Stiglitz on Fukushima and risk

One egg; one basket - you weigh the risk

Well, I bet this'll annoy them over at Catallaxy. Joseph Stiglitz draws comparisons between over-confidence in both the nuclear and finance industries, and ends as follows:

For the planet, there is one more risk, which, like the other two, is almost a certainty: global warming. If there were other planets to which we could move at low cost in the event of the almost certain outcome predicted by scientists, one could argue that this is a risk worth taking. But there aren't, so it isn't.

The costs of reducing emissions pale in comparison with the possible risks the world faces. And that is true even if we rule out the nuclear option (the costs of which were always underestimated). To be sure, coal and oil companies would suffer, and big polluting countries - like the US - would obviously pay a higher price than those with a less profligate lifestyle.

In the end, those gambling in Las Vegas lose more than they gain. As a society, we are gambling - with our big banks, with our nuclear power facilities, with our planet. As in Las Vegas, the lucky few - the bankers that put our economy at risk and the owners of energy companies that put our planet at risk - may walk off with a mint. But on average and almost certainly, we as a society, like all gamblers, will lose.

That is a lesson of Japan's disaster that we continue to ignore at our peril.

This is, I might point out, very close to the argument I have been running lately. The climate change skeptics, safe in their beds thousands of kilometres away, have been very aggressively downplaying the seriousness of the Fukushima accident; but really, they are the last people who should be pretending to be able to make reliable calls on the question of risk.

Of course, I have criticised the likes of Barry Brooks too, and many scientists with connections to the nuclear industry, for leaping in too fast with claims of "no need to worry, it's all under control." By doing so, they have also hurt the image of their reliability to assess risk.

The appropriate response, is, as it happens, mine. (Who'd have guessed?):

1. the Fukushima accident is very serious: any accident that requires long term abandonment of land scores of kilometres from the scene is serious, regardless of how many deaths or cancers it is ultimately believed to cause. (Even the shorter term evacuation of about 170,000 people is just being ignored, or treated as a mere inconvenience, by some commentators.)

2. It has shown the lack of adequate foresight in the nuclear industry, and highlighted several issues that need urgent addressing, such as the danger of the current international practice of leaving large amounts of spent fuel at the reactor sites for long periods.

3. the accident shows the importance of maximising passive safety in future design, even if such safety increases the cost somewhat.

4. future reactors should not be closely sited together due to the domino effect of disasters.

These issues are not actually all that hard to work out with common sense. I mean, everyone can tell that it's risky having lots of reactors and spent fuel rods in pools in a high risk earthquake area, such as (unfortunately) all of Japan. (Well, we didn't know how dangerous spent fuel rods still were until this accident, did we? Now that we do know, the question is "what are the industry and government regulators thinking, just leaving huge amounts of this stuff in pools - which must always remain full - for decades?)

I still think there can be an important future for nuclear, but there has to be more common sense applied to some of the very basics here, and I am not sure that this should even increase costs unduly. For example, one of the arguments for pebble bed style reactors is that they may need less rigorous containment due to an inability to melt down. Also, is it really cheaper to store spent fuel rods for years in pools than move them off site into the (obviously needed) permanent geological storage facility? And what about the "mini reactors" that are being developed: although I am not entirely sure how "passively safe" they will be, at least if one goes wrong, the amount of material released is going to smaller and more localised.

The nuclear industry needs a good dose of common sense questioning and change, and downplaying Fukushima is not going to achieve that.