Nuclear power, radiation, science, and ... Thomas Kuhn

With all the hyper-attention on the nuclear crisis in Japan, as if the problems of the millions of survivors do not matter at all, it was tragically farcical to read about the sales of iodine tablets here in Eugene, Oregon, which is thousands of miles away from Japan.  All the assurances from scientists and public health authorities:

[Haven't] stopped people from exhausting the supply of potassium iodine tablets at local drug and natural foods stores, however. The run began on Saturday, a day after a deadly earthquake and tsunami struck Japan and severely damaged three reactors at a nuclear energy plant.

Janell Davis, the vitamin manager for Sundance Natural Foods, said the store’s small supply of tablets was gone by Saturday afternoon. A spokeswoman at The Kiva said their supply is gone as well.

Will be funny, if it weren't true!

According to Jerrold Bushberg, a medical physicist at UC Davis:

Americans don't have a particularly good grasp of the science of radiation and tend to over-exaggerate the risks. ...

"I think anything that has radiation associated with it conjures up in people's mind -- either consciously or subconsciously -- fears of everything from nuclear weapons and nuclear reactor accidents like Chernerbol," he said.

It is not merely the lack of an understanding of science.  Hey, we can't know it all, and everyday of my existence is nothing but experiences revealing my ignorance.  But, it is the very questioning of science itself, an a large-scale denouncing of science that worries me.  So, can we blame it on anybody?

The devaluation of scientific truth cannot be laid on Kuhn’s doorstep, but he shares some responsibility for it.

Thus writes Errol Morris in the NY Times.  It is a fantastic series in five parts that the filmmaker Errol Morris has about Thomas Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Actually, he offers a lot more than that, and the entire series is a wonderful example of what liberal education can provide.  A kind of education that we promise a lot but practice the least.  But, I digress ...

Perhaps it was not Kuhn's explicit agenda to provide a relativistic framework to the way we understand anything and everything in the intellectual world, but his work did provide one solid argument for the anything goes attitude of postmodernism and, along with that, the questioning of facts and truth in science.

What exactly is the science behind radiation from the damaged nuclear reactors?  I loved this jargon-free explanation of how a nuclear power generation system works, and what caused the failures, and particularly the following sentence:

It is important to note that many of these fission products decay (produce heat) extremely quickly, and become harmless by the time you spell “R-A-D-I-O-N-U-C-L-I-D-E.”

Worriers about radiation exposure need to read this