Polls of college students and members of the League of Women Voters in Oregon found that both groups believe that nuclear power is their No. 1 "present risk of death," outranking motor-vehicle accidents that kill 50,000 Americans each year and 12 other hazards that kill more than 1,000 each. Yet scientific studies find that the number of deaths expected from nuclear power, including accidents, radioactive waste and everything else, is less than 10 per year; even the principal anti-nuclear activist organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), estimates less than 150. Clearly, even well-educated segments of the American public are badly misinformed.
Another poll found that more that 80% of the public believes that nuclear power is more dangerous than its principal competitor, coal burning, which is typically estimated to kill 10,000 Americans each year with its air pollution -- some studies estimate 50,000. Every single study (at least 20, including one by UCS) has reached the opposite conclusion, that coal burning is much more dangerous. Clearly, the 80% is badly misinformed.
As a consequence of this misinformation, we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars per life saved by protecting people from radiation, while we are disdaining to spend one-thousandth of that amount to protect people from disease, automobile accidents, and other common dangers.
This is a tragic situation, unnecessarily killing thousands of people and wasting billions of dollars every year. Who is to blame? Since the public gets its nuclear information from the media, electronic and print, journalism must be the culprit. Let's see how it has operated.
One of its worst sins is over coverage. More than 100 accidents involving transport of radioactive material have received national media coverage in the past few decades, but the radiation exposure in all of them combined has less than a 1% chance of causing even a single death. How does this square with the 300 Americans killed in accidents every day, with hardly any media coverage? There was tremendous coverage of the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident although all investigations have concluded that there was never any significant danger to the public -- the media still haven't transmitted that message and continue to imply that TMI was a near miss on disaster.
Another problem with nuclear journalism is the use of inflammatory language -- "deadly radiation," and "lethal radioactivity." Why do we never hear about "deadly" automobiles or "lethal" electricity that electrocutes 1,200 Americans per year? Or about "lethal" water that drowns 8,000 each year?
Another journalistic failing is in not trying to help the public understand the dangers of radiation. The best way to do this, always used by scientists in trying to enlighten the public, is to compare the radiation being reported with the much higher radiation doses we all receive from natural sources or medical X-rays. The radiation due to an accident in Rochester, N.Y., nuclear plant last year was a leading national news story for two days, but with all that coverage the public was never told that no one got as much radiation as he gets every day from natural sources.
The media frequently imply that health effects of radiation are poorly understood by scientists. Actually, every involved scientist recognizes that radiation effects are far better understood than air pollution, food additives, chemical wastes and almost any environmental agent. In contrast with the latter examples, all national and international scientific commissions charged with estimating the health effects of radiation obtain similar results.
Journalists continually consult a small handful of "renegade" scientists who have been trying to frighten the public about the dangers of radiation. They very seldom give well respected scientists a chance to rebut their arguments, choosing instead to use utility executives or government bureaucrats, with the all-but-open implication that their credibility is suspect.
How can a journalist tell who is a "respected scientist" or what is a scientific "consensus" on a subject? It's easy. Call a few randomly chosen high-quality universities; ask to speak to a professor of radiation health, and pop the question. The results would be at least 95% consistent in most cases. When journalists interviewing me question my statements, I always ask them to do this but no one ever has. The usual journalist line is that the scientific community is split -- they imply into equal halves -- on the dangers of radiation, with one side dominated by government -- or industry supported scientists fearful of economic reprisal.
Journalists frequently make implicit judgments on scientific issues, treating them like political or social issues on which everyone is entitled to an opinion. They do not recognize that a scientific consensus is based on vast amounts of data, techniques and experience, and is normally agreed upon by over 90% of those possessing these. The public wants and is entitled to be informed of the scientific consensus, but instead it gets the opinions of journalists. For example, to the question, "Are the estimated dangers of radiation larger now than they were 10 years ago?" the scientific consensus is a resounding "no," but the media has told the public that it is "yes." Note that this is a strictly scientific question, with no room for political considerations.
But the worst journalist sin is failure to put risks into perspective. People can understand new risks only by comparing them with risks that are familiar. Let's do it here, deriving the nuclear risk estimates from typical scientific analyses but also including (in parenthesis) those from the anti-nuclear UCS. The present risk to the average American from the nuclear-power industry is equivalent to that of smoking one cigarette in one's life (one cigarette per year according to UCS), of an overweight person increasing his weight by 0.004 ounces (0.2 ounces), crossing a street one extra time every three years (every three weeks) or increasing the national speed limit form 55 to 55.003 (55.13) miles per hour.
I doubt if 1% of our citizenry recognizes that the risks of nuclear power are as low as indicated by these comparisons. By failing to put these risks into proper perspective, journalists have failed in their responsibility to inform the American public.
These failures of journalism are costing our nation thousands of unnecessary deaths and wasting billions of dollars every year. Moreover, they have quadrupled the inflation-corrected cost of new electric power in the U.S., making it twice as expensive as in Europe or Japan. We can only surmise what economic havoc this will wreak in the next few decades.
This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on 11/30/83, but it still applies today, in 2002. Bernard L. Cohen has authored six books and over 300 papers in scientific journals, and he was awarded the Health Physics Society Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award.