coal

Nuclear power is safe. Why don’t people like it?

pnrj ethics, heuristics and biases, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 24, JDN 2457656

This post will have two parts, corresponding to each sentence. First, I hope to convince you that nuclear power is safe. Second, I’ll try to analyze some of the reasons why people don’t like it and what we might be able to do about that.

Depending on how familiar you are with the statistics on nuclear power, the idea that nuclear power is safe may strike you as either a completely ridiculous claim or an egregious understatement. If your primary familiarity with nuclear power safety is via the widely-publicized examples of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and more recently Fukushima, you may have the impression that nuclear power carries huge, catastrophic risks. (You may also be confusing nuclear power with nuclear weapons—nuclear weapons are indeed the greatest catastrophic risk on Earth today, but equating the two is like equating automobiles and machine guns because both of them are made of metal and contain lubricant, flammable materials, and springs.)

But in fact nuclear energy is astonishingly safe. Indeed, even those examples aren’t nearly as bad as people have been led to believe. Guess how many people died as a result of Three Mile Island, including estimated increased cancer deaths from radiation exposure?

Zero. There are zero confirmed deaths and the consensus estimate of excess deaths caused by the Three Mile Island incident by all causes combined is zero.

What about Fukushima? Didn’t 10,000 people die there? From the tsunami, yes. But the nuclear accident resulted in zero fatalities. If anything, those 10,000 people were killed by coal—by climate change. They certainly weren’t killed by nuclear.

Chernobyl, on the other hand, did actually kill a lot of people. Chernobyl caused 31 confirmed direct deaths, as well as an estimated 4,000 excess deaths by all causes. On the one hand, that’s more than 9/11; on the other hand, it’s about a month of US car accidents. Imagine if people had the same level of panic and outrage at automobiles after a month of accidents that they did at nuclear power after Chernobyl.

The vast majority of nuclear accidents cause zero fatalities; other than Chernobyl, none have ever caused more than 10. Deepwater Horizon killed 11 people, and yet for some reason Americans did not unite in opposition against ever using oil (or even offshore drilling!) ever again.

In fact, even that isn’t fair to nuclear power, because we’re not including the thousands of lives saved every year by using nuclear instead of coal and oil.

Keep in mind, the WHO estimates 10 to 100 million excess deaths due to climate change over the 21st century. That’s an average of 100,000 to 1 million deaths every year. Nuclear power currently produces about 11% of the world’s energy, so let’s do a back-of-the-envelope calculation for how many lives that’s saving. Assuming that additional climate change would be worse in direct proportion to the additional carbon emissions (which is conservative), and assuming that half that energy would be replaced by coal or oil (also conservative, using Germany’s example), we’re looking at about a 6% increase in deaths due to climate change if all those nuclear power plants were closed. That’s 6,000 to 60,000 lives that nuclear power plants save every year.

I also haven’t included deaths due to pollution—note that nuclear power plants don’t pollute air or water whatsoever, and only produce very small amounts of waste that can be quite safely stored. Air pollution in all its forms is responsible for one in eight deaths worldwide. Let me say that again: One in eight of all deaths in the world is caused by air pollution—so this is on the order of 7 million deaths per year, every year. We burn our way to a biannual Holocaust. Most of this pollution is actually caused by burning wood—fireplaces, wood stoves, and bonfires are terrible for the air—and many countries would actually see a substantial reduction in their toxic pollution if they switched to oil or even coal in favor of wood. But a large part of that pollution is caused by coal, and a nontrivial amount is caused by oil. Coal-burning factories and power plants are responsible for about 1 million deaths per year in China alone. Most of that pollution could be prevented if those power plants were nuclear instead.

Factor all that in, and nuclear power currently saves tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives per year, and expanding it to replace all fossil fuels could save millions more. Indeed, a more precise estimate of the benefits of nuclear power published a few years ago in Environmental Science and Technology is that nuclear power plants have saved some 1.8 million human lives since their invention, putting them on a par with penicillin and the polio vaccine.

So, I hope I’ve convinced you of the first proposition: Nuclear power plants are safe—and not just safe, but heroic, in fact one of the greatest life-saving technologies ever invented. So, why don’t people like them?

Unfortunately, I suspect that no amount of statistical data by itself will convince those who still feel a deep-seated revulsion to nuclear power. Even many environmentalists, people who could be nuclear energy’s greatest advocates, are often opposed to it. I read all the way through Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything and never found even a single cogent argument against nuclear power; she simply takes it as obvious that nuclear power is “more of the same line of thinking that got us in this mess”. Perhaps because nuclear power could be enormously profitable for certain corporations (which is true; but then, it’s also true of solar and wind power)? Or because it also fits this narrative of “raping and despoiling the Earth” (sort of, I guess)? She never really does explain; I’m guessing she assumes that her audience will simply share her “gut feeling” intuition that nuclear power is dangerous and untrustworthy. One of the most important inconvenient truths for environmentalists is that nuclear power is not only safe, it is almost certainly our best hope for stopping climate change.

Perhaps all this is less baffling when we recognize that other heroic technologies are often also feared or despised for similarly bizarre reasons—vaccines, for instance.

First of all, human beings fear what we cannot understand, and while the human immune system is certainly immensely complicated, nuclear power is based on quantum mechanics, a realm of scientific knowledge so difficult and esoteric that it is frequently used as the paradigm example of something that is hard to understand. (As Feynman famously said, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”) Nor does it help that popular treatments of quantum physics typically bear about as much resemblance to the actual content of the theory as the X-Men films do to evolutionary biology, and con artists like Deepak Chopra take advantage of this confusion to peddle their quackery.

Nuclear radiation is also particularly terrifying because it is invisible and silent; while a properly-functioning nuclear power plant emits less ionizing radiation than the Capitol Building and eating a banana poses substantially higher radiation risk than talking on a cell phone, nonetheless there is real danger posed by ionizing radiation, and that danger is particularly terrifying because it takes a form that human senses cannot detect. When you are burned by fire or cut by a knife, you know immediately; but gamma rays could be coursing through you right now and you’d feel no different. (Huge quantities of neutrinos are coursing through you, but fear not, for they’re completely harmless.) The symptoms of severe acute radiation poisoning also take a particularly horrific form: After the initial phase of nausea wears off, you can enter a “walking ghost phase”, where your eventual death is almost certain due to your compromised immune and digestive systems, but your current condition is almost normal. This makes the prospect of death by nuclear accident a particularly vivid and horrible image.

Vividness makes ideas more available to our memory; and thus, by the availability heuristic, we automatically infer that it must be more probable than it truly is. You can think of horrific nuclear accidents like Chernobyl, and all the carnage they caused; but all those millions of people choking to death in China don’t make for a compelling TV news segment (or at least, our TV news doesn’t seem to think so). Vividness doesn’t actually seem to make things more persuasive, but it does make them more memorable.

Yet even if we allow for the possibility that death by radiation poisoning is somewhat worse than death by coal pollution (if I had to choose between the two, okay, maybe I’d go with the coal), surely it’s not ten thousand times worse? Surely it’s not worth sacrificing entire cities full of people to coal in order to prevent a handful of deaths by nuclear energy?

Another reason that has been proposed is a sense that we can control risk from other sources, but a nuclear meltdown would be totally outside our control. Perhaps that is the perception, but if you think about it, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense. If there’s a nuclear meltdown, emergency services will report it, and you can evacuate the area. Yes, the radiation moves at the speed of light; but it also dissipates as the inverse square of distance, so if you just move further away you can get a lot safer quite quickly. (Think about the brightness of a lamp in your face versus across a football field. Radiation works the same way.) The damage is also cumulative, so the radiation risk from a meltdown is only going to be serious if you stay close to the reactor for a sustained period of time. Indeed, it’s much easier to avoid nuclear radiation than it is to avoid air pollution; you can’t just stand behind a concrete wall to shield against air pollution, and moving further away isn’t possible if you don’t know where it’s coming from. Control would explain why we fear cars less than airplanes (which is also statistically absurd), but it really can’t explain why nuclear power scares people more than coal and oil.

Another important factor may be an odd sort of bipartisan consensus: While the Left hates nuclear power because it makes corporations profitable or because it’s unnatural and despoils the Earth or something, the Right hates nuclear power because it requires substantial government involvement and might displace their beloved fossil fuels. (The Right’s deep, deep love of the fossil fuel industry now borders on the pathological. Even now that they are obviously economically inefficient and environmentally disastrous, right-wing parties around the world continue to defend enormous subsidies for oil and coal companies. Corruption and regulatory capture could partly explain this, but only partly. Campaign contributions can’t explain why someone would write a book praising how wonderful fossil fuels are and angrily denouncing anyone who would dare criticize them.) So while the two sides may hate each other in general and disagree on most other issues—including of course climate change itself—they can at least agree that nuclear power is bad and must be stopped.

Where do we go from here, then? I’m not entirely sure. As I said, statistical data by itself clearly won’t be enough. We need to find out what it is that makes people so uniquely terrified of nuclear energy, and we need to find a way to assuage those fears.

And we must do this now. For every day we don’t—every day we postpone the transition to a zero-carbon energy grid—is another thousand people dead.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people refuse to do cost-benefit analysis

pnrj core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 27, JDN 2457597

My title is based on a famous quote often attributed to Edmund Burke, but which we have no record of him actually saying:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

The closest he actually appears to have written is this:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Burke’s intended message was about the need for cooperation and avoiding diffusion of responsibility; then his words were distorted into a duty to act against evil in general.

But my point today is going to be a little bit more specific: A great deal of real-world evils would be eliminated if good people were more willing to engage in cost-benefit analysis.

As discussed on Less Wrong awhile back, there is a common “moral” saying which comes from the Talmud (if not earlier; and of course it’s hardly unique to Judaism), which gives people a great warm and fuzzy glow whenever they say it:

Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he had saved the whole world.

Yet this is in fact the exact opposite of moral. It is a fundamental, insane perversion of morality. It amounts to saying that “saving a life” is just a binary activity, either done or not, and once you’ve done it once, congratulations, you’re off the hook for the other 7 billion. All those other lives mean literally nothing, once you’ve “done your duty”.

Indeed, it would seem to imply that you can be a mass murderer, as long as you save someone else somewhere along the line. If Mao Tse-tung at some point stopped someone from being run over by a car, it’s okay that his policies killed more people than the population of Greater Los Angeles.

Conversely, if anything you have ever done has resulted in someone’s death, you’re just as bad as Mao; in fact if you haven’t also saved someone somewhere along the line and he has, you’re worse.

Maybe this is how you get otherwise-intelligent people saying such insanely ridiculous things as “George W. Bush’s crimes are uncontroversially worse than Osama bin Laden’s.” (No, probably not, since Chomsky at least feigns something like cost-benefit analysis. I’m not sure what his failure mode is, but it’s probably not this one in particular. “Uncontroversially”… you keep using that word…)

Cost-benefit analysis is actually a very simple concept (though applying it in practice can be mind-bogglingly difficult): Try to maximize the good things minus the bad things. If an action would increase good things more than bad things, do it; if it would increase bad things more than good things, don’t do it.

What it replaces is simplistic deontological reasoning about “X is always bad” or “Y is always good”; that’s almost never true. Even great evils can be justified by greater goods, and many goods are not worth having because of the evils they would require to achieve. We seem to want all our decisions to have no downside, perhaps because that would resolve our cognitive dissonance most easily; but in the real world, most decisions have an upside and a downside, and it’s a question of which is larger.

Why is it that so many people—especially good people—have such an aversion to cost-benefit analysis?

I gained some insight into this by watching a video discussion from an online Harvard course taught by Michael Sandel (which is free, by the way, if you’d like to try it out). He was leading the discussion Socratically, which is in general a good method of teaching—but like anything else can be used to teach things that are wrong, and is in some ways more effective at doing so because it has a way of making students think they came up with the answers on their own. He says something like, “Do we really want our moral judgments to be based on cost-benefit analysis?” and gives some examples where people made judgments using cost-benefit analysis to support his suggestion that this is something bad.

But of course his examples are very specific: They all involve corporations using cost-benefit analysis to maximize profits. One of them is the Ford Pinto case, where Ford estimated the cost to them of a successful lawsuit, multiplied by the probability of such lawsuits, and then compared that with the cost of a total recall. Finding that the lawsuits were projected to be cheaper, they opted for that result, and thereby allowed several people to be killed by their known defective product.

Now, it later emerged that Ford Pintos were not actually especially dangerous, and in fact Ford didn’t just include lawsuits but also a standard estimate of the “value of a statistical human life”, and as a result of that their refusal to do the recall was probably the completely correct decision—but why let facts get in the way of a good argument?

But let’s suppose that all the facts had been as people thought they were—the product was unsafe and the company was only interested in their own profits. We don’t need to imagine this hypothetically; this is clearly what actually happened with the tobacco industry, and indeed with the oil industry. Is that evil? Of course it is. But not because it’s cost-benefit analysis.

Indeed, the reason this is evil is the same reason most things are evil: They are psychopathically selfish. They advance the interests of those who do them, while causing egregious harms to others.

Exxon is apparently prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to further their own interests, which makes them literally no better than Mao, as opposed to this bizarre “no better than Mao” that we would all be if the number of lives saved versus killed didn’t matter. Let me be absolutely clear; I am not speaking in hyperbole when I say that the board of directors of Exxon is morally no better than Mao. No, I mean they literally are willing to murder 20 million people to serve their own interests—more precisely 10 to 100 million, by WHO estimates. Maybe it matters a little bit that these people will be killed by droughts and hurricanes rather than by knives and guns; but then, most of the people Mao killed died of starvation, and plenty of the people killed by Exxon will too. But this statement wouldn’t have the force it does if I could not speak in terms of quantitative cost-benefit analysis. Killing people is one thing, and most industries would have to own up to it; being literally willing to kill as many people as history’s greatest mass murderers is quite another—and yet it is true of Exxon.

But I can understand why people would tend to associate cost-benefit analysis with psychopaths maximizing their profits; there are two reasons for this.

First, most neoclassical economists appear to believe in both cost-benefit analysis and psychopathic profit maximization. They don’t even clearly distinguish their concept of “rational” from the concept of total psychopathic selfishness—hence why I originally titled this blog “infinite identical psychopaths”. The people arguing for cost-benefit analysis are usually economists, and economists are usually neoclassical, so most of the time you hear arguments for cost-benefit analysis they are also linked with arguments for horrifically extreme levels of selfishness.

Second, most people are uncomfortable with cost-benefit analysis, and as a result don’t use it. So, most of the cost-benefit analysis you’re likely to hear is done by terrible human beings, typically at the reins of multinational corporations. This becomes self-reinforcing, as all the good people don’t do cost-benefit analysis, so they don’t see good people doing it, so they don’t do it, and so on.

Therefore, let me present you with some clear-cut cases where cost-benefit analysis can save millions of lives, and perhaps even save the world.

Imagine if our terrorism policy used cost-benefit analysis; we wouldn’t kill 100,000 innocent people and sacrifice 4,400 soldiers fighting a war that didn’t have any appreciable benefit as a bizarre form of vengeance for 3,000 innocent people being killed. Moreover, we wouldn’t sacrifice core civil liberties to prevent a cause of death that’s 300 times rarer than car accidents.

Imagine if our healthcare policy used cost-benefit analysis; we would direct research funding to maximize our chances of saving lives, not toward the form of cancer that is quite literally the sexiest. We would go to a universal healthcare system like the rest of the First World, and thereby save thousands of additional lives while spending less on healthcare.

With cost-benefit analysis, we would reform our system of taxes and subsidies to internalize the cost of carbon emissions, most likely resulting in a precipitous decline of the oil and coal industries and the rapid rise of solar and nuclear power, and thereby save millions of lives. Without cost-benefit analysis, we instead get unemployed coal miners appearing on TV to grill politicians about how awful it is to lose your job even though that job is decades obsolete and poisoning our entire planet. Would eliminating coal hurt coal miners? Yes, it would, at least in the short run. It’s also completely, totally worth it, by at least a thousandfold.

We would invest heavily in improving our transit systems, with automated cars or expanded rail networks, thereby preventing thousands of deaths per year—instead of being shocked and outraged when an automated car finally kills one person, while manual vehicles in their place would have killed half a dozen by now.

We would disarm all of our nuclear weapons, because the risk of a total nuclear apocalypse is not worth it to provide some small increment in national security above our already overwhelming conventional military. While we’re at it, we would downsize that military in order to save enough money to end world hunger.

And oh by the way, we would end world hunger. The benefits of doing so are enormous; the costs are remarkably small. We’ve actually been making a great deal of progress lately—largely due to the work of development economists, and lots and lots of cost-benefit analysis. This process involves causing a lot of economic disruption, making people unemployed, taking riches away from some people and giving them to others; if we weren’t prepared to bear those costs, we would never get these benefits.

Could we do all these things without cost-benefit analysis? I suppose so, if we go through the usual process of covering of our ears whenever a downside is presented and amplification whenever an upside is presented, until we can more or less convince ourselves that there is no downside even though there always is. We can continue having arguments where one side presents only downsides, the other side presents only upsides, and then eventually one side prevails by sheer numbers, and it could turn out to be the upside team (or should I say “tribe”?).

But I think we’d progress a lot faster if we were honest about upsides and downsides, and had the courage to stand up and say, “Yes, that downside is real; but it’s worth it.” I realize it’s not easy to tell a coal miner to his face that his job is obsolete and killing people, and I don’t really blame Hillary Clinton for being wishy-washy about it; but the truth is, we need to start doing that. If we accept that costs are real, we may be able to mitigate them (as Hillary plans to do with a $30 billion investment in coal mining communities, by the way); if we pretend they don’t exist, people will still get hurt but we will be blind to their suffering. Or worse, we will do nothing—and evil will triumph.