Letters-to the-Editor
Los Angeles Times
Dear Sir:
I am writing in response to the Commentary piece on the
dangers of nuclear power published in your November 30 edition
by Helen Caldicott, a highly political activist who has never
published a paper in a scientific journal on health effects of
radiation and is not a member of any of the major scientific
societies that deal with that subject.
Her principal issue is the potential harm from the
radioactive wastes of nuclear power that will be converted
into a rock-like material and buried in the natural habitat of
rocks, deep underground. She fails to recognize that the ground
is, and always has been, full of radioactive materials from
natural sources,and the wastes from nuclear power will never
increase the amount by more than a minute fraction of one percent.
She also fails to note that most electricity is now generated
by burning coal which releases waste (called ashes) into the top
layers of the ground, and these wastes include cancer-causing
chemicals like cadmium, arsenic, beryllium, etc which will last
forever, not decaying away naturally as do the nuclear power
wastes of which 99% are gone after a few hundred years. Using
the same risk analysis procedures, results indicate that the
number of cancers caused by the coal burning wastes is thousands
of times larger than the number caused by nuclear power wastes
from generating the same amount of electricity. Another of the
wastes from coal burning, known as air pollution, causes even
more total deaths, all of them now rather than spread out over
millions of years. The wastes from oil burning are only a few
times less harmful than the wastes from coal
burning.
The Caldicott claim that nuclear power does not greatly
reduce the releases of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse
gases) that contribute to global warming is absolutely
preposterous as any scientist, or even a high school chemistry
student, readily recognizes. It is not supported, as she implies,
by the Friends of the Earth (FOE) study she cites, and is belied
by the fact that France, which derives 70% of its electricity
from nuclear power, has far lower per capita carbon dioxide
releases than any other industrialized nation. She quotes
the FOE study as implying that the fossil fuels used to provide
the materials for nuclear power plants are a significant
contributor to global warming, but she fails to note that other
studies attribute far less fossil fuel usage to nuclear power,
and that solar energy, the darling of FOE, uses more than ten
times as much of these materials (steel,aluminum, cement, glass)
as nuclear power for generating the same amount of electricity.
In summary, the Caldicott piece is nothing more than a
political diatribe against nuclear power, with no attempt to put
problems in proper perspective or to properly inform your
readership.
Note: Bernard L. Cohen is Professor-Emeritus of Physics and of
Environmental and Occupational Health at University of Pittsburgh,
author of several books about nuclear power and of about 275
research articles in scientific journals, recipient of the Health
Physics Society Distinguished Scientific Achievement award and of
four other national awards from American Physical Society (APS) and
American Nuclear Society (ANS). He is a former Chairman of the APS
Division of Nuclear Physics and of the ANS Division of Environmental
Sciences.
Bernard L. Cohen
Physics Dept.
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Tel: (412)624-9245
Fax: (412)624-9163
e-mail: blc+@pitt.edu