Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. opines in the Wall Street Journal that Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford, has a more realistic idea for fighting global warming than any being promoted at the climate summit in Paris .. Increase by 1,000-fold the allowable limits for radiation exposure to the public and workers from nuclear power plants. Politicians in Paris might notice their host country ranks 20th in per capita income but 50th in greenhouse emissions. You know why? France gets 75% of its electricity from nuclear. France has waded forward even while, for reasons having to do with horror of nuclear war and atmospheric testing, the world has surrendered since the 1950s to an unfounded dogma that radiation exposure is always dangerous in direct proportion to dose. This is roughly the equivalent of saying a bullet fired at one foot per second has 1/900th the chance of killing you as a bullet fired at 900 f.p.s. (the actual muzzle velocity of a .45 automatic). Known as the linear no-threshold model (LNT), it underlies predictions of thousands of cancer deaths from Chernobyl or Fukushima that have consistently failed to be borne out. Sweden a few years ago finally acknowledged nearly a year supply of reindeer meat was needlessly destroyed after Chernobyl.
A Japanese survey in 2013 found 1,600 premature deaths from evacuation stress (including suicides and loss of access to critical health care) among those forcibly protected from exposures that posed little or no threat and were less than residents of, say, Finland experience on a normal basis. In 2001, American chief nuclear regulators cautiously admitted that excess cases of leukemia that can be attributed to Chernobyl have not been detected. All the studies have now concluded that exaggerated radiation fears have been crucial in driving up the safety, waste storage and licensing costs of nuclear power. But change may finally be coming .... a paradigm shift in how we think about nuclear risk.
Original URL: http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-nuclear-paradigm-shift-1449014295
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