So . . . What Do We Do Now?
OPINION
So . . . What Do We Do Now?
Charles W. Pennington, MS, MBA
Jeffry A. Siegel, PhD
Bill Sacks, PhD, MD
October 2014
An opinion of what really needs correcting in our industry, and a
recommendation on getting "radioactively" involved in that correction
today for a better tomorrow!
Overview
As members and supporters of the U.S. nuclear industry, we have
experienced a rough and rather traumatic time over the last 6 years, or
so. But during the last few months, many of us may have begun to feel
that things could be turning our way just a bit. We see that small
modular reactors (SMRs) appear to be here to stay and that their
licensing is now firmly planned (while also realizing that the first SMR
is still at least a decade away). We see that a few large reactors of
conventional design have made progress in licensing and even
construction (while recalling that several times that number have been
cancelled over the last 6 years). We also note that the Waste Confidence
political and regulatory brouhaha seems to have been timely addressed
and, perhaps, resolved, at least until the next political onslaught to
stop nuclear energy. (Reid between the lines here, if you would,
please.) But we also recall that some of the regulatory analyses
produced to support the NRC's assertion of waste confidence showed that a
number of people could die as fictitious latent cancer fatalities
(LCF) due to exposure to ionizing radiation (IR) within a 10 mile radius
of a reactor that experiences a spent fuel storage pool fire. These
regulatory analyses using highly conservative safety codes included
several typical assumptions that are beyond credibility.
So it still appears that all is not quite right in our industry, and
the problem seems to be, at least to some of us, that our industry
continues unaggressive action, doing too little about the issue that
really controls the present and future (as it has controlled the past)
of the safest and most ecologically friendly technology for generating
central station electricity: nuclear energy. And that issue, my friends,
is public fear – fear of nuclear energy technology, because the more
basic fear of uncontrollable releases of threatening exposures to
cancer-causing IR is associated, almost uniquely in the public's eye,
with nuclear energy. The history of nuclear power, nuclear energy, and
our own industry, from the earliest years, demonstrates the growth of
this public fear, fed by the cooperation of bad science, anti-nuclear
politics and commercial interests, and the media. Some of this history,
with key references, was summarized at the Packaging and Transportation
of Radioactive Materials (PATRAM) Symposium in August 2013 in San
Francisco (Ref 1). Despite an enviable safety record and no demonstrated
LCF impact on the public from nuclear energy, even after an accident,
our industry has not been able to overcome a deluge of public
fear-mongering.
As an industry, we have nothing to fear . . . (well, you know the
rest), but the fear we must fear is that of the public. However, we
should also be at least concerned that this fear situation is not
static. It is most dynamic, and in a fashion that is not helpful to our
cause. There are many "researchers" that are now publishing extensively
on an assortment of new IR fear topics. It is stunning to see some new
"research" actually being peer-reviewed and published using data that
are highly questionable in their content or in the assumptions used to
mine the data, and then fitting these data to models that already assume
a linearity of fit (because the Linear No-Threshold hypothesis {LNTH}
is already accepted science, right?). The only best-fit of sometimes
questionable data is said to be the best linear fit, two errors in one
piece of research.
http://www.nucleartownhall.com/blog/so-what-do-we-do-now/
No comments:
Post a Comment