Safety and nuclear power plants. Lecture held by the Norwegian Atomic Energy Association, autumn 1970

The community expects to benefit fron all major industrial activities through improvement in food, comfort, enjoyments health or security. All activities involve some risk of harm to people either through direct participation or indirectly, but it is hoped that the risks will be minimised and more than compensated for by attendant advantages. It is commonly recognised that absolute safety cannot be achieved, but as the acceptance of risk is emotionally difficult, public discussion of health risks is, not surprisingly, often confused by exaggeration or understatement. Part of the difficulty arises from the use of words defining qualities which mean different things on different occasions, such as safe, hazardous, risk, credible, likely, incredible. As it is the degree of risk which matters, it is pertinent to recognise the extent of risks in normal life. In the case of a family, a man and wife and three children living in a typical industrialised society, the odds are 1 in 2,500 per year against the accidental death of one of them in the home, and as pedestrians they carry a further collective risk of 1 in 5,000 per year of death from sn accident at vork (considerably higher in some industries), and as a car driver he would carry a further risk of 1 in 5,000 of a fatal accident. Other numbers could be produced for risk of disease, and it may be argued that societies accept, even if reluctantly, the risks with which they are familiar, but they react against risks from new activities even if they are comparable with or smaller than the old. It has been said that atomic energy is feared because it is new and introduces a new type of hazard. On the contrary, man has evolved in a radioa ti/o world; radioactivity is present in rocks, soils, bricks and stones. Our bodies contain radioactive potassium, radioactivity is present in our food and water, and we receive radiations from outer space. These various factors have been well studied and widely reported in the technical literature. The continued development of atomic energy will introduce some change, but it is a question of the degree of change - the need to ensure that the changes are small today and can he kept small and under control in the future.