The air over northeastern Japan is slightly radioactive—not at dangerous levels for people, but an indicator that higher levels might come. The newspapers in Japan and here are talking earnestly about failures in pressure vessels and falsified safety reporting, as they should.

But now, a slightly hysterical Surgeon General of the United States is recommending that millions of U.S. residents buy iodide crystals to ward off potential thyroid cancer—from a nuclear event thousands miles away. Four thousand people were on the site of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986; nine have died from thyroid cancer exposure. Thyroid cancer is one of the most successfully treatable cancers.

Greenpeace, under a heading of “No New Nukes” is trumpeting that “There is no such thing as a ‘safe’ dose of radiation… If a meltdown were to occur, the accident could kill and injure tens of thousands of people.” This is a two-subject statement:

1.     Obviously we are all exposed to safe levels of radiation every day; and many of us owe our lives to the tumor-destroying blessing of directed medical radiation.

2.      There has never been a “meltdown”—the temperatures in a nuclear plant are about 550 degrees F–the highest setting of your home oven.

Lost in the discussion is this simple reality: These nuclear plants withstood a 9.0 earthquake—even greater than their design strength—with no reactor problems. But the diesel generators that backed up the nukes’ electrical cooling systems were drowned by the tsunami. The huge wave knocked out the power grid for the entire region. Everybody agrees it is the water that’s boiled out of the spent waste pools that is the real radioactivity risk to the public—because the generators were knocked off line.

The New York Times says one of the diesel generators was in the basement of the reactor building—where the tsunami waters quickly drowned it. At another plant, the generators were behind an 18-foot seawall, and the tsunami was 21 feet high.

In 1990, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission identified diesel generator failure as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event. That report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, but apparently the folks at Tokyo Electric didn’t read it carefully. Now they face billions of dollars in losses to their reactors and billions more in lawsuit damages. Instead of a few thousand dollars to ensure their diesel generators were up high enough to protect against a tsunami—like on the roof of the administration building!

There’s another lesson here, too—for the United States and for Greenpeace. It is dangerous to keep spent fuel rods sitting around the reactor site, even when they’re protected by circulating water. We should immediately reopen work on the long-delayed storage faculty at Yucca Mountain—so far blocked by activist lawsuits and a cowardly congress. Or, we could reprocess the spent fuel rods to recover much of the energy and keep the nuclear plants sustainable.

Bottom line:  How many thousands of people would die in a severe winter if Greenpeace’s favorite wind turbines don’t have any wind to turn them?  Britain last winter got just 9 percent of the rated generating capacity of its huge wind turbine arrays. What kept Britons from literally freezing to death in their homes were the back-up fossil fuel plants that have to be kept in “spinning reserve” behind the erratic turbines. But the fossil backup required is why the wind turbines don’t reduce greenhouse emissions. And they provide no protection for the public from weather just cold enough to freeze ice in nearby ponds.

If we won’t build nuclear plants, we had better, learn to love coal and oil to keep the lights on and the heat warming.

Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years. Readers may write to him at PO Box 202 Churchville, VA 2442; email to cgfi@hughes.net. Visit our website at www. cgfi.org

By:  Dennis T. Avery

Nuclear power and genetically engineered rice are set to help rescue the world from global warming. This isn’t really what anti-tech activists had in mind when they launched the campaign against fossil fuels, hoping to restrict our current lifestyles.

The British government has just announced that it will encourage a new generation of nuclear power plants to “supply unlimited amounts of electricity to the national grid,” to offset its declining energy harvests from North Sea oil and gas.

Meanwhile, a California genetic research firm is collaborating with a Chinese province to create UN-approved “carbon offsets,” by encouraging Chinese farmers to plant a new genetically engineered rice variety. The biotech rice needs only half the normal amount of nitrogen fertilizer to produce the same yield, and thus emits far less nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times as potent as CO₂. 

Britain’s sudden move to expand nuclear power represents a major shift from the Labor government’s 2003 stance that nuclear power was “an unattractive option” for its energy future. Since then, oil prices have hit record highs and Middle East Islamic turmoil has further increased the importance of “energy independence.”  Nor has any more attractive energy option than nuclear come forward.

Britain thus joins France (80 percent of its electricity nuclear), Finland (building a new nuclear plant), Germany (Chancellor Merkel says she will not decommission her nuclear plants after all), and Eastern Europe (building several nuclear facilities) as pro-nuclear powers. China and India are planning and building dozens of nuclear facilities.

NRG Energy of Texas has filed for two new U.S. nuclear plants to come on line in 2014, reportedly the first of a new wave of American nuclear expansion.

The biotech rice might be as important to our Greenhouse future as the nuclear power. The International Rice Research Institute estimates that rice production around the world adds 100 million tons of CO₂ equivalents per year because only about half of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to rice is absorbed by the plants. Much of the rest passes into the air as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse agent.

Arcadia Bioscience’s new rice plants would cut nitrogen fertilizer use by 50–60 percent without reducing rice yields. The new technology would also sharply reduce the amounts of natural gas needed by fertilizer makers to capture natural nitrogen from the air.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions through American lifestyle changes, in contrast, would probably require at least a two-thirds cut in U.S. energy use. The Marshall Institute suggests that a couple could achieve their share of such a greenhouse cut if they 1) gave up driving any car;  2) moved to a smaller home heated with natural gas (in increasingly short supply) rather than coal or oil; 3) set their thermostat 10 degrees lower in winter and 10 degrees higher in summer;  4) replaced their windows with energy-efficient types; 5) refused to fly; and 6) reduced their electric bills to half the current U.S. family average. Driving, flying, reading after dark and home freezers would put their emissions footprint far beyond any greenhouse limits. Obviously, a few Americans could or would comply.

Any massive shift to such lean lifestyles, however unlikely, would doom the suburbs, and require us to recreate the “tenements” that crowded our cities 100 years ago. Even then, most industrial production would have to be banned because of greenhouse emissions. Even imported manufactures would have to pay “energy taxes” on the CO₂ used in their production. 

On the other hand, the earth’s net warming since 1940 is 0.2 degrees C, and there is a 95 percent correlation between our temperatures and sunspots, not with CO₂.