A key component of the scientific method is being able to admit that you were wrong.
In his best-selling book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins describes an occasion when he was a student. An elderly and highly respected professor attended a lecture at which a visiting American academic publicly disproved the professor’s cherished theory. According to Dawkins, who was also at the lecture, instead of arguing with the American, or just ignoring his ideas, the elderly professor walked right to the front of the lecture hall, shook the visitor firmly by the hand and loudly said “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.”
I’m not going to say that all scientists are as grown up and noble as this. A very good example of scientific conservatism is the reaction from the scientific establishment in the early 20th century to the theories of relativity and quantum physics. These ideas were so revolutionary that the establishment couldn’t accept them. Many “scientists” at the time even thought that they were close to a complete understanding of the universe, that classical science from the time of Newton, Kepler and Copernicus explained everything. The new science, complicated by the fact that much of it came from Germans and Jews, was too revolutionary for the old guard. The resistance was formidable.
However the good thing is that the scientific community realized in the early 20th century that science doesn’t have to be convenient, it has to be correct. Einstein and his colleagues WERE right and progress was necessary.
The rest of the world often seems to find inconvenient evidence hard to digest.
Take the example of nuclear power. Almost everyone in the world thinks that nuclear power production is massively dangerous. Ask people and they’ll think of disasters like Chernobyl and, more recently, Fukushima.
But if you drill a little deeper, it’s not quite as simple as it seems. The biggest risk with exposure to radiation is cancer. It’s obviously impossible to say with any particular cancer victim that a particular thing caused their cancer but you can look at the number of deaths in an area and time and see if they’re different. In the initial explosion at Chernobyl 25 years ago, 57 people were killed but the long-term effects were significant. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimated that the long-term effect might be as high as 9,000 deaths. They also noted that there was no evidence of higher levels of birth defects or “solid cancers”.
The situation in Fukushima is similar but less significant. The Japanese government estimated that the release of radiation was about one tenth of that at Chernobyl. Even today, a year later, there remain some after-effects of the disaster. The BBC reported recently that fish caught in local waters remain contaminated above acceptable levels for human consumption. However that was at least in part due to the Japanese authorities changing the acceptable level to appease local consumers. The generally accepted predicted death toll is expected to be in the low hundreds.
It’s critical to understand how both of these disasters occurred. Both of the reactors were outdated, Chernobyl in particular, and used designs that haven’t been used in new reactors for decades. Although it was initially thought that the disaster at Chernobyl occurred because technicians at the plant were fooling around, it later transpired that the main cause was a combination of design flaws in the reactor and it’s catastrophic misuse. The main problems with Fukushima were its age and, again, operator errors.
No recently built nuclear reactor has any of the design problems that led to these two disasters. Of course new disasters can’t be ruled out but the chances are lower than ever before. There’s also the fact that although radiation can be dangerous, it’s not nearly as dangerous as the so-called “green” lobby would have us believe.
What about “conventional” power production, such as coal-fired power stations? They’re a much safer alternative, surely? There’s another uncomfortable truth we have to face.
Generating electricity by burning coal is by far the most dangerous way to produce power. It’s estimated that over 13,000 people in the USA alone are killed directly by inhaling particles from coal-powered power stations every year. The World Health Organisation estimates that around 3 million people around the world die every year from the results of air pollution caused by the combustion of fossil fuels.
Let me put it another way. For every one person killed by nuclear power, it’s been estimated that 4,000 die from coal. And which type of power production are we investing in? Why are we digging up large amounts of coal instead of encouraging more prospecting for uranium?
Is it possible we’re wrong but afraid to confront the truth?
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