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From: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.sci
Subject: Nuclear power: Bernard Cohen, nuclear expert
Message-ID: <530@gargoyle.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 17-Jul-86 20:52:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.530
Posted: Thu Jul 17 20:52:56 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 19-Jul-86 06:42:08 EDT
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Distribution: net
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 119
Keywords: coal vs. nuclear
Xref: watmath net.politics:17469 net.sci:1296

Now let's consider physicist Bernard L. Cohen, whose statement that
"every time a coal-burning plant is built instead of a nuclear plant,
many hundreds of people are condemned to premature death" is
uncritically quoted by nuclear advocates on the net.  Let's begin
with a sample of Cohen's own views (*The Resourceful Earth*, p. 566):

 ...in the past ten years science has come under irrational attack
 from the forces of ignorance, and is losing public support.  This
 process has essentially destroyed the key ingredient needed to
 provide our bright future -- nuclear power, and is already zeroing in
 on other targets vital to our future.  Our government's science and
 technology policy is now guided by uninformed and emotion-driven
 public opinion rather than by sound scientific advice.
 Unfortunately, this public opinion is controlled by the media, a
 group of scientific illiterates drunk with power, heavily influenced
 by irrelevant political ideologies, and so misguided as to believe
 that they are more capable than the scientific community of making
 scientific decisions."

Now let us see how Paul and Anne Ehrlich review his contribution to
*The Resourceful Earth*, an article on "The Hazards of Nuclear
Power":

 Bernard Cohen's chapter is not much better [than Beckmann's].  He
 promotes his principal theme -- that coal-burning is vastly more
 hazardous than nuclear electricity generation -- with unremarkable
 opinion-poll findings (98 percent of "scientists" who make their
 livings from nuclear power are in favor of it); with vigorous attacks
 on straw-men (a nuclear reactor cannot explode like an atomic bomb!);
 with misleadingly selective and often erroneous citation of "facts"
 from the literature of energy risks; and with fallacious propositions
 of his own invention.  [Examples follow.] ...
 
 ...If Cohen had accurately represented his references on this point,
 his conclusion would have been that the health risks from routine
 operation of nuclear power, measured as loss of life expectancy in
 the present generation, may well exceed the corresponding risks from
 coal-produced air pollution.
 
 Cohen's treatment of the longer-range hazards of coal and nuclear
 energy is of even lower quality.  He offers a multiply fallacious
 argument to the effect that uranium mining *reduces* cancer deaths in
 the long run, an argument that was considered and dismissed in the
 National Academy studies Cohen cites.  On the other side, he peddles
 some numerical estimates of long-term, trace-metal hazards that are
 without validation in the professional literature.  His only
 reference on this point is an unpublished manuscript written by
 himself.
 
 On the basis of the "estimates" Cohen reaches this ringing
 conclusion: "Every time a coal-burning plant is built instead of a
 nuclear plant, many hundreds of people are condemned to premature
 death."  Given *The Resourceful Earth*'s inveighing against the
 ignorance and irresponsibility of the *Global 2000* authors -- as
 opposed to its own unmatched authority and expertise -- there is
 special irony in the volume's last "substantive" chapter ending on
 this wholly unsupported and highly irresponsible assertion.  And that
 chapter is followed by a vicious preachment from Cohen about how
 human problems will not be solved because the "forces of ignorance"
 oppose the solutions.  It is an appeal for laypeople to trust
 "experts" like Cohen.

Cohen replied with an indignant letter to the *Bulletin* (Sept.
1985).  The Ehrlichs responded:

 We are not surprised that Bernard Cohen found our comments on his
 chapter "highly insulting," but we remain unsympathetic.  Authors who
 present propaganda in the guise of objective analysis must expect
 insulting reviews from time to time.
 
 The opinion poll of which Cohen is so proud was intended to show that
 the media have exaggerated the hazards of radiation, thereby
 contributing to a degree of public opposition to nuclear power that
 Cohen considers irrational.  Cohen now protests that the poll was
 "*not* about nuclear power" and implies that university-employed
 analysts of radiation protection -- most of whose work relates to
 nuclear energy and most of whose jobs would not exist in the absence
 of a nuclear-energy industry -- are appropriate judges of the
 public's degree of rationality on these matters.  The journals that
 refused to publish Cohen's poll apparently found it no more
 illuminating than we did.
 
 Responsible analyses of the numbers of deaths attributable to
 coal-fired and nuclear electricity generation -- some of which Cohen
 cited but apparently did not understand -- indicate that the range of
 possibilities for both sources extends from one or two deaths per
 plant-year to several tens of deaths per plant-year, depending on
 mining practices, power-plant location, pollution-control technology,
 and highly uncertain assumptions about dose-response relations and
 effects (of both sources) extending millennia into the future.  In
 his chapter, Cohen presented figures for nuclear energy from the
 extreme low end of the range of values found in the literature
 (indeed, *outside* the range that would be considered respectable if
 studies now regarded as obsolete were excluded); and his figures for
 coal were near the extreme high end of the range found in the
 literature.  The reader received no clue of the enormous and
 overlapping uncertainties associated with the nuclear and coal
 figures -- only a wholly irresponsible assertion (quoted in our
 review) about the "many hundreds of people condemned to premature
 death" each time a coal-burning plant is built instead of a nuclear
 plant.
 
 As for the hazards of trace metals released in coal burning, Cohen's
 reference on this point in his chapter was an unpublished manuscript
 by himself.  He now reveals that he has published his analysis in two
 journals.... [T]he refereeing system of professional journals is so
 badly overloaded that substantial numbers of erroneous and even
 wholly incompetent papers get through.  The magnitude of this problem
 is such that capable scientists would be in danger of accomplishing
 nothing else if they tried to correct all the nonsense that comes to
 their attention.  This is a sad state of affairs, but it requires
 that much of the nonsense simply be ignored unless and until it
 reaches forums where it seems likely to be taken seriously by the
 unwary.  We -- and we trust others -- will continue to feel free to
 come down hard on "analyses" like Cohen's where they seem most
 dangerous, without claiming (or feeling obliged to try) to catch
 every lapse at its first appearance.  [Paul and Anne Ehrlich]

Richard Carnes