I often think that it's politicians' perception of public opinion that is actually driving things rather than public opinion itself. We did a survey looking at the acceptability of nuclear technologies in Canada, and we did it pre- and post-Fukushima.
After Fukushima, acceptance of nuclear technologies across Canada rose, including in Quebec, which has a slightly different attitude to nuclear technologies. It didn't fall, and yet the perception among the political class was that it was a gut reaction. This must mean there's going to be more opposition to nuclear within Canada, Germany, or other countries.
What happens is that people are beginning to realize that we've had a succession of nuclear accidents or power plant failures. I don't like calling Fukushima a nuclear accident because it was 100% predictable, given the circumstances there. The reactor wasn't designed to meet what was thrown at it. People realize the consequences are quite small; they're mostly economic consequences. You can go back to the first one, the Three Mile Island reactor accident. Nobody was harmed as a consequence of that accident. Go to Chernobyl. The predictions were that thousands and thousands of people were going to die as a consequence of the radiation from Chernobyl. The reality is that there is no excess in anything as a result, except childhood thyroid cancer, and that's treatable. You've only had about a few tens of deaths that you can attribute to Chernobyl.
From Fukushima, the doses are really quite low. The doses around Chernobyl now in the exclusion zone are lower than they are in Cornwall in southwest England. Similarly, people were being moved from areas around Fukushima where there was some contamination, but they were being moved into areas in Japan where the natural background dose was higher than the areas they had come from. There are lots of things involved, and I think the problem is that the perception is very difficult to fight.
The reality is that if I had 200 people and I irradiated them with so much radiation that half of them were going to die in the next week or so, of that 100 remaining, 80 would never see any radiation-induced cancer. The reality is that radiation is a remarkably poor carcinogen; it's not very carcinogenic. That's why we can use radiation for radiotherapy. Otherwise we'd be inducing as many tumours as we were trying to treat. That sort of perception, that sort of message, is not there, even within our own workforce at Chalk River. We had issues with misperceptions about risk and radiation. I remember the incident with those devices being taken away from Bruce Power. It didn't make any sense, but that was the perception. In fact, they're clean.