I recently read an article in Forbes about nuclear energy and fear. Imagine There's No Fear -- Why We Are So Afraid of Nuclear. The writer spends a lot of time talking about ideas and culture. He suggests that the question of why people fear nuclear energy and radiation is complicated and bound up in a lot of cultural issues. He says that the idea of power and who wields it is part of the complicated mix and that nuclear energy linked into a deep cultural concern with the struggle between good and evil. According to the author, the idea that dangerous weapons that could rain death down on millions and the strategy of mutually assured destruction as a deterrent existed before nuclear weapons but nuclear weapons became the ultimate embodiment of these ideas. Then he says something that I consider to be very stupid “Nuclear will no more easily destroy the world than will coal, or drug-resistant bacteria, or terminator-GMO seeds.”
I had to read that sentence several times to see if it really was as wrong as it appeared to be on first reading. I hate to contradict a pundit for a prestigious magazine but this statement is just silly. Whether or not his rattling on about memes and the sociology of fear is worth reading is one thing, but this blatant idiocy of this quote is something that I have to challenge. I agree that the three other things that he mentions could cause widespread death and destruction in some circumstances but their threat is tiny compared to the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. A small exchange of a few hundred warheads by Pakistan and India which is a very real possibility could cause a nuclear winter that would effectively destroy human civilization. If the spent fuel pool for Reactor 4 at Fukushima collapses from another earthquake which is a very real possibility, the resultant injection of radioactive materials into the atmosphere will spread around the entire northern hemisphere of the earth and threaten civilization. While there are serious hypothetical threat scenarios that coal, bacteria or GMO seeds could cause much havoc and death, they are nowhere near as possible or likely as nuclear war or nuclear accidents.
The author then goes on to talk about what a great document the U.S. Constitution is and that it is a great framework for incorporating any new technology into society for the benefit of the people. So the U.S. needs to develop renewable energy sources and other green technologies such as nuclear for a stable and prosperous future. I have already said a great deal about the viability and dangers of nuclear energy in other blogs and I will have more to say in the future. For the moment, I would just like to say that I really resent this cheerleading for the nuclear industry under the guise of a sober assessment of cultural and technological trends. Contrary to the article I am citing, it is very reasonable to fear nuclear energy and to work hard to exclude it from the mix of practical future energy sources. The Forbes article is too long on sociology and psychology and too short on physics and technology to be taken seriously.
