Your recent article “Powering ahead: Nuclear energy’s resurgence faces technical, financial and political challenges” (Report, February 2) correctly mentions strict regulations as an important factor. These regulations are designed to reduce the risk of accidents that will expose the public to radioactivity.
It is not widely appreciated that internationally-accepted regulations value a life lost to radioactivity at least 100 times more than a life lost to air pollution from burning fossil fuels or biofuels such as wood. This can be inferred from the fact there is a far higher risk of death from air pollution than from radioactivity at levels considered acceptable by relevant regulators.
This irrational regulatory difference is a major reason for the high costs of nuclear energy. By making fossil and biofuels much cheaper than nuclear energy, this regulatory error has increased air pollution deaths, global warming and loss of biodiversity.
Paradoxically, strict regulations have increased the harm caused by nuclear accidents, as they forced governments to create permanent large exclusion zones and conduct expensive and unnecessary clean-ups.
Indeed, experts in a paper by the Royal Society have concluded that all the measurable harm done by the nuclear accident at Fukushima has been a consequence of the response to, and fear of, the released radioactivity rather than the radioactivity itself.
Making our regulations on nuclear energy more rational is a cheap way to reduce carbon emissions, deaths from air pollution and threats to biodiversity.
This may also reduce the harm done by future nuclear accidents.
Professor Anton van der Merwe
Sir William Dunn School of Pathology
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
