Bryan Appleyard has narrated this article for you to listen to.
There are three parties when it comes to global warming. First, the hard right, which says it isn’t happening, and even if it is that we can do nothing about it. Then there are the far leftish Luddites who would smash all power generation systems, allowing only wind turbines, wave power etc. Finally there are the suave centrists who know perfectly well that only nuclear can save us. This book will become their bible.
Tim Gregory is a nuclear scientist who works at Sellafield. He has a serious problem defending his conviction that nuclear is the answer: radiophobia, the terror people feel about radioactivity. Superficially, this terror seems well-founded. There have been some major nuclear power plant disasters: Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979; Chernobyl in the then Soviet Union in 1986; and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. Together they destroyed faith in nuclear as a safe generation system. The industry was stalled and still largely is.
This, argues Gregory, is madness. After Fukushima, only one death can be directly related to radiation – a man who died from lung cancer seven years later. The remaining 20,000 casualties were caused by the earthquake and the ensuing tsunami. Even the direct death count from the Chernobyl disaster only amounted to the ‘low to mid thirties’. ‘That’s about the same number of people who die at work in the United Kingdom every three months,’ writes Gregory.
In contrast, a city of one million people using coal power would suffer 22 deaths per week; using gas would result in two or three deaths per week. Globally, some 8.8 million deaths a year are caused by air pollution. Hydro power, however, would lead to one death a week, and a combination of wind, nuclear and solar to one death every six months. ‘I know where I’d rather live,’ observes Gregory.
Even the multiple nuclear weapons tests that lasted until 1996 seem to have made little difference to the levels of radiation to which we are exposed. The climax of this testing craze came in 1961, when the biggest nuclear weapon ever – the Russian 50 megaton Tsar Bomba – sent up a mushroom cloud seven times the height of Everest and the blast shattered windows 560 miles away. But, as Gregory shows, all such monstrous detonations only had a tiny effect on global radiation.
Even, after all that, you choose to live near a nuclear power station, your total radio dose ‘would be no more than the harmless natural background you’d receive by spending a day or two in Colorado or Cornwall’.
We expose ourselves to radiation all the time, not least to save our lives
If you believe Gregory, then the Luddites, the hard deniers and the radiophobes are doing a lot more harm than they can imagine. Powering a rising world population – now 8.2 billion – up to a decent standard of living is far beyond the Luddites’ aspirations. Only nuclear reactors could do this – preferably the breeder reactors which produce more fissile materials than they consume. In all, this should guarantee energy supplies for the next 900 years, by the end of which we can reasonably assume something either very good or catastrophically bad will have come along.
In the latter parts of the book, Gregory turns to the big picture. He might startle the average contemporary-minded and understandably paranoid reader by pointing out that the world has ‘enjoyed a period of unprecedented tranquillity since the end of the second world war’. He adds: ‘The spread of democracy and the growth of global trade no doubt played their parts, but it might also be the case that atom bomb deterrence, by frightening the world into peace, had a hand too.’ Perhaps, like Dr Strangelove, we should learn to ‘stop worrying and love the Bomb’.
There are many further reasons why we should learn about the numerous benign uses of nuclear science. Plutonium 238, a powerful but containable emitter of radioactivity, ‘lets us go anywhere’. Indeed, we couldn’t really go beyond the confines of our planet without nuclear power. Nuclear batteries have powered space voyages ever since 1969, when Apollo 12 touched down on the lunar surface.
In addition, we expose ourselves to radiation all the time, not least to save our lives. PET scanners send radiotracers dashing around our bodies and even the good old X-ray machine doses us with potentially dangerous ionising radiation; but, at current levels, it seems to be safe, or at least preferable to failing to detect a lethal tumour.
In short, Gregory’s case is that nuclear power is humanity’s only hope. Carbon dioxide emissions would vanish as an issue in a nuclear world and, I suppose, we could then get on with killing each other by more conventional means. His argument is powerful and it would be interesting to see a counter argument by somebody – certainly not a Luddite – who writes and thinks as well as Gregory. But perhaps there is no such person.
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