Minding the (partisan) gap: partisan divisions in support for nuclear

Via NEI's twitter feed comes this story of a new Gallup poll on energy and environmental issues similar to that released by Pew which I dissected a few weeks ago.

Image via Gallup

For the most part, the trends are indeed quite similar - especially in the respect that public opinion on the issue of nuclear energy appears to be quite "sticky," consistently polling at a slight majority of Americans favoring its continued use (and even expansion). Unsurprisingly, support for the expanded use of nuclear energy is riven by partisan divides, with much broader numbers of Republicans favoring its expansion over Democrats.

Indeed, this partisan fissure is consistent with Pew's prior polling, with Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters strongly favoring measures including more stringent environmental regulations and more funding for alternative sources such as wind and solar, with much weaker support for the development of new nuclear or fossil fuel exploration. (Interestingly, support for new nuclear among Democrats is weaker than that of opening up federal lands for oil exploration.)

The Republican side naturally shows the inverse, with Republicans generally favoring policies to expand energy supplies (with the relative strength of support for opening up additional land for oil exploration as Democrats show for conservation and regulatory measures). A notable difference in this poll is much stronger support among Republicans for expanding nuclear energy, being the second-favorite choice among Republicans and Republican-leaners at 64% of respondents favoring, compared to 54% in the similar Pew poll.

	% in favor
	National Adults	Republicans	Democrats
Setting higher emissions and pollution standards for business and industry	70	54	85
Spending more government money on developing solar and wind power	69	51	84
Spending government money to develop alternate sources of fuel for automobiles	66	51	81
Imposing mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions/other greenhouse gases	65	50	82
Opening up land owned by the federal government for oil exploration	65	84	49
More strongly enforcing federal environmental regulations	64	47	80
Setting higher auto emissions standards for automobiles	62	49	76
Expanding the use of nuclear energy	52	64	41

Getting back to the issue of "stickiness" in public opinion, while support for expanding nuclear has been steadily growing among Republicans since the early 2000s, among Democrats support appears to be stuck around 40%, after briefly spiking around 2006 (incidentally, around the time of Al Gore's most famous work, An Inconvenient Truth was released).

Given the need to develop new domestic sources of energy and the general drive to phase out dirtier sources like coal, it provokes a nagging question - why such a stark partisan divide over one of the largest clean energy sources in the U.S. by share of electricity (around 20%)? Indeed, it's one thing to expect broad divisions overall (given the relative weight individuals assign to factors such as economics, waste management, safety, and so forth). And indeed, some of the split will be driven by familiarity with energy sources overall (i.e., the feasibility, not to mention practicality of providing electricity from intermittent sources at the caprice of nature). An of course, splits along other lines are perhaps more obvious manifestations of priorities - take the split over fossil exploration. But what explains nuclear?

One explanation (which I will cover in a follow-on post) is the influence of cultural factors - specifically, cultural factors which influence risk perception. There is an entire field of study devoted to this, such as the Cultural Cognition Project at the Yale Law School. Ultimately what it boils down to is that how individuals perceive risk and respond to new information is dramatically influenced by their value systems. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the same patterns of values which tend to divide liberals and conservatives also tend to divide across issues such as the perceived risk of nuclear energy production (along with related issues, such as nuclear waste management).

However, this can cut both ways as well, a matter which should be of key interest to those committed to action on global climate change. A teaser for next time - one particularly interesting finding is those of value persuasions typically found in conservatives that if expanded use of nuclear energy is presented as a necessary solution to global climate change, these individuals become more open to evidence of the risks of climate change, as compared to greater regulatory control over industrial activity - precisely due to the issues of concordance of values. Food for thought.

The other thing Vogtle has revived: Nuclear hysteria

They say no one likes a buzzkill, but almost as if on queue, the NRC's announcement of its issue of the first combined operating license (COL) in over three decades has drawn out the usual suspects committed to reassuring us that this both simultaneously meaningless (read, "The Nuclear Renaissance is still dead!") and yet somehow at the same time, an imminent danger. Call it the nuclear equivalent of the "double-tap" - anti-nuclear activists will throw out everything (kitchen sinks included) as an effort to kill off an apparently "moribund" comeback of nuclear energy. The Vogtle announcement seems to have put this process into overdrive.

One probably needs to learn to develop thick skin when working in this field, but sometimes the arguments get obnoxious enough to be called out on their own. Take for example a recent facts-optional anti-nuclear jeremiad published over at The Energy Collective (Disclosure: On occasion my posts are syndicated over there), entitled, "Rethinking the Nuclear Renaissance." The piece is essentially a warmed-over serving of recycled arguments (one can suppose at least that part of it makes it "green"), made somehow new and interesting by the fact that there has been some incremental forward motion on reactor construction in the United States. (But never fear, readers - as our intrepid author assures us, "...only 5 reactors including the two in Georgia that are likely to be completed in the next decade," and yet another of those was one which started in the 70's [Watts Barr] and never completed.)

At this point already one may wish to don their wading boots, because at the risk of falling into the classic XCKD trap, we're about to go debunking.

When the cure proves more harmful than the disease

Recently, the Boston Globe published a series of haunting images taken from the evacuation zone surrounding the stricken Fukushima plants. Perhaps what is most striking is the unearthly nature of the abandoned towns, now turned feral, their only inhabitants being abandoned pets and livestock. These are more snapshots from a post-apocalyptic wasteland; it is difficult to imagine these as bustling, populated places less than a year ago.

Several news agencies have taken up the issue of the evacuation zone, referring to it as "poisoned" and "uninhabitable for decades to come." And of course, taking a look at maps such as that put out by the Washington Post, indeed the situation does look quite grim. (For an excellent, authoritative view of the data, the NNSA has continued to publish updated radiation measurements).

The evacuation zone - and the surrounding dire rhetoric - is founded on the idea of maintain a "safe" level of annual radiation exposure, set as 20 milliSieverts (mSv) per year, or 2 rads/year. (Note that the NRC limits for the general public are 1 mSv/year for the general public, and 50 mSv/year for radiation workers). By contrast, an average member of the public would receive on average 4 mSv/year simply from natural and synthetic sources of radiation each year (including x-rays, CT scans, and the like).

Yet without getting into the issue of radiation hormesis (i.e., the theory that low doses of radiation may show an overall benefit), the epidemiological understanding of radiation risk from protracted exposures at levels under 50-100 mSv is extremely murky. (This is not to assert no long-term risk of excess cancers exists for this level, but simply that our currently understanding of this risk is extremely limited). Conversely, long-term doses above 100 mSv have been shown to contribute to an excess risk of cancers.

Two critical questions should arise at this point. First, what risk exactly is the 20 mSv/year limit based upon? For reference, estimates of radiation doses from smokers put their annual doses around 150 mSv/year (due to polonium-210 deposited into smokers' lungs). While clearly no one should endorse smoking as a healthy life choice, it is regardless a risk that individuals freely make each day at that we as a society (reluctantly) accept. In this sense then, why is the government of Japan making a choices of risk for thousands of displaced individuals at thresholds far lower than individuals themselves accept?

Taking the linear-no-threshold model (LNT) at its face, a common value for excess fatal cancers is assumed to be 0.005 fatal cancers / Sv (i.e., 0.00005 fatal cancers / mSv; the value established by NCRP 115). Assuming a dose of 20 mSv/year, this leads to an overall increase in risk of fatal cancer of 0.03 over 30 years - in other words, 1 in 33 individuals can be expected to develop an excess fatal cancer over a period of 30 years. That comes down to 1 fatal cancer per year per 1,000 individuals exposed - a rate approaching statistical noise.

Still sound scary? Let's put this into the context of other common everyday risks:

Risk	Order (death/year)
Meteorite impacts	~0.000000001
Radiation risk to U.S. population from nuclear power plant	~0.00000001
Radiation from high-altitude flight	~0.0000001
Lightning	~0.0000001
Radiation death from consumer products	~0.0000001
Flood, tornadoes, or earthquakes	~0.000001
Death from cholera or whooping cough	~0.000001
Train passenger death	~0.000001
Natural background radiation	~0.00001
Passenger deaths in aircraft accidents	~0.00001
Death from leukemia or tuberculosis	~0.00001
Brain damage from whooping cough vaccination	~0.0001
Overall road accident deaths	~0.0001
Death from bronchitis or influenza	~0.0001
Death from childbirth	0.00024
Lung cancer risk from smoking (20 cigarettes/day)	~0.001
Death from all causes at age 55	~0.001
Death from cancer, stroke, or heath disease	~0.001
Deaths from 20 mSv exposure (Fukushima exposure limit)	~0.001

In other words, the absolute limit on exposure established by the Japanese government corresponds to roughly equal that of the mortality risk of an average smoker (assuming conservative projections of low-dose risk). Beyond this, residents are to be permanently exiled from their homes.

Now conceive of a relatively conservative limit of even 50 mSv/year - a little over double the current exposure limit. From the above exposure maps, this would roughly halve the area requiring permanent evacuation ("permanent" in the sense of on the order of 30 years given the half-life of Cs-137, assuming no further decontamination). This would lead to a risk of about 0.0025 cancer deaths per year - 1 in 400. 

While such a certainly not trivial (although based in conservative projections), the question which should be asked is, "Compared to what?" Those evacuated have been deprived entirely of their livehoods - homes, farms, businesses, and ancestral lands. Clearly, they should be made whole by TEPCO, and failing this, the Japanese government. Yet the additional risk of death from cancer should be balanced against the very real physical and emotional costs of a mass involuntary exodus (not even taking into account the economic consequences for both those impacted and the country as a whole). What is the toll in terms of premature death from stress and associated mental health disorders (including alcoholism, depression, etc.) In essence, what is the cost in terms of human life from a forced exile? 

Nor are forced evacuations without cost - recently, Japan's blanket 20 km evacuation order recently came under fire due to its generic nature (ignoring real-time radiation exposure data, showing that contamination was spreading in a northwestern direction due to seasonal winds). As a result, many individuals received a higher dose than that if they'd simply stayed in place (due to evacuating to the northwest). Likewise, these evacuations themselves necessitated leaving homes (areas where radiation exposure is lower) and taking up residence in less sanitary conditions with greater exposure to the outdoors (increasing overall exposure). Thus, evacuation itself is not without risk. Each alternative must be evaluated for its own inherent risks - there is no free lunch.

I am not about to assert that there is zero risk from allowing residents to return - namely because the data regarding prolonged low-dose exposures is too poor to make a definitive assessment of risk. However, what should happen is that residents themselves should be allowed to make this choice from themselves - rather than the government. Perhaps one of the most disturbing images of the Fukushima evacuation zone is the constant vigil of police forces enforcing the no-entry zone; an act done ostensibly for residents' "own good," despite the legions of family pets and livestock abandoned to starvation or a return to ferity.

Within reason, these are risks residents should be allowed to evaluate on their own in an informed manner, rather than having them imposed upon them.