Nuclear Risk and Fear, from Hiroshima to Fukushima

[Bonobo]

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/nuclear-risk-and-fear-from-hiroshima-to-fukushima/
Here’s Spencer Weart’s “Your Dot” essay on the roots of nuclear fear, and its resurgence after the ravaging of the Fukushima plant:
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A year after the Fukushima reactor catastrophe, we can start to estimate its effects on people’s medical and mental health. Curiously, it’s the mental impact that we can predict best. As a recent Green Blog post by Matthew Wald explained, the medical effects are expected to be too weak and widely dispersed to measure. According to one theory, the increased radiation received by hundreds of thousands of citizens will cause an increase in their cancer rate — but an increase too tiny to detect amid the large number of cancers that will occur anyway. According to a rival theory, radiation at these low levels will cause scarcely any cancers at all. Scientists just don’t know.

The psychological impact, however, is plain. Precisely because damage from very-low-level radiation cannot be detected, people exposed to it are left in anguished uncertainty. Many believe they have been fundamentally contaminated for life. They may refuse to have children for fear of birth defects. They may be shunned by others who fear a sort of mysterious contagion.

Such great psychological danger does not accompany other materials that put people at risk of cancer and other deadly illness. Visceral fear is not widely aroused by, for example, the daily emissions from coal burning, although, as a National Academy of Sciences study found, this causes 10,000 premature deaths a year among Americans. It is only nuclear radiation that bears a huge psychological burden — for it carries a unique historical legacy.

Overt fears dwindled with the end of the Cold War, but the idea of nuclear radiation as an almost magical pollutant persisted. Think of the three-eyed fish in the effluent of the nuclear power plant featured in television’s “The Simpsons,” or the horrid mutants that shamble through the popular post-apocalyptic computer game “Fallout.” A more realistic image is terrorists planning to explode a “dirty” bomb, that is, an ordinary bomb that scatters radioactive materials around a neighborhood. Of course if you want to terrorize people with cancer-causing substances, there are plenty that are easier to get hold of than nuclear wastes. But it’s the nuclear stuff that would bring real panic, large-scale evacuation, and frantic cleanup efforts wherever the tiniest trace of radioactivity could be detected. So nuclear fear feeds back on itself, holding its status as the supreme horror.