenty years ago he formulated the `Gaia' hypothesis: that Earth's life-friendly environment has been shaped, and is kept stable, by the living species that depend upon it. The concept was soon hijacked by the Greens and New Agers who use it as a mere metaphor for Mother Earth, but the theory itself is strictly scientific.

Arguing from purely Darwinian principles, Lovelock maintains that the Earth's plants, animals, and microscopic life have vital chemical functions, controlled mainly by feedback mechanisms, that keep key factors like the salinity of the oceans and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (crucial to global temperature control) within livable limits. So it's not surprising that he backs nuclear power, whose chemical by-products have a low environmental impact.

It's ten years since the Number Four reactor at Chernobyl exploded on April 26, 1986, starting a fire that burned in the reactor core for nine days and spewed 200 times the combined radiation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs into the atmosphere. Stand by for a torrent of outrage about the dangers of nuclear power.

Some of the outrage is justified. It is outrageous that 15 other reactors of the same unreliable RBMK type are still operating in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania, including two on the Chernobyl site. It is outrageous that 12 other Russian reactors of another flawed design, the older generation VVERs, remain in operation in Russia, Armenia (on an earthquake fault), Slovakia and Bulgaria.

After that, however, the outrage rapidly slides into the gulf of ignorance about risk perception, and about the difference between local and global risks.

The local damage from the Chernobyl calamity was severe. Even ten years later hardly anybody enters the `Zone of Alienation' around Chernobyl except the people running the remaining reactors (and they don't stay overnight).

In the large `Purple Zone' around Chernobyl, where the soil is contaminated but the residents have returned, there are two million children -- and UNICEF reports a 38 percent increase in the number of children suffering malignant tumors and bone disorders.

But does this mean that nuclear power poses unacceptable risks? Only if you believe that other means of generating power have no consequences for people's health. You also have to ignore the global environmental effects of burning coal, which is still nuclear power's main rival for generating electricity.

Estimates of the deaths directly caused by radioactive contamination from Chernobyl vary widely, but Dr. David Marples of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton believes the figure is at least 6,000. That is close to the number of people who die each year from coal-mining accidents and miners' diseases like emphysema.

This is where risk perception distorts the equation. The miners' death are an annual event, and so they are discounted. A single nuclear accident of comparable scale, once in the 40-year history of nuclear power generation, gets far more attention.

Moreover, miners' deaths mostly occur within relatively isolated mining communities, whereas a nuclear accident strikes at the general public. And the wider health consequences of burning megatons of coal for electricity, in terms of pumping pollutants and carcinogenic substances into the atmosphere, are so hard to trace, in terms of any individual's illness, that they are simply ignored.

But the global consequences of favoring coal over nuclear power are what really frighten James Lovelock. When I met him recently, he was deeply pessimistic about the short-term future of humanity.

"Why do the Greens all fret about nuclear power?" he asked. "It could actually be a boon in every sense of the word. The worst thing that could happen with nuclear power is that it would kill some people -- which sounds a terrible thing to say, but it would relieve the pressures on the planet. Whereas burning coal will kill us all, or has the danger of doing so."

Lovelock's point is that the Earth shifts between three stable temperature regimes in this geological epoch. Most of the time, it is in a relatively cool, glacial regime with average global temperature around 10C (50F). For brief periods during the interglacial era, it warms to about 15C (60F). (The present inter-glacial era began around 10,000 years ago). But it can also run away to a hot stable state around 25C (77F), and stay there for a long time.

The worst time at which to be pumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is during an unstable inter-glacial period like the present. It is not clear how much is needed to trigger a run-away effect, but we really do not want to find out. Yet our population will grow by 80 percent in the next half century, our power demands will soar threefold or more -- and on current form, we will generate most of it by burning coal.

The real tragedy of Chernobyl is that it has made people hyper-sensitive to the risks of nuclear power while they remain blind to the graver risks of `conventional' coal-fired power stations. In the past ten years, for example, not one new nuclear power station has been ordered in North America. If this goes on, we are in deep trouble.