Theodore Rockwell ’43 *45 takes exception (letters, June 1) to two of my statements (A Moment With, April 27):
1) “These [power] reactors were not designed for inherent safety. These are the descendants of submarine propulsion reactors, where safety has been an add-on ... I think this technology could be safe. But I don’t think that the people running these plants, and the people regulating them, are producing that result.”
Rockwell responds that, “Over a period of two human generations (50-plus years), our nuclear navy has driven 526 nuclear-reactor cores 150 million miles without a single radiological incident.”
The U.S. nuclear navy does indeed have an admirable safety record. It is well known, however, that the Soviet nuclear navy had much worse luck with the same basic technology, see e.g. http://spb.org.ru/bellona/ehome/russia/nfl/nfl8.htm.
2) “The estimate is that Chernobyl, the one big accident we’ve had so far, will have in total shortened the lives of about 10,000 people by cancer.”
Rockwell responds: “As the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, WHO, and Red Cross reports have been demonstrating for 25 years, the actual number of cancer cases was not increased by the accident.” In fact, the 2008 report of the U.N. Committee on Chernobyl shows that the incidence of thyroid cancer in Belarus among those younger than 18 in 1986 has increased about 10-fold (http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/11-80076_Report_2008_Annex_D.pdf, p. 15). The expected increases of other cancers would, however, be undetectable against the background incidence. Ten thousand cancer deaths in an exposed population of 100 million would be an incidence of only 0.01 percent relative to a background of about 20 percent. The fact that they are invisible doesn’t mean that they are not occurring.