Author: Kiersten Sundell
If you can’t prove that something is undoubtedly safe, it’s dangerous. Well that’s what the precautionary principle says, anyway.
It’s not necessarily a sound argument, or even one that makes any sense at all. Living your life by the precautionary principle would be like wearing a helmet everywhere you go, because there’s a chance that a brick could fall from the sky and kill you. This has never happened to you before, or anyone you know, but there’s no proof saying it’s impossible, which means it’s possible.
The precautionary principle comes up a lot in nuclear.
Radiation is such a weak carcinogen that the consequences from small doses are impossible to detect — if they even exist. Nuclear skeptics respond to this saying: “Well, if harm from small doses of radiation hasn’t been proven, then it hasn’t been disproven, either.”
While it’s true that radiation exposure is potentially harmful, it really, really depends on the dose. Developing nuclear power facilities spend billions of dollars trying to make the risk of something bad happening go down from 0.001% to 0.00001%. Regulators have been led to believe that any non-zero risk in nuclear power is supposed to be a really big damn deal, forgetting that very very marginal risks exist in pretty much everything.
If you’re driving a car, there’s might be a 0.01% that your airbag will fail to go off in the event of a car crash, and you will instantly die. This is an inherent risk, and it’s one that you accept when you get behind the wheel. You don’t see car companies driving themselves wild to make the risk of airbag failure go down from 0.01% to 0.001% — they already have awesome safety features in place, and it’s extremely unlikely in the first place.
And yet, this has become the default approach to nuclear power, ballooning costs and extending construction times to outlandish degrees.
We assume risks every single day, because they’re tiny. Just like how you wouldn’t buy a $1,000 unbreakable helmet to keep you safe in the unlikely event that a brick falls from the sky, we shouldn’t push reactor developers to spend billions reducing a negligible risk harm to something even smaller. Nuclear power is already among the safest energy sources in existence, and adding regulations will only increase the cost of power, which is wanted by nobody.
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