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Nuclear Risk and Fear, from Hiroshima to Fukushima

By Andrew C. RevkinMarch 10, 2012 5:10 pmMarch 10, 2012 5:10 pm

Associated PressExperts in radiation risk last week said it would be difficult to measure cancers related to Japan’s nuclear emergency because levels of radiation exposure were very low.More photos here.

Next month will see the publication of “The Rise of Nuclear Fear,” a fresh look at the history of perceptions of nuclear risk by the physicist and historian Spencer Weart, who builds this book on his 1988 work “Nuclear Fear: A History of Images.” Weart is best known to Dot Earth regulars as the author of the essential guide to 100 years of research pointing to a human influence on climate, “The Discovery of Global Warming” (here’smy 2003 review of that book for The Times).

With the worldturning its focus to Japan on theanniversary this weekend of the great earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Honshu island andwrecked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex there, I invited Weart to muse on the consequences, which have beenfar more economic and psychological than radiological.

Here’s Spencer Weart’s “Your Dot” essay on the roots of nuclear fear, and its resurgence after the ravaging of the Fukushima plant:

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. Asa 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.
Add onto this the dislocation from forced evacuation, and you have a recipe for social isolation, anxiety, depression, psychosomatic medical problems, reckless behavior, even suicide. Such was the outcome of the still worse nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986. Acomprehensive 2005 study concluded that “the mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem unleashed by the accident to date.”
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 aNational 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.
The association of nuclear radiation with uncanny danger was present already in the 1930s in science fiction. One example, the movie “The Invisible Ray” featured actor Boris Karloff as a radioactively glowing mad scientist:

After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings the imagery exploded into an entire genre of movies with gigantic insects and other horrors. Audiences quailed at the monsters, imagining that they were plausible consequences of radiation.
To be sure, people knew that nuclear energy had a good side. Already in the 1950s, radiation therapy was saving lives by the million. But thoughts of “good atoms” were overwhelmed by the terrors of the Cold War. Outcries against bomb tests focused on the radioactive materials they spread around the world on the winds. Debates over fallout shelters offered an image of a dead planet scourged by radioactive dust. In short, fear of nuclear war drove home images of radiation as an insidious contamination that was uniquely deadly on a global scale.
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.
That’s not to say we should be terrified by ordinary chemicals. While pollution does shorten some lives, overall our industries bring indispensable benefits. But let’s try to level things up. An atom of a radioactive element, just like an atom of mercury or a molecule of a carcinogenic smoke, should be approached cautiously but objectively — not as if it was a breeder of unspeakable mythic horrors.

5:14 p.m.|Technical Note

I’m on the road through March 17th helping a Pace University student team make a documentary aboutthe path from cork forests to wine bottles, so comment moderation may be slow.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected topass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created byAndrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.

The blog moved to the Opinion side of The Times in 2010 when Revkin left the Times staff to teach communication courses at Pace University. He won aNational Academies Communication Award for Dot Earth in 2011 and Time Magazine named himone of the web's 25 top bloggers in 2013.

In December 2016, Revkin ended the blog and left Pace to return to full-time journalism as senior reporter on climate and related issues for the public-interest newsroomProPublica.

Click here for anarrated slide show on the roots of Revkin's journalistic journey.