Readers will certainly notice the title.

Why You Should Fear Your Toaster More Than Nuclear Power

TAYLOR PEARSON

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A recent nuclear disaster in Japan provides a challenging context for Pearson’s claim: we need nuclear energy.

For the past month or so, headlines everywhere have been warning us of the horrible crises caused by the damaged Japanese nuclear reactors. Titles like “Japan Nuclear Disaster Tops Scale” have fueled a new wave of protests against anything nuclear — namely, the construction of new nuclear plants or even the continued operation of existing plants. However, all this reignited fear of nuclear energy is nothing more than media sensationalism. We need nuclear energy. It’s clean, it’s efficient, it’s economic, and it’s probably the only thing that will enable us to quickly phase out fossil fuels.

The first-person plural point of view (we) helps Pearson to connect with his audience.

DEATH TOLL

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First, let’s address what is probably everyone’s main concern about nuclear energy: the threat it poses to us and the likelihood of a nuclear power plant killing large numbers of people. The actual number of deaths caused by nuclear power plant accidents, even in worst-case scenarios, have been few. Take the Chernobyl accident — the worst and most lethal nuclear incident to date. As tragic as it was, the incident has killed only eighty-two people. More specifically, according to a 2005 release by the World Health Organization, thirty-two were killed in the effort to put out the fires caused by the meltdown and thirty-eight died within months of the accident as a result of acute radiation poisoning. Since the accident occurred in 1986, an additional twelve people have died from the radiation they were exposed to during the accident. Almost all deaths were highly exposed rescue workers. Other nuclear power accidents have been few and never resulted in more than ten deaths per incident. Still think that’s too dangerous? To provide some perspective, let’s consider an innocuous household appliance, the toaster: over three thousand people died from toaster accidents the first year the appliances were produced and sold in the 1920s, and they still cause around fifty accident-related deaths every year in the United States. So your toaster is far more likely to kill you than any nuclear power plant and subsequently give you a painfully embarrassing epitaph.

Pearson deflates fears by putting deaths caused by nuclear plants in perspective.

In fact, in comparison to the other major means of energy production in the United States, nuclear power is remarkably safe. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, coal mining currently causes about sixty-five deaths and eleven thousand injuries per year, while oil drilling is responsible for approximately 125 deaths per year in the United States. Annual death tolls fluctuate depending upon the demand for these resources and the subsequent drilling or mining required, but the human cost is still exponentially more than that of nuclear energy. However, in the decades that nuclear power has been used in the United States, there have been zero deaths caused by nuclear power accidents — none at all. That’s much better than the thousands of lives coal, oil, and toasters have cost us. If you care about saving human lives, then you should like nuclear energy.

RADIATION

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Despite nuclear energy causing remarkably few deaths, people are also terrified of another aspect of nuclear power — radiation. Everyone’s scared of developing a boulder-size tumor or our apples growing to similar size as a result of the awful radiation given off by nuclear power plants or their potential meltdowns. However, it should comfort you to know (or perhaps not) that you receive more radiation from a brick wall than from a nuclear power plant.

The argument uses technical terms but makes sure they are accessible to readers.

We live in a radioactive world — nearly everything gives off at least a trace amount of radiation; that includes brick walls. Yes, while such a wall emits about 3.5 millirems of radiation per year, a nuclear power plant gives off about .3 millirems per year. (Millirem is just a unit of radiation dosage.) Of course, this low level of emission is a result of the numerous safeguards set up around the reactors to suppress radiation. So what happens if those safeguards fail? Will everyone surrounding the plant turn into a mutant?

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To answer that question, let’s examine the reactor failures in the recent Japanese nuclear crisis following several devastating earthquakes. The damage from the quakes took out the power to several nuclear plants, which caused their core cooling systems to go offline. To prevent reactor meltdowns, workers had to douse the failing reactors in thousands of gallons of seawater to cool the fuel rods, which contain all the radioactive materials. Worries about the resulting radioactive seawater contaminating the ocean and sea life flared as a result. But just how radioactive is the water? Officials from Tokyo Electric Power Company said the water “would have to be drunk for a whole year in order to accumulate one millisievert.” People are generally exposed to about 1 to 10 millisieverts each year from background radiation caused by substances in the air and soil. “You would have to eat or drink an awful lot to get any level of radiation that would be harmful,” said British nuclear expert Laurence Williams. You get exposed to 5 millisieverts during a coast-to-coast flight across the United States. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, you receive between 5 and 60 millisieverts in a CAT scan, depending on the type. So drinking water for a year that was in direct contact with containers of radioactive material used in those Japanese nuclear plants will expose you to a fifth of the radiation you would get from the weakest CAT scan. How dangerous!

The argument is full of data and statistics from what seem to be reputable authorities and sources.

WASTE

But even if we have little to fear from nuclear power plants themselves, what about the supposedly deadly by-products of these plants? Opponents of nuclear energy cite the fact that while nuclear power plants don’t emit greenhouse gases, they do leave behind waste that remains radioactive for thousands of years. However, this nuclear waste problem is exaggerated. According to Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University, John McCarthy, a 1,000-megawatt reactor produces only 1.5 cubic meters of waste after a year of operation. The current solution is to put the waste in protective containers and store them in caverns cut in granite. At the very least, with such a small amount of waste per reactor, the caverns don’t have to be dug very fast.

As the argument explores various aspects of nuclear energy, headings keep the reader on track.

Pearson strategically concedes a downside of nuclear energy.

Nuclear power plants do produce waste that needs to be kept away from living things, but the actual amount of waste produced is small and therefore manageable. If the United States got all its power from nuclear plants, the amount of waste produced would be equivalent to one pill of aspirin per person, per year — tiny compared to the amount of waste produced by plants that use fossil fuels; the U.S. Energy Information Administration notes that coal alone produces about 1.8 billion metric tons of CO₂ emissions per year.

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Quantity is not the only factor that has been exaggerated — the amount of time the waste remains dangerously radioactive has also been inflated. After about five hundred years, the fission products’ radiation levels drop to below the level at which we typically find them in nature; the thousands of years opponents of nuclear energy refer to are the years the waste will be radioactive, not excessively so. You don’t want to stand right next to this material even after those first five hundred years, but if it can exist in nature without doing any noticeable damage, then it doesn’t pose any serious threat. Essentially, everything is radioactive; to criticize something for being radioactive without specifying the level of radioactivity means nothing.

MEETING OUR ENERGY DEMANDS

Although I’ve done a lot here in an attempt to defend nuclear energy, I still acknowledge it’s not perfect. While the nuclear waste problem isn’t something to be too worried about, it would still be better if we could satisfy our demand for energy without producing waste, radioactive or otherwise. However, I believe nuclear energy is the only realistic option we have to one day achieve an entirely clean energy reality.

We live in an age dominated by energy — to power our cars, our homes, and our computers. Let’s face it: we’re not going to give up the lifestyle that energy gives us. But under the current means of energy production — primarily coal in the United States — we’re pumping out billions of tons of greenhouse gases that will eventually destroy our planet. So we have a dilemma. While we want to do something about global warming, we don’t want to change our high-energy-consumption way of life. What are our options?

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Currently, completely clean sources of energy haven’t been developed enough to make them a realistic option to supply all our energy needs. For solar energy to match the energy production of nuclear power plants presently in use, we would have to cover an area the size of New Jersey with solar panels. That’s not a realistic option; we’re not going to build that many panels just to get ourselves off of our addiction to fossil fuels. The same is true of the other renewable energy sources: wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, etc. The technologies simply aren’t mature enough.

The concluding paragraphs compare nuclear power to potential alternatives.

However, nuclear power is realistic. We have the means and the technology to make enough nuclear power plants to satisfy our electricity demands. Nuclear plants produce a lot of power with relatively little waste. Moving from coal to nuclear plants could provide us with adequate power until we develop more efficient renewable sources of electricity.

So what’s stopping us? Of course, those heavily invested in coal and other fossil fuels lobby the government to keep their industries profitable, but a large source of opposition is also the American public. Because of the atom bombs of World War II, the Cold War, and Chernobyl, we’re scared of all things nuclear. Anytime we hear the word “radiation,” images of mushroom clouds and fallout enter our minds. But nuclear power plants aren’t bombs. No matter what happens to them, they will never explode. Strong as it might be, our fear of nuclear power is overblown and keeping us from using a source of energy that could literally save our planet. We need to stop the fearmongering before we burn our planet to a crisp.

Pearson ends his argument by asking readers to acknowledge that their fears of nuclear power aren’t based in fact.

Of course, that’s if our toasters don’t kill us first.

Taylor Pearson wrote “Why You Should Fear Your Toaster More Than Nuclear Power” while he was a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin. The assignment asked for a public argument — one good enough to attract readers who could put it down if they lost interest. In other words, a purely academic argument wouldn’t work. So Pearson allows himself to exercise his sense of humor. Nor did the paper have to be formally documented. However, Pearson was expected to identify crucial sources the way writers do in magazines and newspapers. The paper provides an example of a factual argument with a clear thesis: “We need nuclear energy.”