As global demand for energy increases, serious decisions need to be taken about future energy policy.

The obvious solution to many of the problems is greater use of nuclear energy. The raw materials (uranium and thorium) are abundant; and pollution to the atmosphere is minimal compared with fossil fuels. Global warming could be controlled or reversed. As a bonus, it would reduce dependence on the unstable territories of the Middle East. (Incidentally, as a puzzle for Christian fundamentalists, why did God give all the oil to the Muslims? Does he have a perverse sense of humour?)

Yet environmentalists, with honourable exceptions like James Lovelock, persist in objecting to nuclear energy. The main objection is to the hazards of nuclear waste.

I argue that the dangers of nuclear waste have been greatly exaggerated. Unnecessary fears are delaying urgent decisions, and artificially inflating the costs of the nuclear option, because excessive costs of waste disposal and decommissioning are built into the cost estimates.

Of course, there are risks, but they are relatively easily controlled. (I found a useful source of information on the health risks of radiation here.) I would make the following points:

1. In deciding on energy policy, the risks of all the options should be considered. Fossil fuels create pollution and greenhouse gases. Wind power involves building and maintaining tall structures, which is inherently risky. Or suppose it takes a million solar panels on rooftops to replace one nuclear plant. It is a safe bet that some people will be killed and injured in installing and maintaining them.

2. The dangers of radioactivity itself are not as great as popularly supposed. Monitoring in Hiroshima and Nagasaki has shown that long-term cancer rates are not much higher than normal. No increase at all has been found in birth defects. (Radiation is mutagenic, but many of the mutations are recessive.) The effects of the Chernobyl radiation leaks are also much less than popularly supposed. (To quote one lunatic comment I found on an anti-nuclear website, ‘Chernobyl is the clearest single message to humanity that Nuclear Technology is not an appropriate exercise of human intelligence. It is omnicidal [sic, meaning ‘killing everyone’]’. The reality is that out of some 5 million people seriously exposed to radiation, a few thousand cases of cancer (mainly thyroid) have been attributed to the leak, and most of these have been successfully treated. According to a BBC report. ‘Fortunately, thyroid cancer is a very treatable disease, so few of the 2,000 who have developed it as a result of Chernobyl have died’. It is difficult to get accurate figures, but if we disregard hysterical claims, the true death toll from this worst-ever peacetime nuclear incident is probably less than that of an average air crash. [Added 6 September: The New York Times has a report today here (requires free subscription) on a new study of the Chernobyl disaster. This gives an estimate of 4,000 for the ultimate death toll, mainly due to the expected long-term increase in various cancers. This remains to be seen, but in any case 4,000 deaths, though deplorable, would be far below the hysterical claims of the anti-nuclear nuts, and also below the death toll of a medium-sized natural disaster (earthquake, tsunami, flood, etc). And this is the worst nuclear accident that has ever happened or is ever likely to happen.]

3. Most nuclear waste is ‘low-level’, and practically harmless, unless you sit on top of it for weeks.

4. A small proportion of waste is highly radioactive, but most of the radiation decays quickly, and the waste is only dangerous for a few years or decades, not centuries.

5. There is the threat of terrorists using nuclear waste in ‘dirty’ bombs, and security precautions would be needed to prevent this, but no more than for many other purposes. Again, the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is relevant. The idea that cities could be rendered permanently uninhabitable by a dirty bomb is absurd. Radioactive fallout in urban areas literally goes down the drain after a few days of rainfall. I would be much more worried about terrorists hijacking a fuel tanker and driving it into a crowd.

6. This leaves the problem of plutonium and a few other substances with serious long-lasting radioactivity. Plutonium is not only radioactive but highly toxic. This gives the scaremongers the opportunity to manufacture nightmare scenarios. A tiny particle of plutonium dust in the body can prove fatal. Therefore if a kilo of plutonium were ground into dust and scattered in the atmosphere, thousands of people could be killed. So the lesson is: don’t grind plutonium into dust and scatter it in the atmosphere! Of course, in pure form plutonium can also be used to make nuclear bombs, but nuclear waste contains plutonium only in low concentrations, and could not be used for bombs. One of the absurdities of the present situation is that weapons-grade plutonium has been taken out of bombs (as part of post-cold-war arms reductions) and is being held in storage because politicians cannot decide to build new nuclear plants!

7. But the trump card of the objectors is that plutonium will still be dangerous for millennia (it has a half-life of over 20,000 years). Extraordinary (and costly) measures are therefore needed to ensure that it cannot in any conceivable circumstances leak out, even in the very distant future. This seems to me wholly misconceived. It is absurd to worry about what may happen in future millennia, but there are two broad alternatives. Either civilisation will have collapsed, possibly due to nuclear war, in which case a bit more plutonium will be the least of our descendants’ worries. Or civilisation will have survived, in which case our descendants will be able to look after themselves. In particular, they will know better than we do how to extract plutonium from waste, and to cure cancer and other ailments. The responsible approach is not to bury plutonium inaccessibly deep in the ground, or in the ocean bed, but to keep it securely stored, in such a way that it can be dealt with by the appropriate authorities whenever they wish to, using future technologies we cannot yet imagine.

Well, that’s just my opinion. I don’t claim any expertise on the subject, but most of those who make kneejerk objections to nuclear energy don’t have special knowledge either. They just rely on the public’s ignorance and the prejudice against anything involving the word ‘nuclear’.