Spirit in Action
Nuclear Sanity? Investigating Nuclear Power
Karen Street had a jarring experience in 1995 - she found that her prejudices and beliefs opposing nuclear power were ill-founded, and that the alternatives were doing much greater damage to people, other animals & the Earth. Carefully researched and examined, Karen provides a compelling, compassionate case for using nuclear power.
- Broadcast on:
- 23 Oct 2011
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sync deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. [music] We'll have a different sort of discussion for today's Spirit in Action. Karen Street has been thoughtfully and lovingly dressing one of the very common concerns of many liberals, nuclear power, though Karen has been marshally evidenced in support of nuclear power as a way of caring for our planet and our own well-being. If you have a prejudice against nuclear power, I invite you to listen to Karen Street, a woman of careful integrity and sharp analysis. I'm not fully decided myself about the issues around nuclear power, but I do trust that entering a dialogue with Karen can only improve the chances that will contribute to minimizing harm and maximizing good for all. And that is a worthy goal. Karen Street joins us from California. Karen, it's great to have you here today for Spirit in Action. It might be here. I read with great interests, the articles that were featured in the Friends Journal, that national Quaker publication, about your viewpoint on nuclear power and the necessity, the importance of adopting it. You probably got some heat back from it. I certainly saw letters to the editor that were taking issue with a lot of things you said. Do you want to summarize any of the articles, maybe the most recent one, and what the essence of it was? The most recent article came after Fukushima. Basically, it says the same thing as the other articles that we are not paying attention to the big issues like climate change, and we are paying attention to much smaller, less important dangers. And that that focus, it isn't good for us, and it isn't good for the world. And by that focus, I assume you're talking about kind of the mass rush towards, we have to get rid of all nuclear power. Yes, it was a mass rush among small numbers of people. And if you were just taking the reaction to the articles from the letters to the editor, you're going to get a somewhat distorted picture. Their response of friends has not been so monolithic, you know, anti-oh my gosh, that article is just awful. So when you talk to people, I don't know if you've had that experience of checking with people who read the article and see what their reaction is, but most people are reacting pretty positively. One of the things that I thought was a major point in your recent article was you said it's something that it's important to think carefully about and to gather the information and make our decision based on the information, not on either rash ideas or on prejudices that we need to deal with the information. So let's talk about some of the information that you brought forth. I think one of the things that is perhaps misunderstood in the public is what our normal exposure to radiation is and how much that increases when you have a nuclear plant around. Can you talk about the kind of evidence you presented about that? Yes, the normal background radiation is, I'm going to use no receiver, which is the same unit that was used in the media. It's the International More Modern Unit. The normal background radiation around the world is anywhere from two to 30 millisievert or even higher. So there's hundreds of thousands of people who live with 30 millisievert or higher exposure and a lot of people in the United States live with 10 millisievert or higher. If you live pretty near a nuclear power plant, you're going to add something like 0.00001 millisievert to that. Fukushima obviously increased the exposure of a lot of people, but for many of those exposures that they're worried about, the increase would be less than if they had flown to Denver State and visited Denver for a while or flown to part of India, Brazil, Iran, where the background radiation is much higher. The variation around the world depends on rocks. It depends on elevation. It depends on how you make your houses. If you make your house out of brick or stone, you're going to have a higher exposure than if you make it out of wood. And again, the percentage increase. If you go to Denver, if you're living in Denver because it's the higher altitude, less atmosphere to intercept or deflect the cosmic rays, how much higher is that than, say, living in a good place like you do? The increase is about four to five times if you go to Denver from where I live. I don't know where I live is any better than Denver. Denver actually has a lower cancer rate, but it does have four to five times more background radioactivity than the Bay Area. And can you talk a little bit about why people have this reaction about radiation and, you know, fear of nuclear plants, fear of radiation in general? I've been curious about that and trying to read more about that for some time. It seems that we see danger in very different ways. Some people see danger in Sharia law. Other people see danger in environmental risk. Sometimes the risk really is there and sometimes it really isn't. If we're prone to see risk, we often see it where it isn't. And then that gets reinforced by the group. And it's very difficult to challenge a belief once it becomes a group belief. So, for example, if you're going to talk about industry polluting and government not regulating well enough, that would be a concern of people with a certain worldview. You could pick a number of issues that would fit into that category. You could pick oil. You could pick coal. But that group has chosen nuclear. And having chosen nuclear, they tend to look if there's an earthquake. They don't look at what happens to the natural gas pipelines. They look at what happens to the nuclear power plants. You get into the habit of looking in one place. And then after that, it becomes much harder to challenge the belief. So, it's not that the belief is irrational. But what happens is a lot of people take a belief that makes sense and they generalize it. So, yes, there are problems with how the coal industry operates and how the government regulates it. But there aren't necessarily problems with how the nuclear industry operates and how the government regulates it. But there aren't necessarily problems with how the nuclear industry operates and how it is regulated. There used to be. But there are not so many problems in the United States today. I mean, you're never going to get perfection, of course. You can always point to, oh, oh, look. But in general, the system is working pretty well. I'm sure there's a lot of people to take issue with that point, but one of the things that you have to do when you make these decisions, you say, okay, well, what would be the effects on our life? And I think this is a logical thing that you would advocate, a research-based type decision. Say, if we made our power using coal, how many people's lives would be negatively affected, how many people would be killed, what would be the environmental effect of it? If we try and produce that same power using nuclear power, how many people will suffer in one way or another, or the environment suffer? So what kind of numbers do you see for those two situations? I was very surprised when I first began looking at the issues in 1995. I assumed that the numbers were comparable. It was a shock to me to learn how much worse the fossil fuel numbers were than I estimated and how much better the nuclear numbers were than I estimated. And I actually spent a lot of time trying to confirm my prejudices I walked into the room with. Unfortunately, the sources that agreed with me seemed clueless, and I ended up changing my mind because the people who clearly knew what they were talking about said something very different. So if you look at nuclear power, at 50 years of nuclear power in the West, we'll leave that Chernobyl. Now we could talk about it later if you want. 50 years of nuclear power in the West, we've had two major accidents, beginning with early reactors and an early regulatory system. And the second accident was precipitated by an tsunami. I mean, there was human failure in both accidents. Clearly, humans made a lot of mistakes where the accidents wouldn't have occurred and they wouldn't have been so serious. But the second one was triggered by a tsunami. The number of people who were expected to die from these two accidents, well, none from Three Mile Island. And then from the Fukushima accident, we're talking it's about as bad as one day of coal pollution in the United States. So it's not a really large number, and that number is going to be over 70 years. One worker died from a heart attack out of 3,700 workers at the Fukushima plant, and then out of the 125 or so most exposed worker, you can expect about one to get cancer over the next 70 years. So imagine a fossil fuel plant in the United States producing that much electricity that only has two workers die a year. I mean, it would be unheard of for that kind of safety record in the fossil fuel industry. There's so much pollution, there's so much mining accidents, black lung, natural gas accidents, that would be a really impressive safety record if it were a fossil fuel plant. The numbers for coal in the United States, over 10,000 people die from coal pollution every year. Well, Health Organization said 150,000 people died from climate change in 2000. That's from drought, that's from disease, food problems. Those numbers are going to go up very rapidly by the end of this decade. And so we're talking fairly large number of millions of people, or 10 millions of people, or more dying from climate change this century. The numbers for fossil fuels are huge, and over 50 years, the numbers for nuclear power in the West are not huge. And that really surprised me when I began looking at the issues, and I began comparing the numbers. I imagine there might be some people listening who said, "Is she just a shill for the nuclear power agencies?" So we better lay out your background and your influences so that people know that we're not talking about someone who's in the pay of nuclear power. Do you want to lay out both your scientific and maybe your job history? Have you now or ever been a nuclear power worker? I have never received any money from the nuclear power industry. No, I am not really a scientist. I was an electrical engineer, and then I taught high school math and physics for many years. I lost my hearing in 1994, which is pretty hard. You sort of lose your social life, your contact with the universe, and I lost my teaching job, of course, because I couldn't hear the students. So I started trying to write. I thought I would be a science writer. In a writing class, I was given an assignment to a comparison paper I chose, "Covers is nuclear for the paper." And went in with one set of ideas how they would compare and turned out to be totally wrong. It was emotionally challenging. But the people who really seem to know what they're talking about, the scientists, also said, "Climate change is a really big issue. It's not air pollution. It's not coalminer death. It's climate change." And so I began reading national reports, international reports, trying to read at least the executive summaries of huge numbers of reports, and learn more and try to understand both climate change and energy policy. It became my job, I felt, to translate a lot of what scientists had into language that non-scientists can understand. That's what I used to do when I was a physics teacher, and that's what I tried to do, trying to do today around climate change and energy issues. And obviously, you're listening to me. You're hearing my questions and you're responding, so you have some hearing. And that's some good news. You can deliver to us about what happened? Yes. I lost more and more hearing. Then, thank goodness, the cochlear implant got one in 2004, and I got my second one in 2009. And actually, as I regained hearing with cochlear implants, it's a challenge. I had to listen to lots of books on CD. But as I regained hearing, then I was able to do a different level of presentation. I was able to teach classes and change how I try to work this field. So, I am excited. And those of us who have cochlear implants are among the few people in the United States whose hearing improves with age. Go right ahead and rub it in. I can tell mine and my wife's is decreasing. Coming back to nuclear power, how do the deaths that happen with, say, coal and maybe the deaths that that leads to with respect to nuclear power? How do those come about? Talk about where the deaths happen and how visible they are, which is, I think, part of the issue. Because if people do not see the deaths, I think that they assume they are not there. I think that your observation about not seeing the deaths is true. I gave two presentations from different parts of Southern California in one weekend. In both cases, an older English gentleman talked about how nuclear power came to town and the life expectancy in their town, Roosevelt 50. Today, I think that a lot of people ignore air pollution because it's not as bad as it once was. I mean, when you're talking 10,000 people dying from coal, it's a smaller rate than used to be true. So coal deaths, and to some extent, natural gas deaths, the mostly coal deaths come from small particulates at large in the lungs. And the main cause of death is going to be heart disease, the secondary cause of death is going to be cancer lung cancer, particularly. It comes about 10,000 a year just from the electricity made some coal. In addition, there's the carbon dioxide changing the climate and changing where disease is changing the amount of rain places get. So some places get a pack of sand gets the same amount of rain per year, but it falls in bigger chunks. Floods are the main natural disaster of killing people around the world. So climate change has already begun to kill. It has been killing people for quite a few years now. From nuclear power and normal operations, nobody ever gets a kind of exposure that anyone pays attention to. However, in mining uranium back in the 1950s, and here the United States government and industry were both at fault because they had this information in the early 50s, and they didn't act on it until 1959. You have to vent uranium mines. It's the radon in the uranium mines, not the uranium that is radioactive. And people will breathe in the radon. This was particularly true of people who would smoke in mines. A lot of miners liked to smoke, but you could never smoke in coal mines, and they let them smoke in uranium mines, and then they would inhale deeply radon into their lungs. Several hundred miners have already died or will die from that exposure they got through 1959 in the mines. They're not so many uranium miners dying today compared to coal miners because you use about a million times as much coal as you do uranium, so they're just a lot more coal miners. In an accident, the main way that people are killed is the spread of radioactivity. At Chernobyl, quite a few workers got radiation poisoning, and 30 of them died within months. They got such a high exposure. And those who did not die within that period of time are at higher risk for getting cancer. Based on the studies at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, a certain amount of radiation in the whole population will end up killing one person. It's 19 grades. It's a unit. We'll end up killing one person. The idea is that it doesn't matter if one person gets it, well, one person gets it, they'll buy from radiation poisoning. But it doesn't matter if 10 people are exposed to that level, one will die, or 10,000 are exposed to that level, one will die. That's what the current model says. There are a lot of challenges to the model, but that is the current model that's used by United States National Academy. Not all countries use that model. The United Nations rejects two low exposures as being important. So what you would say is that the total exposure to the 125 or so most exposed workers in Japan was sufficient that you would expect one out of those 125 to die sometime in the next 70 years from cancer. It's not going to be very many from an accident like Fukushima. In Chernobyl, we're talking 2,000 workers and 2,000 members of the public are expected to die over 70 years. So it's a much larger number from Chernobyl because of the way the plant was constructed. It could explode. It wasn't a nuclear explosion, but it was an explosion. The radioactivity wasn't contained for the most part and spread through the air. The model predicts a certain number of deaths over 70 years. The improvements in plants are to try to reduce the possibility of accident and try to reduce the consequence of accidents, but it's still true that a certain amount of radioactivity will end up with a certain amount of deaths. That model changes over time. There's disagreement on the model, particularly at the low exposures, but that's the function we use. I'm not exactly sure what your question is. Part of what I was asking is we have some historical data about what has happened and we have predictions in models that say what's likely to happen in the future, but it's still something I imagine that we're learning about, just as we're learning about climate change. One of the things that I recall being exposed to 35, 40 years ago was some evidence that indicated that there's more radioactivity released by burning coal than by nuclear power plants. That is to say, there is radioactivity contained with coal and that gets emitted into the air as you burn the coal. Are you aware of that kind of information as well? Yes, and it was actually in one of my articles. Coal power plants release a hundred times as much radioactivity when they're operating as nuclear power plants when they're operating. If you look at the complete life cycle from mining the uranium to uranium decaying hundreds of thousands of years in the future, coal power plants, while they're operating, emit three to four times as much radioactivity per kilowatt hour as nuclear will over complete life cycle. So coal power is more radioactive. It's just not enough to worry about. One of the things that I learned in 1995 when I started looking at the issues is that environmentalists would list the three greatest sins of each power source, except for renewables. They didn't list any sins for renewables and nuclear they would list radioactivity number one. Well, the radioactivity from coal is so far down, coal with the sins, that it doesn't ever make the list. But it is a much greater problem than radioactivity from nuclear power. That is true. I'm sure there are still people who are listening who are absolutely positive that you're mistaken, that you've been listening to bad sources of information. Can you talk about your sources of information? Is it people who are already advocates of nuclear power who are therefore providing data that supports their point of view already? Or how should we find a good source, a resource to know what the real dangers are? The group that I get my information with is the group that begins with peer review and then continues to discernment. So peer review is not sufficient, but after peer review, they look at the information some more, they do some consideration of it. I almost never cite anything that has just been peer reviewed. I usually look for information that comes from the major reports like National Academy of Sciences. Above that are complaints. If scientists don't like the work that has been done by National Academy of Sciences, I'll read about it in the next six months in Science magazine. Sometimes they are fussing about really big points, sometimes they're fussing about really small points. But scientists write objections when they see the big groups in a governmental panel on climate change, international energy agency, or international atomic energy agency. When they see them making mistakes, they discuss that in science and nature. Nature is the UK general science magazine that's peer reviewed and science is the American general science magazine that's peer reviewed. Scientists don't consider anything that has not gone through peer review as being contributed to the science community. They consider it all as contributed to the public. So the first thing, if you want to share your ideas with the science community, the first thing you do is you write it up and then a bunch of peers that is people who are experts in that field review your work. They catch little errors. They catch big errors. They say test this more. They reject it. Maybe some stuff gets through without any errors being detected. That's the first level of discernment in the science and policy community. If it goes to some general magazine like science or it goes to a much more specific magazine, then once it's published in those magazines, scientists will look at the information in more detail. It'll be considered more test will be one, maybe the same test will be one by different group. Over time, there'll be more information about whether the initial ideas were valid or not. I think also in terms of trusting what you've got to say, people need to hear a little bit more about why this is a burning issue for you. Again, I do think that speaking up in Quaker circles or maybe general scientific circles, public circles, you do risk some anger and retaliation from people by bringing up an idea that is about which they have great fear. What's pushing you to do this? What are the central values that are leading you to take the risks of maybe you'll get death threats? At one point, when I spoke out on the television station here, after we invaded Afghanistan, I said we should have considered possible other ways of responding. And I got a death threat the next day for saying that very lukewarm statement. What kind of reactions have you got? And again, what pushes you to take the risk of having people angry at you? There's two questions there. The first question is what pushes me. That is concerned for human life and concerned for other species and how short a time we have to respond with climate change. Because of the way I was raised, because I have enough science background, I like to be something about the facts. Scientists are always characterizing carefully the numbers and trying to get to say I'm just right. It isn't just people who are anti-nuclear I work with. It's also people who are pro-nuclear, for example, who have this idea that we could be 100% nuclear by 2050. The facts don't show us getting there. That seems too optimistic. And I don't like them ignoring big solutions. I don't like the facts being wrong. And we really do need to respond at a much bigger level than just one type of energy source. So I say that to all sorts of group. I give presentations and watery club and you run into people with very different worldviews and they have very different points on which they challenge my presentation. So these are just people who are anti-nuclear. The reaction in the friends community and among life-minded people to the nuclear power portion of it, there have been people who have never been anti-nuclear. They are for the most part in the closet. They don't feel comfortable telling people that. There are people who have changed their mind as a result of what I or others have said. There are people who continue to remain anti-nuclear. Unfortunately, a fair number of them have this sort of cultural war attitude. This is evidence that we good they bad that so many Americans seem to be in fighting today. What impresses me most about friends is those who are more interested in the process than in arguing that I am wrong. Are you asking me onto the show? In an example, you think that ideas should have a right to be discussed and considered? The most impressive example I've seen from any friend was in TMPI. I don't know today if this friend is pro or anti-nuclear, but she set up this conflict resolution format. We came in and the idea was there are certain points we would agree on. We would agree on climate change is happening. These are the current energy sources and so on. We would share why we held our view, which sources we trusted, and what could change our mind if we learned something and learned that it was true? What could change our mind from our current position? At the end, the idea was to have a set of questions that we created that others in the room created where the answer would bring us into more agreement could win power supply all that much electricity. Is this that dangerous? Unfortunately, we never did follow it up because the person who was anti couldn't answer the two questions about which sources he trusted and why and what could make him change his mind. There was no format. He wasn't amenable to conflict resolution. I thought that was such a wonderful format. I learned so much from it about friends' ways and about how to talk about the issues. I've seen that as well. This approach to process and respect for process, which is so important to today's discussion and so unusual in today's discussion. One thing I have to jump in with, Karen, you keep referring to friends. I try and use the word Quakers because that clearly differentiates everybody has friends. But the question is, when we're saying friends or when you've been using friends in this context, you are referring specifically to Quakers. You are Quaker. How long have you been and where did you come from? What kind of background did you bring with you religiously spiritually? I came from not much and I started attending in the early 80s and then I joined in the mid 80s and I've been a member of Brookley Meeting since then. You said you came from not much, which is an interesting characterization. I've never heard that one before. What do you mean by that and what led you to be part of Quaker community as opposed to others? What I noticed in the late 70s and the early 80s, I would listen to people talk about politics and it seemed to me that people who talk from a religious viewpoint at that time seemed to talk differently, seemed to talk from a more centered space. That attracted me and so I looked at the various religions. I had seen a movie made by Quakers during the Vietnam War that we say it spoke to my condition. It felt like a movie that it felt like it had a message that was less about blame and more about understanding. So of the various religions that I considered, Quakers seem to be the one that attracted me most and it's the only one I investigated. Well, I guess if you hit bingo right away, you don't need to go on. Yes, and I learned a lot. I learned a lot from how people look at questions, how people challenge religiously and their ways of going deeper. I'll share one of my perspectives on why I fit as a Quaker and this is not to say that there are no other alternatives out there that will be good for myself or others too. But one of the things that was acceptable in Quaker circles is I was supposed to speak from my experience as opposed to, here's a list of things you believe or here's a list of things that you're supposed to do that's just out there. I was never told that I should believe something, but rather I was given a laboratory, if you will, where I could experiment and find out what was true. And I think that this is a key part of what I consider a better approach is to have it experientially or experimentally established what you do as opposed to here's your list, just accept it on blind faith. Blind faith is probably not something that works well for me. As a physicist, if I come up with a hypothesis or a statement, I like to test it and find substantiation in favor or against and that applies to spiritual things as well as nuclear power plants. I wonder if that played any part in what worked for you about this community. I also really like the idea that we speak from our experience that we tell our own stories. That part has been a very powerful and meaningful part of being a Quaker. The challenge for Quakers though is that in order to have experiential knowledge of science, you have to have experiential knowledge of science. We either have to accept what those who do have experiential understanding say or we have to neglect it. I saw a discussion between somebody who says he wants to understand every issue himself, and a climatologist said he doesn't come close to understanding every issue himself. He has to trust people who are in 90% of the fields of climatology, he has to trust their work because he doesn't have any experiential understanding of that. So either he rejects and ignores it and that is wrong or he accepts it. That can be a challenge where people want to broaden the experiential understanding without the experience. So I can't have an experiential understanding of most fields of physics. I have done some working in national labs as part of make science teacher smarter projects. They were wonderful, but I just don't have the same experience beyond that limited work in the laboratories that informs so much of what goes on in the science community that did give me a real sense that people didn't just make stuff up. When they stuff makes it into the magazines, there's been work behind it, there's lots behind it. Even if it's very confusing, quantum is terribly confusing, huge fields in science are terribly confusing. The people who have studied the science overwhelmingly are prone to the earth. Overwhelmingly they say it's safe and necessary. There isn't a disagreement in the community. You can't go to a major report that says it's dangerous. You can go to a major report and say we need to do things differently. For example, after Fukushima, there will be a lot of analysis. But the agreement about nuclear is necessary and it's relatively safe. That's the scientific community reason. I see the difference not just whether you've had a little bit of science or very little science. I think it's whether or not that the group you choose to pick a fight with. George Monbiot is a well-known environmentalist. He's well-known on the left. He used to be anti-nuclear. He moved to being neutral on nuclear. And then with Fukushima, he moved to being positive, totally in favor of nuclear power. And began debating people on the issue. And as a result of the debating, he actually became much more knowledgeable. His reaction to Fukushima is you give us a once in a millennium tsunami and that's all you get. You know, that's a relatively small danger if that's all that can happen. Using the oldest nuclear power plants that are out there. And he stopped being anti-nuclear. And he has said he is fighting with the Guardian and others are fighting with the Guardian. This is the UK Guardian. It's a left-wing paper saying if you accept scientists on climate change, you need to accept them on nuclear power. You can't just pick and choose and say, OK, scientists know what they're talking about here and they're totally clueless there. So the question isn't so much about the technical dance. The question is, are you going to fight with a scientist? Are you going to say that that? And I don't mean individual scientists. All individual scientists are going to be wrong to some extent. But the science community, the process of discernment that goes on in that community. I think that's a more important question than what your technical background is. That is interesting, the point you make. And it was one thing I heard you say before that that had some importance. I guess you'd say on the left, it's pretty common to accept the conclusion that anthropogenic, human-caused climate change is a reality and it's a very serious threat. And we're accepting on faith that comes from the scientists there. Evidently for you, you believe that's a very significant threat to our future because I think what I heard you say in previous cases was that part of the importance of having nuclear power plants is that it's going to reduce the carbon that we put into the atmosphere. This point about do we trust the scientists? If we don't trust scientists, then maybe we shouldn't trust them about climate change as well. Do you find people who are conflicted that who say, yes, I believe the scientists about this but know the scientists who are working on nuclear power plant are all making money off of it and that's why they're not believable? Cultural theory of this talks about that. It talks about how we all see the world through this sort of lens. We assume that scientists agree with us, and if that is totally impossible, like people who are anti-nuclear power are really aware that scientists are remotely, or people who say climate change is not happening or is not serious, are pretty aware that not all scientists agree. Then we assume that scientists are disagreeing on the issue. They haven't reached any kind of agreement. I run into people who tend to believe one or the other. They believe that nuclear power is dangerous. Actually, I should say that the most people I run into believe that climate change is happening, they don't know the details of what scientists are saying about how serious it is. They believe that climate change is happening, and also the majority of them are willing to accept nuclear power. There are some who deny one or the other. And I used to teach, so I'd have students who didn't believe in evolution or didn't accept the big bang. So needless, I can figure most people in the United States think scientists are wrong about some major issue. It's not a real charming part of our behavior. That's a very genteel way of saying it. It's not a very charming part of our behavior. If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit in Action. This is a Northern Spirit radio production. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeat. Our website is northernspiritradio.org, and on the site you'll find our archives of the past six years. You'll find links to our guests, and you'll find a place to leave comments. And perhaps some of you will want to argue with Karen or me about what was said in this, and we welcome your input. We do want to listen deeply, and that's part of what Northern Spirit radio is about. Again, we're speaking with Karen Street. She's not a scientist. She was a science teacher. She's looked into this dispassionately or maybe passionately in terms of caring for the world. Would you describe yourself, Karen, as a passionate person? What are you passionate about? I am passionate about the environment. I am passionate about how humans are affected by our choices. I'm passionate about politics and passionate about bicycling. I used to be passionate about movies when I could hear them and conversations. But yes, I believe in setting aside the passion when I try to understand the issues. When there's a good chance that I might not be right on the issues, and I'm much more interested in just listening and learning. And so this passionate would apply there. There's two issues that I've still had reservations about nuclear power. Again, as myself a physics major and I did teach physics at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, only the intro courses, I don't have a PhD. I do have some basic understanding of the science involved and of scientific process, which I think is perhaps more important. The two reservations that I have not been able to find adequate answers for, let's deal with them one at a time. Number one, I have the concern that we have no way to deal with the nuclear waste. That we've been building it up and right now we have no place to store it. We've been typically storing it at our facilities. It is significant amount of radiation and it will persist for tens of thousands of years. What's the answer to that? Do you know of an adequate answer in terms of what that's going to impose upon our society or what we need to do about that? That's actually the issue that I brought in when I started looking in 1995. I don't find a majority of people who are anti-nuclear agree on any one perception of risk, but that is one of the bigger ones concerned about nuclear waste. When I began looking at the issues, it appeared that question is not so much nuclear waste, but how do waste compare across the energy sources? It's a lot easier to deal with small amounts of solid waste than it is to deal with liquid waste and much harder to deal with gaseous waste. Each molecule of carbon dioxide is less dangerous than the amount of nuclear waste, each molecule of nuclear waste. However, if a typical American gets all her electricity over her lifetime from nuclear power, in that lifetime, she creates one Coke can with a nuclear waste. If she gets all her electricity, this is just in the house, from co-power, she creates 25 pounds of carbon dioxide every day. So the sheer quantity of waste to deal with from fossil fuels is much greater and is a much more challenging form of waste. Question is, what could be done with the waste? When I read, starting in the mid-90s, this is much more of a political issue with social challenge than it is a technical challenge. Put it in Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years, there's essentially no exposure to anybody, and that includes getting the waste to Yucca Mountain. And then later, as the canisters decay, as it makes it into the groundwater, then the exposure increases until it peaks at 300,000 years from now, where there's a small exposure to a small population. You compare that to the amount of waste created by the smallest co-power plant in Nevada, and there is no comparison between the dangers. There's just none. Not even counting climate change, the waste products from fossil fuel plants, the small fossil fuel plant is going to be much worse than Yucca Mountain. Putting it into canisters and leaving them there for 50 or 100 years makes a challenge of putting it in Yucca Mountain less. The problem with putting it in the canisters is that it's not a plant. It's a lack of plant, and we really do need a plant. If the plant was to put them into canisters, there's a perfectly good plant, and some countries have chosen that. Other countries have all learned from our experience, and so no country right now is going to pick a site, even if it's a site, with where you were testing nuclear weapons where nobody lives, it's a pretty undesirable site. The country is going to do that anymore. The new plan that has been used successfully in Sweden and Finland is to send out requests to the communities you want to bid on having a nuclear waste repository in your community. Then from those communities that say yes, they pick the site and Sweden and Finland expect to open their repositories in 2020 and 2022. There will be nuclear waste dealt with elsewhere in the world, but the challenge in the United States is that we didn't start with that method, and so we've got a lot of entrenched challenge. But leaving them at the nuclear power plants, leaving them sitting in the canisters, that's a perfectly good method if that is the plan. The second item that I had concern about, and it's perhaps the one that pushes the biggest fear button for people, and that is the massive destruction that is theoretically possible from a nuclear power plant, particularly if it's near a major population area. Now, you've already referred to Fukushima. Fukushima, they evidently have not killed tens of thousands of people yet, and that's not projected for the future. The worst case scenario is so horrific, I think, that some people say we're not willing to do it, and if you multiply the risk out, it's going to be lesser. Mathematically speaking, the expected value of how many deaths will result will be less than the certain deaths that we're going to have, say from dealing with coal mines, et cetera. That is to say, maybe it's an infinitesimal seeming danger, but there could be three million people dead. Number one, is that a realistic scenario? Does that happen, and is it because of the expected value that we should still prefer the nuclear power plant? I think that the risk from accident is not nearly what you're describing. The Chernobyl, which was as bad an accident as we can imagine, is considered the upper limit for how bad any nuclear power accident can be. 2,000 workers are expected to die over the next 70 years from their exposure to 2,000 members of the public are expected to die. It was such a bad design, it didn't have a containment system. When you were running that particular experiment, it didn't just run at 100%. It ran at higher than 100%, so the whole thing got so hot, it exploded, released a lot more radioactivity. One of the differences between a western accident and a Chernobyl accident is that you have time to evacuate. In Fukushima, you have time to say, okay, everybody, you know, get out sometime in the next week or month or something, and just sort of move. People didn't have to move exactly at that instant. They had time to evacuate. You've lost the area around Fukushima. There's a couple mile area that has to be remediated. I don't know how difficult it will be before people will be able to move back in. Then there's another plume that went northwest where people, they went out to pass 12 miles. People are not going to be able to come back until remediation happens, and that may be a while. So you're getting, it's challenging for people to lose their houses. That is true. But we're not looking at such a large number of deaths as occur every month from co-power in the United States, even with this multiple reactor accident. And there were three reactors running when the tsunami hit. So even in this situation, we're not looking at that many deaths. It is terrible for the people. Our hearts go out to them. I mean, first of all, they have this earthquake. They have a tsunami. The tsunami alone killed. Over 20,000 are dead and missing from the tsunami. There's over 100,000 who are still homeless. They've got huge public health issues from the tsunami. It's going to take them three years to clean up the fish stink that are caught in the debris. It's a big public health issue. I don't mean to say that what they experience, both with the tsunami and with the human error that mixed with the tsunami that led to the accident of Fukushima. I mean, the fact that human error was involved must make it even all that much worse. So that is an awful experience. But the idea of 3 million dead, the idea of even 1,000 dead, the idea of even 100 dead, I shouldn't say that. I think that 100 dead is certainly considered possible from a nuclear power accident. We ignore much greater dangers in other fields. We ignore the Gulfville. I didn't see everybody give up flying and driving after the Gulf oil spill. I didn't see people give up rubber after both all, which was a much, much worse accident than Chernobyl. We continue to use sources even when they lead to -- even when there are accidents. So, Karen, those are my two big questions that you've responded to. Are there any other big questions that I should have been asking that I didn't ask? Another topic that I see as a major concern. Again, not with a majority of people who are anti-nuclear, but still a really large number are concerns about proliferation and concerns about terrorism. It's a very large question. When it comes to proliferation, there are two main parts I want to talk about. First is, what are the major issues for nuclear proliferation? I accept the idea that it's important to zero out all nuclear weapons or close to zero out. And so, we certainly don't want to increase the amount of nuclear weapons in the world. The largest issues from the proliferation community are the nuclear weapon states. This includes the United States zeroing out the amount of nuclear weapons we have. The accepted belief is that cheating will be much less of a problem than continuing to have weapons. The other important part of this is better funding and strengthening international atomic energy agency to check both on the nuclear weapon states and those without nuclear weapons. So those are considered the big issues. There are more minor issues such as nuclear power, India getting a better cashmere policy and so on that would reduce nuclear tensions a lot. So nuclear power is not considered a big part of the proliferation issue. But that doesn't mean it's not part of it. And how does nuclear power fit into proliferation? First, it is a positive. It's a positive because it was a carrot in getting so many countries to find the non-proliferation treaty. It was a agree that we, the countries with nuclear power and nuclear agriculture and nuclear medicine would help those countries without. And hence, we have a non-proliferation treaty. It also gives the people who are nuclear power countries are monitoring the transfer of technology around the world, the transfer of uranium around the world. It's another set of eyes in addition to the International Atomic Energy Agency. So it's a positive that way. They catch clandestine movement. And the International Atomic Energy Agency also catches behavior that is not approved, that we don't want to see happening. We don't want to see nuclear weapons spreading. The main thing that a country needs to acquire nuclear weapons is information that it's possible, which we now all have. And 1940s United States technology, that level of technology. And then if you have that, you can build a bomb. Most countries that have a bomb or all countries that have a bomb started, I believe, with the bomb and then went to nuclear power. And not all countries with the bomb even have nuclear power now. So Israel and North Korea don't have nuclear power today. If you don't have that, you can buy the information from the Chinese at one point from the North Koreans, from the Pakistanis. There's ways to get the information. But basically, most countries in the world are able to build a bomb. If you also have nuclear technology from nuclear power or nuclear medicine, that will speed up the process. You can build a bomb months or maybe even more than months faster. But it's not as big an issue to building the bomb as having a good industrial level. There is a very weak correlation between having nuclear power and having nuclear weapons. I mean, the nuclear power tends to come second. But that it's been a weak correlation doesn't mean that it will be no correlation. So there's certain kinds of technologies that could cause problems. For example, we don't like selling power plants where people produce their own fuel because that encourages them to build centrifuges. Once you have centrifuges, then you can get highly enriched uranium and make a bomb out of it. It's a challenge. It isn't easy to go for making lightly enriched uranium for a power plant and going to highly enriched uranium. But it's much more possible than if you don't have the centrifuges. So we want to change technology so that power plants are sold, for example, with the fuel already in them. Those kinds of technology changes will help keep what little contribution nuclear power makes to the proliferation or might make in the future. It will help them minimize that. We've certainly covered a lot of information, Karen. I hope our listeners have been able to follow along. Is there anything you want to wrap it up with? Climate change is happening because we prefer to pay attention to our favorite problems and our favorite solutions. We're not paying enough attention to eliminating the problems from climate change. Also, my own experience that once we begin to read enough to learn that we've been wrong, that means we've begun the process of listening. Well, as you know, my position as part of spirit and action is not to argue with you. I'm looking for the best input that you have. And you've got some very good reasons and insight that I hope people have listened to. I hope people then go back and do their own research because that's one of the things that I think we fail to do. If we just say someone else is wrong but we don't check out the evidence, I think we're doing everybody a disservice. And you're doing us a service by getting us thinking. So I couldn't be more thankful for your presence here today for spirit and action. The fact that you've stepped forward for the good of all the species on the planet, including humans, is a valuable gift that you're giving to us. Thanks for joining me for spirit and action. It was nice to talk with you. My spirit and action guest today was Karen Street. Come to my northernspiritradio.org website to find links to Karen and valuable resources she draws upon. So you can examine the questions in greater depth and judge for yourself the validity of her sources. So let's meet next week for spirit in action. The theme music for this program is turning of the world performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern spirit radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit in action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.