I'm not all that wrapped up in terrorism. A lot of things keep me awake at night, but terrorism isn't one of them. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what terrorists might do or whether they might do whatever it is they do when I'm around. About the only time I ever thought about terrorism was when my wife - we live a relatively short distance from New York - was out when the Twin Towers were struck. I didn't know if anything else was going to happen and I worried a little that she would be alright. Ultimately she came home, and we held each other and then we wept.
Of course, I am upset with what has been done to the Constitution under which I was born because of other people's obsession with terrorism, but beyond that, I don't expect terrorism will ever affect me. I could be wrong about that, but I look at the world in terms of probability. Let's face it, I'm more likely to get lung cancer from breathing soot, or a heart attack from eating too much of the wrong type of food, than I am likely to be killed by a terrorist. If you don't believe me, just look at the mortality statistics for the US.
In fact, if you look at the mortality statistics for almost any country - the unfortunate nation of Iraq not included - you will see that terrorism is not the threat to humanity that it cracked up to be.
For instance this arbitrarily picked up abstract suggests that in the Andalusian region of Spain, just a small part of the country, more than 7000 people died from non-malignant respiratory disease in 1997. If we assume that the rest of Spain is like Andalusia, we can estimate that 40,000 Spainards died from non-malignant respiratory diseases in 1997. This fact generated no headlines anywhere other than in esoteric scientific journals like the one to which the link refers. On the other hand, the Madrid train bombing in 2004, an act of terrorism that remains more or less unsolved, killed 191 people. If 2004 was a lot like 1997 in terms of respiratory diseases, a particular Spaniard would be 200 times more likely to die of a non-malignant respiratory disease than to be killed by a bomb on a train. If one normalized the matter over a decade, the probability of being killed by a terrorist on a train (or elsewhere) would be appreciably lower.
Nevertheless, I'm sure many people in Spain are upset by terrorism, just as many people in the US are upset by terrorism.
My failure to be impressed with the risk of terrorism came to bear on me yesterday, when I discussed the much ballyhooed risk of so called "nuclear terrorism". In it, I ridiculed the notion that a "nuclear terrorist" might get a hold of spent commercial nuclear fuel and make a bomb with it.
"No! No! No!" many detractors cried. "You have it all wrong! You have the wrong kind of terrorism! We're not talking about that! Strawman! Strawman! We're talking about a plane! A truck bomb! The terrorists are going to attack the Indian Point Nuclear station outside of New York City. The city will be wiped out! Killed! Scadoodled! Death! Death! Death! Destruction!"
One writer even asked me to look at a link from an organization called The Committee to Bridge the Gap that comes with a cool animation of an airplane crashing into a nuclear power plant and going "Boom!" It's narrated my Martin Sheen who must know a lot about nuclear energy, since he is a celebrity. The cartoon comes from an organization that wants to build big cages around nuclear plants, big bird cages. Of course, should someone build the bird cages, the people who demanded them in the first place will next insist that they won't work.
C'est la vie. Sigh...
Of course, I have a big problem with a cartoon version of reality, and I am never going to advocate bird cages around nuclear plants because of a cartoon narrated by Martin Sheen. I think that nuclear power plants are already the safest forms of energy on the planet. They are not risk free, of course, but on a risk balanced level, environmental and health losses per kw-hr of energy, they are the lowest risk that humanity can afford. In any case, humanity has much bigger problems than the one's that Sheen's bird cage might address. I think humanity will almost certainly die in vast numbers unless coal plants are not replaced by nuclear plants soon. Rather than build a bird cage around the Indian Point nuclear station, which might cost, let's say, 100 million dollars, I would rather spend thirty times as much money building another new nuclear plant right next to the ones at Indian Point. I contend that doing so will have in units lives saved per dollar a much greater return on investment.
How can I possibly say that? "New York! New York! Terror! Terror! Radioactive! Nuclear! Terror! Terror! Birdcage!"
Why am I so nasty and so mean? Because I'm angry, that's why. I have just watched my more than two hundred year old constitution, a constitution written by some of the greatest political thinkers in human history, a constitution that solved the question of Federalism, that solved of the rational division of powers, the solved the problem of checks on effective government that protects people both from government and from each other - the constitution left to me intact by my forbearers - trampled into the mud because of an imagined threat.
Now I am watching the atmosphere of my entire planet destroyed because Martin Sheen thinks Indian Point needs a birdcage around it, because a subset of people exists who believe that anything they can imagine must be real. (This reminds me: I fucking hate television sets.)
Gritting my teeth in clear anger, I am now going to contemplate - against my better judgment and with contempt for the notion that the discussion is even remotely connected, in probabilistic terms, with reality - a nuclear terrorist attack on the Indian Point Nuclear Station.
First let's review the Indian Point Nuclear Plant. Three plants are on the site, two operate. Unit 1, which has been shut, was a 250 MWe plant and in modern terms, would hardly even register as a commercial power plant. It was really of demonstration scale. The two remaining reactors are roughly each four times as large. In 2003 Unit 2 and Unit 3 produced more than 16 million megawatt-hours of electrical energy, more than the output of the rest of the entire nation from solar PV - and for that matter solar thermal energy. Unit 2 operated at 98.2% of rated capacity, and Unit 3 operated at 88.8% of capacity. The number of people who died as a result of the generation of all this energy is zero.
According to the anti-nuclear group that calls themselves the Union of Concerned "Scientists" (quotation marks mine) a terrorist attack on the nuclear station at Indian Point could result in 44,000 immediate deaths and 518,000 deaths from cancer. Now why they choose 44,000 and not 45,000 and 518,000 deaths and not 519,000, I don't know. Many scientists do error bars, but apparently "Concerned Scientists" do not.
Ed Lyman, who wrote the article, has a PhD. degree in Physics from Cornell University, and has a long career in professional opposition to nuclear power, beginning with the Nuclear Control Institute. Of course, having a PhD. in Physics from Cornell is very impressive and this makes him a "scientist." When I was a young man and was also, like Dr. Lyman, opposed to nuclear power, I was a member of the "Union of Concerned Scientists." Here's how I joined: I sent them a check. No one wrote to me to ask me whether I had ever thought about the second law of thermodynamics or spin orbital coupling in aromatic compounds, or the evolutionary genetics of chloroplasts or the relativistic implications of the precession of the planet Mercury. I was a "concerned scientist" because I wrote a check.
Well, Dr. Lyman, I want some more details. By what mechanism, exactly, do you come up with these figures? How, exactly, is this all going to happen, involving 518,000 and not 517,892 cancers?
Here's what Dr. Lyman writes:
Although the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) ordered modest security upgrades at Indian Point and other nuclear power plants in response to the 9/11 attacks, the plants remain vulnerable, both to air attacks and to ground assaults by large terrorist teams with paramilitary training and advanced weaponry. Many question whether the NRC’s security and emergency planning requirements at Indian Point are adequate, given its attractiveness as a terrorist target and the grave consequences for the region of a successful attack.
Mmmmm. That's frightening. Bold is mine.
So Dr. Lyman wants us to close Indian Point because of the risk of a large armed band attacking the plant. Well, that's become more likely than it was in 2004. After all the New York National Guard is in Iraq and unquestionably there is a huge risk of Al Qaeda terrorists armed with sophisticated armor piercing missiles advancing a formation up the New York State Thruway in a formation designed to kill 518,000 people (and not 518,001) with "eventual" cancers.
I'm sure too, that a large band of highly trained terrorists would be absolutely certain to distribute the entire inventory inside the nuclear power plant as widely as is possible. How would they do this? Well, they could blow apart the containment building a distribute all of the fuel elements widely into the environment with maximal aerosolization, right? That would kill 518,000 people right?
Well maybe. I certainly wouldn't want to trouble this "Concerned Scientist" with something like data, but actually there is experimental evidence of what a prolonged fire at a nuclear station will involve. Maybe both you and Dr. Lyman have heard of it. It's a place called Chernobyl. At Chernobyl, many, many, many megacuries of radioactivity boiled of out a hot molten mass surrounded by burning graphite raising a radioactive cloud that was detected around the world. About 100 km away, a little further than the distance between Indian Point and midtown Manhattan was the City of Kiev with more than 2,000,000 residents. That city was never evacuated after Chernobyl. It is still there. The population has grown since the 1986 destruction of the Chernobyl Nuclear Station, and the city is still occupied.
Here is the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation report on the effects of Chernobyl. Unlike Dr. Lyman's webpage, the UNSCEAR report has over 500 scientific references, many of them from the primary scientific literature.
It contains exceedingly dry tidbits like this:
- When hormonal levels, biologically active metabolites and immunoglobulins in 132Russian recovery operation workers were stratified by absorbed doses, no differences related to ionizing radiation were seen except for so-called biomarkers of oxidative stress, e.g. conjugated dienes [S8]. These biomarkers are, however, not specific for radiation damage and can be seen in several pathological conditions.
- In an Estonian cohort of 4,833 recovery operation workers, 144 deaths were identified in the period 9861993, compared with 148 expected [R13, T6]. A relatively high number of deaths were due to accidents, violence and poisoning. In nearly 20%, the cause of death was suicide, and the relative risk of 1.52 (n = 28) was statistically significant [R13, T6].
- A Lithuanian cohort of 5,446 recovery operation workers was followed regularly at the Chernobyl Medical Centre during the years 19871995, and 251 deaths were observed [K3]. Themajor causes of death were injuries and accidents, and the overall mortality rate of the recovery operation workers was not higher than that of the total population.
A lot of people don't like what this report says, they tell me. Not enough deaths.
For the record, Chernobyl when it happened scared me more than any other event of which I'd heard since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Had Chernobyl not happened, answering my questions, I would probably still be maintaining my membership in the Union of Concerned "Scientists." However the question has been answered. Nobody thinks Chernobyl was a happy event. No one, not even me, wants it repeated. Let me say too, that a similar event could happen through a mechanism I have not imagined, but if it does, it would never measure up to what climate change is doing right now.
I don't know how else Dr. Lyman expects Indian Point to kill 44,000 and not 44,233 people immediately. I suspect that he and Martin Sheen have lots of scenarios involving rummaging around in the so called "nuclear waste" pools, and piercing the spent fuel casks with missiles and so on. I'm sure it would all make for lots more cartoons.
Lots of people have worked for an outcome like the one that Dr. Lyman proposes. He doesn't propose a bird cage around Indian Point. He wants it to be shut.
Agitation to shut nuclear plants is always accompanied by grand discussions of windmills and solar plants and geothermal facilities and lots of biomass. But every single nuclear plant that has been shut because of public stupidity has not been replaced by any of these things. Every nuclear plant that has been shut by public stupidity has been replaced by fossil fuels. I have no ambiguity at all about fossil fuels. I want them banned.
Dr. Lyman and many of his supporters - some of whom are right here at DKos and who already hold a very low opinion of me and my rage - think that I impressed by the their imaginations but I am not. There is no way in hell that I am going to elevate the lives of 44,000 people who could die - if Indian Point were attacked by a highly trained band of terrorists armed with sophisticated weapons - over the lives of the 40,000 people who are likely to die this year in New York City from air pollution without any terrorist events happening.
Yesterday, the island of Lochara in India disappeared below the seas. Ten thousand people once lived on that island. The low lying nation of Bangladesh, with hundreds of millions of people is nearby. Those lives matter every bit as the 518,000 and not 518,411, people who Dr. Lyman is trying say that the terrorists will get when - and he doesn't want you to really weigh the word "if" - they attack Indian Point.
There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.
