The Power of Nuclear
Iona Italia talks to Marco Visscher about the importance of nuclear energy.
Introduction: My guest this week is environmental journalist Marco Visscher, author of The Power of Nuclear. I talk to Visscher about nuclear power. Among other things, we talk about how Marco himself came to become an advocate for nuclear after initial scepticism. We discuss the role of nuclear power in mitigating climate change. We compare the costs of nuclear vs renewables and talk about why renewables alone are unlikely to bring us energy abundance any time soon. And we discuss the issue of nuclear waste. Finally, we talk about the future of energy, in particular in Africa. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Marco Visscher.
Iona Italia: Marco, youâre an environmental journalist, and you used to feel that nuclear power was an energy source without a future, a technology without a future. But you have completely changed your mind about that. Do you want to talk me through the process, why you used to feel the way you did and what has changed?
Marco Visscher: Yeah, of course. Itâs funny because as I was researching this book, I stumbled upon an article I once wrote. This was published in the year 2000. And I was writing about a climate conference organised by the UN. And at that conference, the nuclear industry was present and it promoted nuclear power as the answer to climate change. And when I read my article, I noticed I was completely baffled. I thought, âWhat does this industry have to do at this conference where people are trying to save the planet?â I think the last sentence of my article was that ânow was the time to kill the nuclear industry before it could ruin the futureâ or something like that. So thatâs where I came from. I felt at that time very much part of the anti-globalisation movement. Naomi Kleinâs book, No Logo, was just out. I was out on the street sometimes protesting. So nuclear power didnât fit my worldview.
Then, as an environmental journalist, I wrote a lot about clean technology, climate policy came up, and I wrote a lot about solar panels, wind turbines, the coming of a hydrogen economy. And nuclear didnât have much interest. I felt that was an old technology, old and tired. We didnât need it anymore. It was too dangerous. And these big clunky reactors, we could do better. And then around 2010 or so, Stewart Brand came out with a book called Whole Earth Manifesto [Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, 2009].
Stewart Brand was one of the original environmentalists, if you will, leading the Back to the Land movement in the 1960s. He said he changed his mind on nuclear power. He said it wasnât so bad at all. Safety was not so much an issue as he previously thought. The waste was not so much of a problem. And we simply need zero carbon baseload. And thatâs something that nuclear plants can provide: round-the-clock clean energy. So I noticed that, but I still wasnât looking into the details. I still felt itâs not on the political agenda. Everyoneâs focus is with solar and wind. Thatâs the future. It took another seven or eight years before I realised climate policy is going really slowly. Global carbon emissions keep rising and rising. We need to do something more. And when we use solar and wind, mostly the backup comes from natural gas plants. So we still keep this fossil fuel industry going. Now thatâs an industry that can ruin the planet.
Here in the Netherlands in politics, there was talk about building one or two nuclear power plants in the Netherlands. And I thought, âOkay, now is the time for me to really look into this.â And itâs not that difficult. I remember thinking, âThis is going to be really, really difficult, right? You always have two sides of a story. Where do you begin?â But really, if you just pull out the established institutions, like the IPCC on climate change, they say nuclear power is a climate solution. You look at the International Energy Agency, they want governments to build nuclear power plants. You look at safety ⊠itâs so much easier now, partly thanks to Wikipedia and thanks to reports being up online, to see that many of the things we thought about nuclear power are just simply wrong.
II: So tell us some of the things that we thought that were wrong. Maybe we could begin with safety.
MV: If you ask 100 people on the streets, probably 90 or more will say that nuclear power is the most dangerous energy source we have because we think of Chernobyl, we think of Fukushima. But if you take a step back and consider that when you produce energy accidents happen, when you mine resources, when you transport materials, the waste management, of course, is a big one. And you tally up all the deaths that can occur from accidents and pollution. And you tally the deaths and you look at per kilowatt hour, you can see that fossil fuels rank highest due to the pollution mostly, but also a gas pipe can leak or can explode, a coal mine can collapse.
Not many accidents happen with hydropower, but sometimes a dam can just break and destroy complete villages. You look at wind and solar, there are very few accidents, very few deaths, and nuclear is at the same level as wind and solar. Itâs really down the bottom, all three of them. And this is in all kinds of scientific reports. If you look at Our World in DataâI love that website, they make it very visual.
By: Hannah Ritchie and Pablo RosadoBut we still think of nuclear power as something that can ⊠I guess people think that a reactor can explode like a bomb and they think it will hurt generations to come, there will be deformities among babies, there will be widespread cancer, but really this is not at all true. This was true in part when it came to the Chernobyl reactor, which was not a meltdown, but a blow-up. The reactor exploded there and people went to hospital because of radiation sickness. A few dozen people died fairly instantly, very relatable to the accident. More cases of thyroid cancerâthatâs another, dozen or so. These are all estimates, of course. And then over a lifetime, 60 years ahead or so, you look at a couple of thousands of additional cancer deaths. Very unfortunate, of course, and should have been avoided. But this is a disease that happens to many of us and we never know the real reason that cancer occurs because a cancer cell doesnât say where the cancer is coming fromâwhether itâs smoking or stress or alcohol or the Chernobyl accident.
We do know thereâs a lot of stress involved whenever an accident happens and we saw this in Fukushima. The biggest public health hazard in Fukushima is not so much diseases that are relatable to radiation because that is not at the case. UNSCEAR [The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation] has published reports showing that there are no discernible health effects from the radiation that was leaked from the Fukushima nuclear reactor. There are no additional cancers, no additional leukemia or thyroid cancer, no additional heart diseases, no birth defects, no deformities. And this will not happen because the radiation that came into the environment was low or very low. Thatâs what UNSCEAR is saying. And they donât expect any of these health results coming from the radiation. But it is very clear that there is a spike in all kinds of mental illnesses. Thereâs much more depression, for instance, more anxiety, but also more obesity. Itâs just there was so much panic. And the fact that so many people, 160,000 people, were evacuated and relocated: they lost their homes, they lost their sense of community. They had to build up a new life, they had lost their jobs. There was a social stigma. Some people even came up with a whole new family history with a new name, so as not to say to other people that they actually came from Fukushima. I can imagine if you live in a place where thereâs so much hype about the nuclear disaster that was happening, then you start getting these kinds of diseases. And this is what has happened, but itâs not due to radiation. Itâs due to our anxiety, our response to a nuclear accident.
II: Yeah, I was very surprised reading the book to hear how small the number of casualties was in disasters like the Three Mile Island disaster and Fukushima. That the casualty numbers are really quite insignificant compared to the level of fear and alarm and the perception of how disastrous those events have been.
MV: Right, yeah. And you can even wonder if âdisasterâ is the right word. In the Three Mile Island accident, nobody died, nobody got sick. There was hardly any radiation released. Radioactivity is all around us. We are surrounded by radiation. Itâs coming from below, from the ground. Itâs coming from our walls, from the building materials. Itâs coming from above, the cosmos. So if youâre taking a flight, for instance, youâre exposed to more radiation. Radiation is completely natural. If you go to a hospital for a CT scan or just a dentist, thatâs radiation. Sometimes you donât want to have a CT scan, of course, but the alternative is sometimes worse. But the radiation at Three Mile Island was so very low, itâs probably compared to a CT scan, a minor thing. So can you really say itâs a disaster? I guess it was disastrous for the nuclear industry. Thatâs certainly true. That took a big dent, of course. Other than that âŠ
II: Can you talk a little bit about the idea that there is no safe minimum dose of radiation?
MV: The LNT hypothesis: linear no threshold.
II: You tell the astonishing story of Hermann Muller, who was a researcher who worked on Drosophila fruit flies who radiated fruit flies and found that bombarding the fruit flies with massive doses of radiation caused genetic damage, which was inherited by the next generation, as we would imagine. He pioneered the idea of linear no threshold, i.e. that there is no safe dosage of radiation and he actually won a Nobel Prize for that work 20 years after heâd conducted the experiments. And in fact, in the meantime, the idea of LNT had already been debunked when he received the Nobel Prize. Do you want to retell that story for our listeners because I thought that was fascinating.
MV: Yeah, of course. Hermann Muller is an interesting guy to begin with. Working frantically on the fruit flies for many, years looking for... When he introduced the X-ray machine with the fruit flies, he noticed something dramatic happened, which hadnât happened in all the years prior, because he couldnât find any genetic changes. So he wrote a study about this, but the study was never published. He wrote an opinion piece instead, and that was published in a scientific journal. There were no references there. There was still no study, no report available. But he suggested that perhaps it was the radiation that was changing the genetic makeup of the fruit flies and possibly also in humans.
This was written at a time when in certain industries radiation was indeed causing workers to become sick. First, most of all, with X-rays in hospitals, the medical assistants or doctors themselves would test X-ray machines by holding their hand in front of the machine to make sure it was working: their hands suffered quite a bit.
