MiniMe, You Retweet Me

Yesterday I tweeted

Lesson from Japan is not that nuke power is dangerous. Tsunamis are dangerous. Four lost trains are not being used to bash train travel.

and frankly, it got a hell of a response (according to my modest standards) of 28 retweets (and a couple of copy/tweet RTs) at the time of this writing. With that comes a few responses that disagree. I’m not about to get into a discussion on twitter, explaining the details I couldn’t cram into 140 characters, into a series of messages limited to 140 characters.

I have a blog for that.

I was chided for the comparison with the lost trains

People would bash train travel too if one of the lost trains exploded and caused 1250 sq Km evacuation

This misses the point I was trying to make. Trains wreck and even explode (I’ve linked to some spectacular explosions from trains) and yet people are not widely afraid of train travel. In this particular instance, nobody is blaming train travel for the loss of the trains — they blame the tsunami. Why? because train travel is normally quite safe, and it took an unusual event — a rare, massive (especially for that fault line) earthquake followed by a wall of water to cause these events. Nobody has a problem identifying the trigger. The earthquake caused the Fujinuma irrigation dam to collapse. Do we now question the inherent safety of dams? Is there a call to eliminate them? Do dams, or trains, evoke the visceral response that nuclear power does? How much area was evacuated in response to the tsunami warning — was it more than 1250 square kilometers?

The issue is the asymmetric assessment of risk (or complete disregard for risk assessment, in some cases). There is a false premise used by some that if nuclear power is not risk-free then it cannot be permitted. This standard is applied almost nowhere else, because it can’t be. You are at risk if you get out of your bed in the morning, but you’re at risk if you stay in bed — there is always risk. In the time that Fukushima Daiichi reactor #1 has been operating, the US has averaged more than 40,000 automobile deaths per year. Why is that tolerable? It’s because we don’t assess the risk in the same way. A large number of people (potentially) dying all at once evokes a greater emotional response than the same number (or even more) dying over a period of time

Part of it is the same reason behind being willing to seemingly spare no expense to stop terror attacks, despite the relatively few who have died from them. We have a similar reaction to the term “radiation” as we do to “terrorism.” But coal plants are famous for the amount of radioactive material they spew into the environment. Hell, bananas are radioactive, as are people.

The bottom line is that, according to the available information, the almost-40-year-old reactors held up remarkably well to the earthquake itself, and it was the resulting tsunami that took out the backup systems that are now causing the (quite serious) problems. But one has to put this in context of the scope of the devastation, rather than holding the risk up to an impossible zero-tolerance standard. Put another way: how many people died in this tragedy, and what’s getting most of the press?

8 thoughts on “MiniMe, You Retweet Me

  1. It’s always nice to read posts from people who think things through logically.

    thank you 🙂

    Josh

  2. More importantly that tsunami wiped out 10,000 people and previous tsunamis have been equally as deadly. And yet, we don’t warn people not to live on the coast.

  3. Thank for posting something like this. It makes me glad to know that there are smart people out there.

  4. I think you miss his point entirely. Anything about the evac range? Why should dams be equated with nuclear plants? Train travel is normally quite save, and even in worst-case scenarios it doesn’t kill 100000 people (some chernobyl death toll estimate). The radiation that can (and might be in japan) be leaked will not only measurable for the next decades, it will have real effects on the people that live there. Show me one train incident with similar proportions.

  5. @bob, what he said in response showed why the comment was irrelevant. The point he was making was that people are portraying the use of nuclear reactors in general to be the cause of the problems that have arisen due to a 9.0 earthquake AND a tsunami. Yet for other problems caused by the tsunami people will gladly accept that it is the tsunami’s fault. He even provided an example, pointing out that bashing nuclear power based on the fact that there are problems with the nuclear reactor (even though the problems were directly caused by the natural disasters), would be the equivalent of bashing train travel because of the fact that something bad happened to a train (even though it was caused by the natural disasters).

  6. @bob, Also, you pointed out that train travel is normally safe, but the same can be said about nuclear reactors. I cant even find a statistic that estimates how many people die a year due to nuclear reactors, which I am assuming is because the number is insignificantly small. and you are using the worst nuclear reactor accident in history (Chernobyl) to show the extremity of nuclear reactor incidents, but most nuclear reactor incidents are nowhere near as bad.(http://www.atomicarchive.com/Reports/Japan/Accidents.shtml)

  7. @bob That death toll is, frankly, absurd. In the actual disaster, 31 people died. Thirty one, all of whom were either workers at the plant or emergency workers in the immediate aftermath. The World Health Organization estimates a further four thousand deaths as a result of long-term effects.

    I’m not going to say that nuclear power is totally, 100% safe. Nothing on Earth is 100% safe. However, nuclear power is massively more safe than almost all other viable power. Coal releases more radioactive material than nuclear, and coal’s is in the air as opposed to in a solid state which can be stored. Oil and gas are nearly as bad. More people die every year because of pollution than from ten Chernobyls. Banning, or even being wary, of nuclear power is both short-sighted and ill-advised.

Comments are closed.