The Low Tar Cigarette of the Nuclear Industry

The nuclear industry has had no private money since 1978. There is no market for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs). No one really wants them. The nuclear industry, however, wants to sell them, peppers the media with advertising and persistently lobbies otherwise naive parliamentarians, This is not the first time that the environmental and health effects of an industry have been ignored by the medical profession. How long did it take to curb the tobacco industry?

Small modular nuclear reactors are not small - the units in advertising brochures weigh 100 tonnes and will be built into a structure a little smaller than Mosaic Stadium (Regina). They will be using enriched uranium which means that uranium will be trucked to the USA and returned to us.

 

Are they safe? Plans are to have high-temperature likely liquid sodium reactors which will eventually be abandoned in their remote locations after providing their lifetimes of electricity. Even before it is irradiated, liquid sodium is highly corrosive - and one of the reasons that the technology was abandoned in the 1960’s. Furthermore, sodium explodes upon contact with air. In effect, what is being promoted is a highly corrosive explosive radioactive liquid at high temperature circulating in miles of metal pipes cooling a nuclear reactor core - what hubris it is to call this “safe”. 

 

Are they Green? By this most people are asking whether they are carbon free. The carbon intensive part of the cycle is external to the power plant - the mining, milling and refining, the aforementioned trucking to the enriching facility and back to Canada, the manufacturing of the fuel rods, construction of power plants, etc. If you turn a blind eye to all of that, nuclear power is indeed carbon  emissions free when producing electricity. 

 

It is not emissions free however. Although the nuclear plant is not producing carbon dioxide when it's boiling water for electricity, all nuclear power plants emit tritium, a radioactive hydrogen, and the occasional atoms of iodine-129, strontium-90 or caesium-137, all radioactive elements.

 

The other distinctly non-green characteristic is the waste. It lasts forever and no one knows what to do with it. Canada has spent billions of dollars over the last fifty years looking for a place to put it and is still looking. Nuclear power is the only means of producing electricity that creates such long lasting volumes of waste. Everything is contaminated. All the broken bits of uranium are radioactive, the building and its contents are radioactive and even the clothing the staff wear is radioactive. There are too many reasons why Deep Underground Repositories don't work; they have already failed in Germany, in the USA, and in France. Finland is expects to being using its first DGR in 2025. Many of us believe that the waste is most safely and cheaply managed on site in a "Rolling Stewardship" model in the hopes that future technology will be able to use it. There is no easy answer.

 

Finally there is the effect upon the health of populations. Ionizing radiation has spread around the world from the first atmospheric test in June 1945 and the subsequent decades of atmospheric testing by the USA, Russia, and France. China, and the UK added to the radioactive rainfall. Is it by accident that the USA and the UK mounted research to explain the "epidemic of leukaemia" in the 1950's. Ionizing radiation has been proven to cause cancer at any dose, as well as autoimmune disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome, atherosclerosis and heart disease. Additionally, it affects germ cells and fetal cells disproportionally. Could the fallout from weapons testing be responsible for what the American Cancer Society today still calls the "cancer epidemic"?

 

Am I being ridiculous? I stand on the shoulders of Dr. John Gofman, "Father of Lipidology", Dr. Linus Pauling, twice Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Ernest Sternglass, Drs Joseph Mangano, and Thomas Mancuso, Drs. Rosalie Bertell and Alice Stewart, Drs. Arthur Tamplin and Harold Knapp, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Drs Alex Rosen, Jeffrey Patterson & Ira Helfand, and, to name a few of many Canadian contemporaries, Dr. Fred Bass, Drs Nancy Covington, Michael Dworkind, Barbara Birkett and Courtney Howard, Drs Mary-Wynne Ashford, Cathy Vakil, Jonathon Down, Jeannie Rosenberg, Richard Denton, Neil Arya, Vinay Jindal and Donna Lougheed, among them professors of medicine, or specialists in their fields. 

 

Dr. Hermann Muller published his first work in 1927 proving that ionizing radiation caused genetic damage in fruit flies, a finding for which he received a Nobel prize. He continued experimenting with smaller and smaller doses and more generations of fruit flies. In the 1940's he concluded that there was no dose so low that it did not have an effect. The same conclusion was reached in 2007 by the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) VII of the National Academy of Science, USA.

 

I’m old enough to recall the battle that health care providers had with tobacco companies. I remember how the tobacco companies seemed to have parliamentarians and policy makers under their control. Physicians were complicit because they were addicted; the surgeons' lounge at Royal University Hospital, Saskatoon, was thick with blue smoke. The industry added filters, and increased the popular advertising line emphasizing individuality, freedom to choose and sexiness. Like nuclear power today, it sold itself as healthy, safe and clean. The final attempt was marketing the low tar cigarette.

 

Today, the Small Modular Nuclear Reactor is the low tar cigarette of the nuclear industry; it is everything else that its big brother is - and more - and will outdo larger reactors in cost per kilowatt. Like the tobacco industry, the nuclear industry has infiltrated the medical profession; many physicians have become convinced that nuclear medicine required nuclear reactors, not realizing that cobalt-60 was harvested from cyclotrons years before reactors. 

 

The Canadian Medical Association should take a strong stand on protecting our health and the health of future generations by opposing the "light cigarette" of the nuclear industry. The CMA should take a strong position in opposition to nuclear power and promote clean-ups of existing radioactive waste sites; it should also take an active participation in the on-going process of decommissioning. For far too long we've allowed the medical profession to be sidelined and our efforts on the behalf of the health of future generations minimized or belittled.