Center for Reactor Information

Risk, Safety and the Average Man

The nuclear power industry and the technical community need to recognize that public policy is determined, not by objective risk, but by perceived safety; those who measure and analyze risks know that when an event can be shown to have an extremely low risk, it is safe, and they are baffled when others don't understand that.

Robert E. Boyar
Retired, Argonne National Laboratory
Prepared February1997

Abstract

Risk and safety are very different; upon hearing that the risk of a serious but hypothetical event is one in ten million, a typical citizen tends not to be reassured, but instead to feel uneasy.

The nuclear community has failed to help people understand that we are not getting the biggest bang for our safety buck when we spend billions to avoid a few hypothetical deaths from exposure to radioactive waste when, instead, we could save many thousands of lives by spending the money on other options to improve public safety or health.

Choosing to spend an extra $2.5 billion on reactor safety instead of on highway safety sacrifices over 16,000 lives to highway accidents in order to save one hypothetical radiation victim!

When risk evaluators make statements about safety, they tread on the jealously guarded turf of lawyers and politicians who believe that technical experts have no business making safety judgements.

In effect, technical people are accused of promoting their careers regardless of hazards to human life; while only the scientifically illiterate and technically incompetent can be trusted to render opinions on moral and ethical issues in public debate.

If the nuclear community is to help the U.S. stop spending scarce resources on overblown problems, it must show that resources are not infinite, and ethics and economic sanity are not mutually exclusive.

Risk, Safety and the Average Man

Risk and safety are very different. Safety is a value judgement-how you feel about it-while risk is measurable and predictable. Most citizens do not think in terms of probability, but rather use a mixture of reason and intuition, and are greatly influenced by mental images of catastrophic events. Upon hearing that the risk of a serious but hypothetical event is one in ten million, most of us tend not to be reassured, but instead to feel uneasy.

We have to deal with that all-too-human failing. A way to answer the question, "How safe is safe enough?" is to present risks as comparisons rather than absolute numbers, since people respond to their relative individual priorities. When we see that public money spent on enhancing the safety of a particular endeavor has reached the point of diminishing returns, we put our own pocketbook into the picture, and are likely to feel that "safe enough" has been achieved.

There will be some who object to putting a price on an "infinitely valuable" human life, calling that "measuring the immeasurable." But most can see that there are tradeoffs in public-policy decisions--"everything has its price." We balance cost and safety when we buy life insurance, when we make safety decisions regarding our car or home, and when we set highway speed limits. Resources are not infinite. Subconsciously we know that in the real world the value of a life is finite.

We have failed to get people to understand that there is only so much money available for public safety and health. We are not getting the biggest bang for our safety buck when we spend billions to avoid a few hypothetical deaths from exposure to radioactive waste when, instead, we could save thousands of times more lives by spending the money on improved health care for the vulnerable. When the public comprehends that the chance of anyone being exposed to harmful radiation from a well-engineered repository for nuclear waste is extremely small, they will see that the current overkill on the nuclear waste issue is absurd. Return on investment will be greater when dollars are spent to solve more urgent health and safety issues.

When risk evaluators cross over the line to make safety pontifications, they are treading on jealously guarded turf of the lawyers and politicians who believe that technical experts have no business making safety pronouncements. Many decision-makers feel that public policy should not be based on assigning numerical costs to human life, calling that a "numbers game" based on nothing more than the questionable value judgements of the technical experts themselves. They see safety evaluation as part of the adversarial legal and political process, in which they are the experts. They feel it's wrong to try to hold safety to scientific standards of objectivity and factuality.

A goal of lawyers and politicians is resolution of conflict. The technical community has a hard time adjusting to the fact that the adversarial process sometimes requires accepting information that is only partially true. Many technical people have difficulty grasping the concept that the adversary process demands compromise with the truth-that living with distortions and factual errors is necessary in the democratic decision-making process. This applies to many fields-e.g. fiscal, judicial, agricultural, foreign policy, as well as public safety.

Our country increasingly scrutinizes-and some factions openly oppose-further advances in what is being called "unsafe, unforgiving, alienating, and centralized hard technologies." The public debate has become politicized. Leaders in the environmental movement, political activists, religious groups, and government officials say that technology raises not only technical, economic, and scientific issues, but also moral and ethical ones. But all too often they claim further that the technical community can only make technical assessments, along with cost/benefit analyses that have dubious value at best.

And the nihilists are listened to. More and more, the public feels that technical expertise corrupts the purity of moral judgments. Technical experts are depicted as morally and ethically blind, with all of their moral judgments tainted, self-serving, and clouded by greedy profit motives. In effect, technical people are accused of promoting their careers regardless of hazards to human life-only the scientifically illiterate and technically incompetent can be trusted to render valid opinions on moral and ethical issues in public debate.

The technical community is asked to ignore ethical and moral issues and focus on quantitative analysis of absolute risk. That applies particularly to those who are involved in:

• Psychological investigation of public risk-perception.
• Analysis of multiple-risk, maximum-credible-accident, and worst-case scenarios.
• Analyzing the cost of reducing the consequences or frequency of accidents.
• Quantifying cost/benefit ratios of decisions.
• Responding to public perception of risk to present and future generations.

Unfortunately, risk analysis has been applied one-at-a-time and piecemeal. First one hazard gets a public spotlight for a time, then another, without end: DDT, lead, saccharin, asbestos, cyclamates, red dye #2, PCBs-all worthy of public examination, but all overreacted to because they were not addressed relative to one another.

Regulatory agencies have their own category of hazards on which to do research and perform "bureaucratic free-enterprise" (finding more problems to justify requests for more federal funds to do more research to find more problems...). Selective concentration on problems and risks magnifies hazards, leading the public to believe that the more-studied risks are the more dangerous ones.

Regulators, being human, can no more admit that what they regulate is safe enough than other professionals can admit that the job is finished and future efforts are unnecessary. No matter how small the risk, it can be reduced.

Technical people scratch their heads when confronted by inconsistent regulations. For example, an EPA regulation on the uranium fuel cycle requires that it contribute no more than 25 milli-rem per year (mr/yr) to the radiation exposure of a member of the general public, in spite of the facts that:

• The 500 mr/yr measured in New York's Grand Central Station, where some members of the public spend their working lives, is 20 times higher than the EPA limit.
• People living in Denver, Colorado, get 100 mr/yr more than citizens of New Haven, Connecticut -higher by a factor of four than EPA's criterion.
• The lowest chronic radiation dose at which harmful effects have been found in people or animals is 25,000 mr/yr-one thousand times the EPA number.

Consider the deactivation and cleanup of the Hanford, Washington site where the Department of Energy's residue of low-level waste from manufacture of nuclear weapons is stored in deteriorating underground containers. The cost of returning this land to a semi-pristine condition is estimated to be $50 billion. Is it ethical or moral to expend that amount of national resources on the job? Yes or no, depending on the answers to questions such as:

• How many lives will be saved or cancers prevented if the project is completed?
• If the cleanup standards were relaxed, what would be the long-range impact on people?
• What would be the long-range impact if the hazardous materials were immobilized and the reservation were fenced off?

To proceed with the Hanford project without answering the relevant questions could result in inexcusable, perhaps criminal, misuse of public funds.

The cultures of the United States and Canada have become the most forewarned, anxiety-prone, and guilt-ridden in history. Routinely, dire predictions are published that are attributed to "authorities" or "experts" who seem credible, and their projected catastrophes are not merely local or national, but global. The appearance of credibility is enhanced by dramatic news anchors and the public's insatiable thirst for bad news. We are told that the human species is deteriorating and that our only habitable planet has been raped and irreversibly polluted by technological man, driven by selfish greed to flirt with eco-catastrophe. Our high-technology society is accused of releasing excessive amounts of toxic chemicals and radiation into the environment. Movie actors and actresses testify before congressional committees about such technical matters as cancer caused by a growth-retardant sprayed on apples. Obviously, the world has become dismally unsafe!

A dramatic illustration of the need for educational work comes from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's estimate that the improved reactor safety that has been mandated corresponds to $2.5 billion per life saved. Combine that with the U.S. Department of Transportation's report that the cost of saving one life by improving traffic safety is $150,000, and you conclude that choosing to spend an extra $2.5 billion on reactor safety instead of on highway safety sacrifices over 16,000 lives to highway accidents in order to save one hypothetical radiation victim! Such comparisons are endless, and, if clearly presented, can help educate people and change minds.

Consider now the morality of converting fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) to energy instead of using uranium. Most people are only dimly aware that the earth's reserves of oil and natural gas are strictly limited (they might only last a few decades, depending on how rapidly consumption increases), that greenhouse gases come from burning any variety of fossil fuel, that oil and coal release toxic materials to the environment when burned, and that coal's deleterious emissions will make it intolerable to burn it even at the present rate for many more decades.

Even among those who do understand all that, few realize that using uranium involves none of those drawbacks. And still fewer know that fast reactors could safely provide all the world's energy needs for thousands of years. The average person does not know that uranium is good for practically nothing other than producing energy. The public is largely unaware that national policy declares uranium, along with energy-rich "spent" fuel from current reactors, to be nuclear waste. Most people are also unaware that it will require significant taxpayer financing to dispose of this unappreciated asset. Management of this "waste" currently involves guarding it for 10,000 years to make sure that nobody retrieves the spent fuel to make nuclear bombs. This is carrying safety to an unnecessary extreme.

Consideration of the ethics and morality of fossil fuels versus uranium for generating electricity would contribute more to public education than explaining in exhaustive detail the ultra-low risks of fast reactors.

If we in the U.S. nuclear community are to begin to help our country regain balance (some would say common sense) with regard to spending scarce resources on overblown problems, we will have to broaden our focus. Merely stating that we have reduced a risk from one-in-a-thousand to one-in-a-million, or giving narrowly focused cost/risk/benefit ratios, is not sufficient. We must move also into the area of ethics, and show that morality and economic sanity are not mutually exclusive.

For additional information, please contact CFRI, an independent organization of retirees with extensive nuclear experience.