Murphy's nuclear law
Sir: Mr Martin's letter (11 March) is a good one, vitiated by another of those nuclear canards. You do have to balance risks against benefits, in nuclear power as in every other economic activity. Murphy's law does apply to nuclear reactors. They can melt down, and they will, though a realistic assessment of numerical risks shows we might have to wait a few hundred years. The canard appears when he sup- poses the consequences of a meltdown to resemble Hiroshima. In fact, they will probably be even less than those at the much-publicised Three Mile Island melt- down in the United States. There, no one on the plant suffered so much as a sore finger, and the radioactive dose rate to the local residents was such that even if one of them had stood at the station fence throughout the entire incident the dose received would have been less than that from a chest X-ray.
Chernobyl, on the other hand, was a horrifyingly dangerous design of plant that Western engineers wouldn't even put for- ward, never mind expect to get past the licensing authorities. It was operated in a way that beggared belief. Even there, however, the death toll, all on the plant, was just 31. An air crash with so few deaths is forgotten in days.
Dennis Thornton
9 Burford Lane, Lymm, Cheshire
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