Germany's ambivalence about nuclear power, common in many developed countries, is again on display following the decision by Chancellor Merkel and the Bundestag to extend the operating life of the nation's 17 nuclear plants for an average of 12 years beyond their currently scheduled closure dates. Merkel says this will help Germany develop the "most efficient and environmental friendly energy supply worldwide." Protestors in Berlin say their government is "...selling safety for money."
Both sides in the decades-long disagreement over nuclear power argue the facts. But underneath this is really an argument about how those facts feel. Risk perception, about nuclear power or genetically modified food or vaccines or any potential threat, is never a purely rational fact-based process. Decades of research has found that risk perception is an affective combination of both facts and fears, intellect and instinct, reason and gut reaction. It is an inescapably subjective process which has helped us survive but which sometimes gets us into more trouble, because we often worry too much about relatively smaller risks, or not enough about bigger ones, and make choices that feel right, but actually create new risks all by themselves.
So the current German experience, reflective of ambivalence about nuclear power around the world, teaches important lessons, not about nuclear power per se, but about how we perceive risk in the first place, because understanding that subjective system is the first step toward avoiding its pitfalls.
Consider the two aspects of the risk of nuclear radiation; the facts, and the feelings.
Nearly 90,000 hibakusha, the name in Japan for atomic bomb survivors who were within 3 kilometers of the explosions, have been followed for 65 years. Scientists compared them to a non-exposed Japanese population, to calculate the effects of the radiation. The current estimate is that just 572 hibakusha have died, or will die, from various forms of radiation-induced cancer. A little more than half of one percent.
Research by the International Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) also found that the fetuses of hibakusha women pregnant when they were exposed to radiation were born with horrible birth defects but little other serious long-term health damage from exposure to those extraordinarily high levels of radiation has been found, not even genetic damage.
Based on the hibakusha research, the World Health Organization estimates that of several hundred thousand people exposed to ionizing radiation from Chernobyl, over the entire lifetime of that population, as many as 4,000 might die prematurely from cancer caused by the radiation. Tragic, of course, but like the number of cancer deaths among survivors of the nuclear bombs, a smaller number than many people assume.
So if we know that, yes, ionizing radiation is a carcinogen, but a relative weak one, why is nuclear power so scary? Research into how people perceive and respond to risk has identified several psychological characteristics that make nuclear radiation particularly frightening;
But public attitudes toward nuclear power are shifting. The psychology of risk perception explains that too.
These psychological factors have nothing to do with the facts about the actual risk of nuclear radiation. But, as is often the case with perception of risk, these emotional filters, more than the facts, determine how afraid we are, or aren't. It's pointless to argue whether this is rational or irrational, wrong or right. This is, inescapably, how it is. Respect it though we must, however, we also have to realize that this affective process can be a danger all by itself. Our fear of nuclear power has led to energy economics that favor coal and oil for electricity. At great cost to human and environmental health. Particulate pollution from fossil fuels kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, and CO2 emissions are fueling a potentially disastrous shift in the global climate.
No amount of education or good risk communication can get around this. Subjective perception is hard wired into the neural architecture and chemistry of the human brain. What governments around the world can do is to learn what the science of risk perception psychology has taught us; that our perceptions, as real as they are and as much as they must be respected in a democracy, can create new perils in and of themselves. With that understanding, government risk assessment can account for not only the facts of a risk but how we feel about them, and how we behave, and by factoring both aspects into a more holistic view, hopefully achieve less conflict over nuclear power and all risk issues, and wiser and more productive policies for public and environmental health.
(This is an updated version of a piece that first ran on Project Syndicate)
Follow David Ropeik on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dropeik
Thanks for this article. It is vitally important that the public better understands their own emotional biases with respect to this issue, and also that the public better understands how we as individuals assess risk.
Thank you for your work, sir.
As a country, we should ask our nuclear professionals, plants and facilities, to open up some part of what they do (even if it is only a lecture series) to the public.
Help the public, as Mr Mann has put it many times here, come to Know Nuclear.
There are real risks involved with this energy technology (as with any energy technology), but the primary actor here is indeed the emotional filters of which Mr Ropeik speaks.
Ropeik's listing of psychological factors leaves out a big one: if the electricity the world presently gets from uranium were instead obtained from natural gas, and the latter fuel remained as cheap as now, the natgas bill would be on the order of $250 million per day. If the present nuclear industry were to double, the natural gas interests would be that much less daily income.
Uranium is less than a tenth as expensive.
So governments and private natural gas interests are hugely motivated to reward scientists who speak misleadingly, regulators who speak misleadingly, and of course "watchdogs" and "gadflies" and "activists" who speak misleadingly about nuclear power. If they can mislead citizens into unnecessary fear, and into real San Bruno-style risks so as to get away from imaginary nuclear ones, a lot of money becomes natgas money that otherwise wouldn't have.