A question of timing - Part 1

I don't have any doubt that anti-nuclear campaigners take political advantage of nuclear crises while they are underway.

However, it seems to me to be actually counter-productive for the pro-nuclear lobby to have been continually talking down the seriousness of the problem at Fukushima, particularly in the early days when no one knew how it would pan out.

But this what the well meaning Barry Brook has been doing, not to mention those who are simply anti-Green for political reasons, such as Andrew Bolt.

Here, for example, is Barry Brook's opening comment on 11 March:

1. There is no credible risk of a serious accident.

A reactor building exploding and/or catching fire on TV every day since then does not, shall we say, seem entirely consistent with that.

Andrew Bolt had been running with "Chenobyl only killed 65", including on Insiders last week, but finally did a column explaining (pretty pathetically) why he was not acknowledging that the WHO expects the total toll to be 4000 "extra deaths". I see that the New York Times noted today:

The great tragedy of Chernobyl was an epidemic of thyroid cancer among people exposed to the radiation as children — more than 6,000 cases so far, with more expected for many years to come. There is no reason for it to be repeated in Japan.

If you're going to talk about Chernobyl honestly, this might be something worth acknowledging. (In fact, I see now, that he finally has in a post that has just appeared this evening.)

A few days ago, Andrew was also happy to quote from a Brook's column the words of MIT expert Oehman:

The plant is safe now and will stay safe.

Even William Saletan at Slate was complaining two days ago:

Early reports said four Japanese plants were in trouble. Now it appears only two were disabled. Early reports said three employees had radiation sickness. Now we're hearing only one is sick, and even in that case, the radiation dose appears relatively low. Two reactor buildings exploded, but these were explosions of excess hydrogen, not nuclear fuel, and neither of them ruptured the inner containers that encase the reactor cores. Some radiation has leaked, but according to measurements outside the plants, the amount so far is modest. Any leak is bad, and the area of contamination, even at low rates, will probably spread. Japan needs our sympathy and our help. But let's not exaggerate the crisis.

Doesn't that seem, after another couple of days of nothing under control, to sound like a pretty feeble attempt at putting lipstick on a pig?

Here's the lesson: with nuclear power, it doesn't pay to spend a lot of time downplaying a crisis until the crisis is actually resolved.

In all honesty, when you're evacuating tens of thousands of people within tens of kilometres from a nuclear accident, you just have to 'fess up and acknowledge that when nuclear goes wrong, it can really go wrong. At the very least, if you have nuclear anywhere near a populated area, it stuffs up the lives of a large number of people in a very major way. It may not end up killing any (or many) of them, but even so, they have a high degree of anxiety and uncertainty in all manner of things (safety for the kids to go back there, is the soil safe for food crops, are their houses now effectively worthless, can you eat the fish, etc.)

So, does this mean I have joined the nuclear nay-sayers club? No, not at all.

The pro-nuclear lobby is still right, in the big picture, and in the long run.

I still believe that nuclear power will be important to reduce CO2 emissions in the future, and the best moral argument to not abandon it is to say that, if you think the problems for people within a 30 km radius of a malfunctioning nuclear reactor are bad, it is likely to be small change compared to the suffering that the worst predictions of global warming and climate change may entail for a huge portion of the world's future population.

And people do need to be reminded of the huge, annually recurring, number of people directly killed globally in the coal mining and oil industries (not to mention the environmental damage of oil spills.)

But even so, don't start saying that yet. Once the current emergency is over, hopefully with much less radiation leaked than the worst case scenarios paint, that may be the time to start talking up nuclear again, emphasising the low number of casualties compared to other industries, and that there are ways that passive safety can be built into future reactors. (Not putting them right beside the ocean might help too.)

But talking up nuclear right now - it just won't wash.