A Thought Experiment

[drplokta]

Suppose that you saw the following statement in the media, and after a little research discovered that it appeared to be well substantiated. How would you react? What do you think would be the general public reaction?

Radiation released from nuclear power stations continues to exceed safe limits in central London, and is causing over 4,000 deaths from cancer per year.

It's not true of course. But let's change a few words, and we get a statement that is true (as far as can be determined):

Particulates released from diesel vehicles continue to exceed safe limits in central London, and are causing over 4,000 deaths from asthma, lung disease and heart attacks per year.

So, what's your reaction to that one? And the public reaction? Is there a difference? Why?

Comments

[dougs.livejournal.com]

I read the first paragraph, following the preceding instructions, disbelieved it, and then and mentally compared it to deaths from conventional power stations, coal mining, oil extraction and the like (or the likely deaths from not having any of that power), and thought it was a reasonable deal.

The second paragraph, a statistic of which I was already aware, wasn't a huge surprise. And generates the (in my view quite reasonable) reaction of "yeah yeah blah blah blah march of progress lalalala I'm not listening".

I'm not qualified to pronounce on the general public reaction, but I suspect I'm a lot closer to it with the second paragraph than I was with the first.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Been reading George Monbiot this morning?

[drplokta]

I have, as it happens. But the whole Fukushima hysteria is annoying me.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Me too.

(Although I share Monbiot's deep distrust of the private sector nuclear industry -- and indeed of all private sector energy industries, because they all have a profit incentive for sweeping bad news under the rug. (See also: BP oil spill.) I'd much rather our nuclear reactors were nationalised so that the externalities can't be ignored, and that the stated goal for running them was to reduce CO2 emissions while providing relatively safe base-load energy -- not cheap energy.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I am probably atypical, because the first statement caused me to think 'What? That sounds like someone trying to scaremonger' while the second was something I knew.

[dalmeny]

Agreed.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

My reaction is that the general public doesn't understand Risk.

I worked in it for three years and still don't understand it fully myself but joe public thinks he does.


but I'll get off my hobby horse now...

[fanf]

Step one: move out of London.
Step two: stop getting sinusitis with every cold.
Step three: profit!

[dougs.livejournal.com]

There's another candidate for second paragraph, featuring deaths from road traffic accidents.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I hate the action of nationalisation and don't advocate it in general, but with regard to nuclear power it seems like a damn good idea.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

You do need to be careful with excess deaths from common causes; statistics of this kind are remarkably subjective. So my first concern would be to ask about how the excess deaths are calculated and how robust the sensitivity testing is.

Take mesothelioma; it punches above its weight in the occupational/environmental cancer stakes precisely because over 95% of all mesothelioma deaths are caused directly by exposure to asbestos. So 3,000 or so annual deaths nationally gets quite a lot of attention (though I promise, not as much as 3,000 annual deaths from radiation leaks would).

Dust of all types (incluing asbestos, coal dust, cotton fibre, silicon dust) causes a load of excess deaths -- but because they are mostly from common causes (lung cancer, asthma, heart disease) you can't separate them out easily.

And you have to be incredibly careful not to double count. You see this with cholesterol. Eating oats, climbing stairs, reducing saturated fats will each reduce risk a certain amount; doing all of them won't reduce risk by 3x that amount. So some of those 4,000 extra deaths will also be counted in other statistics such as the excess deaths from smoking or obesity.

Human reaction to risk is also 'wrong', mathematically, as others have noted below. A couple of the key issues: we expect, and compensate for, the risk from common activities that we undertake, and fear unknown activities, especially those we can't control. We also overplay catastrophe; 50 deaths from terrorism get a great deal more attention than 50 deaths from heart disease.

We have also abstracted energy production. Energy production and transport are both difficult messy activities that cause death, injury and ill-health. But because we don't personally scrape out our grates each morning, we've largely forgotten the first of these. In an ideal world where all central London traffic was low-emission and excess deaths were minimised, we would presumably be putting even more reliance on remote generation of electricity, with consequential increased risks.

Sorry, can apparently bore for England on this subject, and this is just scraping the surface.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

This figure, 4,000 excess deaths in *London*, is much, much higher than the number of deaths from road traffic accidents. But it's also suspect for the reasons I go into briefly below, and also because there is no such thing as an excess death; everybody dies of something. We care, and should care, a great deal more about someone dying in a RTA at age 19, than we do about a 79 year old dying of lung disease due to particulates six months earlier than they would have done anyway.

[drplokta]

But if the first statement sounds like scaremongering, then why has the second one failed to monger a scare?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I wish I knew!

[redbird]

The extreme is the sort of thing where the number of "excess" deaths claimed in a given population from several causes is significantly more than the total number of people in that group dying of all causes. Yes, someone might smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, get no exercise, binge drink twice a week, and avoid their doctor no matter what. And all of those might contribute to them having a heart attack. But if that heart attack is fatal, the person has lost one life. Not four.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

> no such thing as an excess death; everybody dies of something

I agree wholeheartedly. And we can look a little wider than deaths -- my brother, who wasn't an RTA death and doesn't contribute to those statistics, has spent the last twenty years on one leg. And although he's currently dieing, I don't see how you can blame that on any specific cause when we can clearly see it's a combination of several including industrial causes, smoking, and the very aggressive programme of pain management he's been on as a result of the same RTA.

I echo your "statistics of this kind are remarkably subjective" comment below: I think I've demonstrated one of my particular subjectivities.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Previous to the Fukushima incident the two largest releases of nuclear material into the wild from reactors were at Windscale, under the direct control of the British Government at the time and Tchernobyl which was definitely not a privately-held operation.

A privately-held operation such as TEPCO has to put up with no-knock inspections from all sorts of international bodies such as the IAEA to account for fuel inventories under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and others. The assorted non-power generating reactors in, say, the Big Green Square at AWE west of London are under no such obligations relying only on government-appointed inspectors to ensure safe operation of their small but very interesting reactor fleet, including the sweat-inducing supercritical VIPER (although that may have been dismantled by now, unlike the sheds which need lead paint to prevent the plutonium washing out of the wooden planking when it rains -- do you know how hard it is to get lead paint these days?).

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

So you are saying that in private hands nuclear power stations would get more inspections and thus be safer?

Hmmm.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Would the stations necessarily get more and better inspections because they are publicly-held? Any government-run business would have budgets and financial targets to meet just like commercial operations do, and the High Heid Yins would be under similar pressures to make the balance sheets look good come end-of-year.

As a private business the government inspectors can be as heavy-handed as they like with restrictions, limits etc. When the inspection team's boss is an old Civil Service College buddy of the head of British Nuclear Power Pty. then maybe stuff will be brushed under the carpet to give them a chance to fix things before the next inspection, as a favour to an old friend.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

We know that normal levels of radiation released from nuclear power stations would not cause that number of deaths. Unless we're in a science fiction story where something went terribly wrong, a scare is being mongered.

The second statement is describing a normal situation. It's bad, but we've already made our compromises with it. Diesel is arguably much better than what was before: coal, horses, and people doing the same jobs. If we decide we can do better than diesel there will be stories about how the toll is unacceptable, but the reality is it is accepted right up to the point the alternatives are convenient and economic enough. Interestingly, I think we're close to that point. I want my shiny electric future. As a side effect it will make city living even nicer.

[flinx.livejournal.com]

Your (and my, and our) disengagement on the issue of slow deaths due to air pollution ikely stems from the fact that we've been hammered with that information for decades. The specifics about particulates is a new twist on a story that's ~40-50 years, depending upon your locale.

The fear about death from radioactivity due to a nuclear power plant accident, while much ballyhooed, has, barring one truly spectacular incident (Chernobyl), generally failed to materialise. So too, no one has ever used air pollution as a weapon of war, either.

It's the emotional disconnect between a gradual, creeping death (*yawn*) and the potential for a precipitous decline (*yipe!*).

[grytpype-thynne.livejournal.com]

I'll let you get on with it without weighing in too much,as you note the most important point which is that (especially) collectively we cannot understand the concept of risk and, indeed, associate risk levels with our emotional responses to certain types of traumatic event rather than the grind of daily mortality. Without reaching for my textbooks I recall 1,000+ workplace deaths annually in coal mining and railway construction a their respective peaks and yes, some action occurred as result but hardly public outrage. Indeed in the thirties iron foundry trade unions campaigned against safety legislation to keep their members in (very dangerous and unhealthy) jobs.

Probably a good time to recommend Michael Blastland.

It's almost as if we're incapable of acting in our own best interests. It's time for the Hexamon to take over (yes, been rereading Greg Bear).

[ms-cataclysm.livejournal.com]

I think exotic risks are much more frightening . I know plenty of people who are panicky about terrorist activity but totally blase about familiar but higher risks such as traffic accidents.

I don't think this is entirely stupid . If you have an existing risk then you've either already considered it and made some sort of adaptation (maybe I should live further away from the M1 than Aspley Guise in my case) or can't be arsed. If you become aware of a new risk, you need to think about whether you need to change your lifestyle.