The American Spectator

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Nuclear energy, set back for a generation by the deliberate arousal of unjustified fears, is appropriate to our current state of technological development. It is in an expansionary phase elsewhere in the world, notably China. Around the world, about 100 new nuclear power stations are on the books; in the U.S., three more are planned, of much improved design. We should build another hundred. No one in America has died as a result of nuclear power, but as my old friend Petr Beckmann argued years ago in The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, tens or even hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of our dependence on coal.

"What has Green anti-nuclear activism achieved since the seventies?" Peter Huber and Mark Mills asked this year in City Journal. "Not the reduction in demand for energy that it had hoped for, but a massive increase in the use of coal, which burns less clean than uranium." So we thank the environmentalists -- notably Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, Gaia theorist James Lovelock, and Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore -- who have accepted this claim. Even a New York Times editorial recently saw the need to keep "much-feared" nuclear power as "part of the nation's energy mix."

WHY MUCH-FEARED? This brings us to the half-life of radioactivity. I think the New York Times has to date failed to inform its readers of one crucial point: radioactive elements with a short half-life are dangerous and those with a long half-life are not. Uranium-235, for example, has a half-life of 700 million years. Plutonium: 24,000 years. In the body, a gas called tritium (a variant of hydrogen) has a half-life measured in days. So stay away from tritium. The Geiger counter is firing rapidly. (But only for a short time.)

Bernard Cohen, a retired professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh, offered to eat some plutonium if Ralph Nader would eat the same amount of caffeine. Nader, who had said that a pound of plutonium could cause 8 billion cancers, refused the offer. Later, Cohen offered to eat plutonium on camera if the TV people would publicize it, but they weren't interested. Yes, plutonium is dangerous, because you can make a bomb out of it, but its long half-life ensures that its radioactivity is not toxic for humans.

As my dear wife asks: would you rather sit on a bucket of firecrackers if half will go off in the next hour? Or a bucket in which half will go off in the next 10,000 years?

Yet the long half-life of radioactive material is usually cited as damning testimony. It isn't. The key variable is the rate at which radiating particles strike the body. At a low rate they are harmless -- may even be beneficial. Natural background radiation subjects us all to that anyway. Unfortunately, government policy decrees that there is no safe level of radiation, and in so doing it created a rationale for the anti-nukes to oppose any and all man-made radiation, even when it is lower than found naturally in places where uranium is abundant. Such as the Rockies (where cancer rates are lower than elsewhere).

The President ought to campaign to have this "no safe level" rule changed. His apparent unwillingness to do so no doubt explains why Nevada politicians are unwilling to play host to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

To be sure, collecting spent nuclear fuel in one place does increase the relative hazard; and that is a valid argument against the U.S. policy of putting all spent fuel in one place. But most of this material has been cooling off for so long -- it has been kept at the power plants where it was created -- that it is scarcely dangerous at all. Within ten years, 99 percent of all radioactivity disappears. But the most important reason for the lack of political cooperation in Nevada is the decades of misinformation to which we have all been subjected. Maybe some of the green leaders could pay them a visit? It is important, because the expansion of nuclear power will depend on the creation of a spent-fuel depository that is politically acceptable.

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John McCain, Environment, Global Warming, Books, Hollywood, NATO, Energy, Oil