>> today on "earth focus," nunuclear powewer: the downside. miles benson reports on where nuclear insurance falls short, and dr. helen caldicott on the health effects of nuclear radiation. coming up, on "earth focus." >> an earthquake and tsunami struck japan's fukushima nuclear power plant. ththree reactors suffered a meltdown. >> the japanese government has raised the crisis level at the fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant from 5 to 7. >> the confirmed death toll continues to climb.

>> hundreds of thousands fled the radiation. many are still unable to return home.e. propery damages and cleanup costs may run over $250 billion. >> the operator of the disabled fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant has agreed to make provisional damage payments to residents living around the plant. >> what if it happened in the united states? who would pay? a catastrophe like fukushima could erase all existing insurance protection under federal law. it makes the u.s. liability compensation system look grossly inadequate. there are 104 nuclear power plants in the u.s. spread across 31 states. they produce 20% of our electrical power. they all carry some insurance against a nuclear accident, but the combined total coverage is only $12.6 billion. beyond that, americans would be uninsured...

or as the insurance industry puts it, naked. >> if you have to evacuate a very large city, or tens or hundreds of thousands of people are displaced and that there are very large areas of land that are rendered uninhabitable fofor tens to hundreds of years, the-- itit gets to the poinint where - you knowow, the estimation off the damagages and the coststs te government become inestimable, iincalculalable. >> nuclear accidents are costly. some experts say an extreme event here could cost as much as $500 billion omore. >> my colleagues and i did a number of estimates based on the spent fuel catching fire

atat reactors, and some of these estimates went i into the huhuns of billions of dollars. >> so why is the liability cap for insurance ononly $12.6 billn if the actual c cost of a a disr could be far greater? >> now,w, clearly after fukukus, $12 billion doesn't look likike nearly enouough. >> raising the cap would be costly. the nuclear industry says $12.6 billion is enough because nuclear power is safe and the probably of a major accident low. >> i think ththat the amount off coverage isis adequatate. we hae seen that the three mile island accident, the amount was far below the amount of coverage provided. we have no other experience in the united states of an n accident that would d rh the level of $12.6 bibillion, and none is expected, given the strong safefety standards e enfd

by the u.s. nuclear regulatory commission. >> we have a very strong regulatory process, a set of regulations. we do inspections. we have a strong enforcement process to handle when regulations aren't being follllowed, and d those thiningl combine--you knknow, help to gie us contntinued assurance e that nuclelear power is safe. >> after fukushima, steps were taken to review safety at u.s. nuclear plants. >> right now we are a little bit more than 2/3rds of the way through a 90-day review that we're doing to see if there are any immediate short-term issues that need to be addressed to deal with the events at fukushima. >> fukushima reinvigorated this discussion of how n.r.c. considers laland contamination, ececonomic consequenceses within n its regulatory framework and also if the n.r.c. would like to do anything differently in the future. >> we're always looking for ways to improve the regulatory procesess and how we regulate the e civilian uses of nuclear

materiaials. >> but some experts are concerned about safety and regulations. today, u.s. nuclear power plants are aging. built to last 40 years, more than half are at least 30 years old. >> if we're going to have nuclear power, , then we believe it has to be as safe and secure as possible. and we've been long concernrned that neither in the ununited states oror other couos is the regulatoryry infrastructe adequate to make sure nuclear plantnts are safefe. >> i think that there is reasonable assurancece that we're nevever going to have a catastrophic accident of the magnitude of what happened in japan. >> but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. >> you u know, it can be the black swan event: low probability of occurrence but high impact. >> today, 6 million americans live withihin 10 miles o of a nuclelear plant and 120 millionn live within 50 miles. but nobody can buy private insurance against damage to their property

because of a radiation leak or other consequences of a nuclear accident. [majestic mumusic playaying] the nuclear indudustry was b bon in the 1950s when n the u.s. government was determined to promote the civilian use of nuclear energy. president dwight d. eisenhower had a dream: he called it "atoms for peace." >> s so my country'ss purpose is to help us move ouout of the dak chahamber of horrors into the light, to ffind a way by whicich the mindsds of men, the h hopes of men,n, the souls of memen everyrywhere can move forwaward toward peace and hapappiness and well-being. it is not enenough to take this weapon out of the handsds of the ldiers. itit must t be put into the hands of thosose who will kw how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the e arts of peacece.

>> nunuclear power was to beneft mankind, but ththe free-market insurancnce industry was unwilig to cocover cleaear accident r rk becacause it was immeasururabled potential economic damages were incalculable. so to encourage and protectct investmement in nuclear power, congress passed the price anderson act in 1957, which created an insurance pool and capped the amount of liability a commercial nuclear power plant would face should a disaster occur. >> well, the thinking that went into the creation of the price andeon act bacack in the fifties was that in the event of a catastrtrophic accident, no s se uutility would be able, from a financncial standpoint, to withstand that kind of a loss. but it was always s designeded primarily with the view that the accident would probably be the destruction of the physical facilility itself, and it wasn't ever thought about, you know,

a catastrophic accident that went far beyond the plant's geographic borders and into the surrounding community. >> when price anderson was first adopted, there was $60 million of insurance and $500 million of united states governmentnt indemnity. the act wasas later amemended to provide that all of the money would cocome fromm prprivate sources. aat the prest time, the first tier is composed of insurance of $375 million. if that were not adequate, then each operator of the 104 nuclear power plants would be assessed about $111 million. this totals about 12.6 billion. >> anything beyond that would-- is not covered by insurance, and it would be up to congrgress to decide whether they wanted to appropriaiate thethe funds. >> if we start talking a about $$400 or $500 billion,n, there s

no way that any politician is gogoing to vote for r the publio take e on that kind of liabilit. >> y you cannot tell congrgresst in the e future at some time, they''rere gonna hahave to passw to provide many, many more billions of d dollars in case of a nuclear accidenent. that's a fairy tale.e. >> i think we have a $16 tririion deficicit right t . it wouould obviously probably he to be into some kind of deficit financing g with major implications for the economy and for maybe even the value of thehe dollar in theorstst case f scenario i in the worlececonomy. >> the way it works is that many of these reactors are now owned by multi-tiered holding companies that have layers and layers of what they call limited liability corporations beneath them, and each l.l.c. basically represents a reactor and has no other assets. the whole concept

of a limited liability corporation by virtue of its definition is to shield the parent corporation frorom liability. what happens under these corporate structures is that if such an accident of such great magnitude were to occur, these limited liability corporations could probably declarre bankruruptcy and shield the parent corporation that leaveves the taxpayer hololdinge babag to pay for the liabililit. >> only congress with the president's approval can raise the mandated level of insurance coverage against nuclear accidents. there's been no sign they intend to do so, and the nuclear industry is quite happy with that. >> it's sort of shohort-term greed, that what driveses the dustry morore than anything is making as much money as quickly as possible a and as long as possible without incurring any large expensnses that would cut

ininto their profits. itit's tht simple. >> two years after fukushima, costs continue to pile up. it will probably be decades before the full scope of f the expenses is known. japanese government officials admit that the overall consequences are too broad to fix an accurate price on the disaster. cleanup and property damage claims by homeowners, businesses, including 80,000 farms, are already running 5 to 10 times higher than initial expectations. tepco, the tokyo corporation that operated the nuclear plant, is now virtually bankrupt. japan's leaders arare struggling to continue payouts to tens of thousands of their citizens who may never be able to return to homes contaminated by radiation. adding to the financial burden now are collapsing property values in contaminated areas and

related increases nationally in the costs of alternative coal, gas, and oil. and then there is another human dimension: the slow future unfolding of cancer cases in those exposed to contaminants, particularly children. in february, 2013, a world health organization report said that radiation from fukushima posed minimal health risk to the general population of japan. but the w.h.o. acknowledged that ememergency workers at the plant who inhaled high doses of radioactive iodine face an increased risk of developing thyroid cancer, and that children exposed as infants in areas closest to the power plant have a slightly e elevated risk of conontracting leukemimia, br, or thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. critics say that the health impacts of fukushima are far from insignificant and will increasingly be evident over

time. one of the harshest of these critics is longtime antinuclear activist dr. helen caldicott, a pediatrician and author. she offered a far more dire viewew of fukushima's healh impact soon after the disaster. dr. caldicott, fukushima--is it possibible to forecacast the heh consesequences s to the japanese people, and on what scale are they likely to materialize? >> well, it's a guess, really, but i have been following it extremely closely every day since the thing started. and i must say that two days after it began, i got this horrifying, horrrrifying vision and feeling that ththis was like descendidig into hell, and that there's nothing g anyone could do aboutt or willll be able to o do about, and the results are irreversible. i thouought hundns of thousands would die as a

result of fukushima with cancer or leukemia, and--but it will also affect future generations down the timescale, both from the fact that the food and the ground in large areas of japan is heavily contaminated with isotopes that last for hundreds of years. so they re-concentrate back in the food chain continuously, so you never get rid o of the things. the other thing is that once you've got some cesium-137 in your brain or your muscle or your ovary or your testicle or any of the other several hundred elements, they stay in a little place in your body irradiating a few cells witith a high dose.e. so u don''t get a low dose; thohose cells get a high dose. so from two perspectives, the accident kind of never ends. it doesn't end in your r body--maybe one dy you might excrete these elelements, bubut you might not- and that the food chain remains contaminated for hundreds or thousands of years. and we'll

start seeing lung cancer and leukemia i think 2 to 5 years from now, and then solid cancers will start appearing 15 to 16, 17 years later. so the ace up the sleeve is--of the nuclear industry is the incubabation tie for cancer. it takes a long ti for cancers to dedevelop onceceu have inhaled or been exposed to these radioactive elements, and no cancer identifies its origin. and so there is already a level of cancer in society, but it's going to increase dramatically. >> what do people need to o know abouout nuclear power in the unitited states that they are nt being told? >> everything. it just makakes e feel naauseated to ththink thate industry is spending hundreds of millllions of dollars sayingng t nuclear power is clean, green, sustainable, and cheap, and all of those are lies. and i-- you know, i get very sick of scientists or people who lie about science. . if i lied about

memedicine, i i would be deregistered. i would be damaging my patients. it is totally inappropriate and immoral to lilie about science. nuclear power, a, produces large quantities of globabal warming s because it relies on a massive industrial infrastructure. there's mining, enriching, two huge coal-fired plants to enrich your uranium, building huge reactors, knocking them down in 30, 40 years, storing radioactive wastes for half a million years. i mean, none of that is taken into account, so nuclear power adds substantially to global warming. that's lie number one. two, it's not cheap because it's all paid for by tax dollars...except when the reactor's built, and even then the utitilities don't pay any insurance. if there's an accident, you taxpayers pick it up. the utilities make m money y selling electricity. that's all. they don't have to build the reactors; it's all subsidized and paid for. i mean, no other industry has that sort of subsidization, andnd do you know

why? b because it's the prodigal son of the weapons industry. and when nuclear power was begun by eisenhower in the fifties, "atoms for peace," the weapons industry said, "we require nuclear power as a sort of trojan horse, camouflaged too hide behind," and then eveveryoe said it was safe. ththjapanese didn't want nuclear power after nagasaki and hiroshimima, but ty were talked ininto it. s so it'a realally wicked, wicked industr. and any country t that has a reactor, be it syria, , saudi arabia--you name it, they have a bomb factctory. because each reactctor makakes 500 pounds of plutonium a year, plutonium lasts for half a a million year, and all you need is 5 5 pounds o make yourself a nucuclear weapo. so by selling nuclear power abroad, which america is heavily into, it is causising proliferation of nuclear weapons--whichch it says it's n,

but it is--and that could trigger a global holocaust between russia and america who still target each other with thousands of nuclear weapons. >> does the average doctor undnderstand the e full risks involved w with radiation and n nuclear powower plants? >> no. we're not tataught about th m medical i implications of nuclclear power in medical schools. we did getet some curricula going--physicians for social responsibility in the eightieses in medical scschools- about nuclear war, but also nuclear power. it't's a very, vy interesting subject but one about which m most doctors aree fairly ignorant. i i would suggest, though, that all doctors obtain a copy from the new york academy of sciences on chernobyl that was published last yeaear, and there theyy translateded 5,000 articicles fm slavic, from russian, into english that were published inin the russian memedical and scientific literature. over a

million people now have already died as a result of chernobyl-- it's only 25 years old. over a million, and that has been covered up by the blasteded u.n, by the international atomic energy agency--how dare they-- and the world health organization. this is the biggest cover-r-up in the histoy of medicine. i have never r read anything like this in my life, and i've been a doctotor since i was 23. >> the nunuclear reregulatory commission has asked the national academy of sciences to do some research on incidents of cancer in the vicinity of nuclear plalants all over the united s states. is that going to be a helpfpful study, do youu think? >> yes and no. the national academy of sciences has conducted f for 7 consecutitive occasions a thing called the biological effects of ionizing radiation, and they put out a report recently, number vii, and it was a good report and it said no radiation is safe, radiation

is cumulative, and, yes, i trust them. there's a huge push by the industry to prevent really decent research being done, but in a way, it's unnecessary because the german government-- and the germans are very precise with their data-- examined, i think, 16 old reactors and looked at children under the age of 5 who lived within 5k of the reactors, and they had more ththan double the incidents of leukemia--children are 10 to 20 times more radiosensitive than adults--more than double the incidents of leukemia and a high incidence of solid cancers. and the closer they lived to the react,, the higher r the incidence of malignancy. now, that study is absolutely classical--you can't find any hololes in it at all--d in a way, it doesn't need to be repeateded. the data's there. >> it's not just cancer, it's deformeded children as wel, isnn't it? >> if a fetus, a a normal,

genetically chromosomally normal fetetus is exposed to a tiny bit of plutonium that lodges in its braain, developingng brain, it n kill the cell that's gonna form the right half of the brain or the left arm. that's called teratogenesis, damage of a normal fetus, and that's what that drug thalidomide did when women took it for morning sickness and their babies were born with no arms or no legs. it does that. it also--plutonium in particular, which is highly mutagenic--lodges in the testicles. so it has a predilection for testicles, and it lodges nexext to the spermatogonia, the cells that form the sperm, the precursors, and it's an alpha emitter, highly mutageninic. so it can mutate genes in the spermrm to induce genetic mutations and genetic disease down the generations. now, there are two sorts of mutations, dominant-- so if you have a baby with a dominant mutation like brown eyes, the baby will have brown

eyes, or dwarfism-- achondroplastic dwarfism is domominant--but most mutations e recessive like blue eyes. you have to have two genes to have blue eyes. because if you have a brown-eye gene and a blue-eye gene, you're going to get brown eyes. or cystic fibrosis is recessive, or diabetes or many, and it takes up to 20 generations for recessive mutations to express themselves. so we're talking about eons of time for e expression of genetic disease--that's the second thing. the third thing is if the man's got plutonium in his testicles--and every male inn te northern hemisphere has a tiny load in his gonad--it's from weapons testing days, and plutotonium is ststill falling . and the man is cremated, the smokoke goes up the chimneney wh the plutonium, so yoyou can breathe it in, another man can, and it's ad infinitum because plutonium has a half-life of 24,400 years and d lasts for r a llong time. but the other thing is ththat the bodydy thinks

plutonium is iron--it't's an irn analalogue--so it's stored in the liver, where it causes liver cancer. it's stored in the bone marrow to cause--to produce hemoglobin in the red blood cells, but it causes leukemia or bone cancer. it crosses the placenta into the developing embryo--which lets nothing through it, incidentally, except plutonium and a few other nasties. it's stored in the testiticle, t too. so it's s a ubiquitous, really dangerous isotope, and from the time they discovered it in the manhattan project, they knew its dangers. >> does plutonium come only from nuclear weapons testing, or is there a risk of it escaping from nuclearar power plants asas wel? > it's nnot emitted by powerr plants roroutinely. routinely, power plants emit radioactive elements all the time. tritium-- they y cannot prevent tritium escapingng--highly carcinogenic. it's--hydrogen--radioactive

hydrogen, h3, highly carcinogenic. that's probably what's causing the cancer in the kids living around the reactors in germany. carbon-14, highly carcinogenic. xenon, krypton, argon are all emitted, and they say, "oh, it's just routine," like i could say, " "oh, you've justst got a routine cancer, d't worry about it." that sort of thingng. plutonium doesn't escae until thehere is an accident lie a meltdown or an explosion like fukushima or chernonobyl. t thre mile island had a meltdown. i remember when i first read a book about nuclear power and it was called "poisoned power" by dr. gofman and tamplin, my hair nearly fell out on the desk. i'd never read anything so dangerous...and i still got along with it. i can't tell you how indignant as a physician i feel about that, having helped so many children die of cystic fibrosis, the commonest fatal genetic c disease of childhoodo, which will be increased by

plutonium,m, having helped childldren die of leukemia. what are we talking abobout? how precious is life?e? we going to kill peoplple? >> so going forward, ddr. caldicott, whwhat would you like to see donene? >> i want an informed democracy. that's what jefferson said, "an informed democracy will bebehave in a responsiblble fashion," and it's like i have to inform a patient. say i have to tell you you've got pancreatic cancer. i have to tell you what it means, where your pancreas is, how it operates, where the cancer could metastasize, what sort of treatment you might need, the side effects of that, what your prognosis is. you must be educated--that's the practice of medicine. now, the earth is in the intensive e care unit, acuty clinically ill, and we all must understand what is happening, what the pathology is, the pathogenesis, because we all are, in fact, physicians to a dying planet.

>> dr. caldldicott, thanknk you very much. >> thahank you. 8úxúññ

j.p. harpignies: greetings, fellow creatures. so all we need to do is really to k know a little bit of our history or to turn on the news every day to know that fanatically utopian social movements can be catastrophically destructive. also, the utopian impulse can be embarrassingly silly when it's not grounded. that said, the utopian imagination is crucial to the human enterprise because it's the source of most of the new ideas and visions that human beings come up with, and i suspect that none of you would bbe here at "bioioneers" if yoyu didn't think we needed some new ideas and new visions. the literary realm that has explored the utopian