Unless you are prepared to be shocked, do not read the following information. This information was taken from the book The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear by Dr. Petr Beckmann, 10th printing, published by Golem Press, 1985. Available from The Energy Advocate P.O. Box 7595, Pueblo West, CO 81007.
In what ways can a company be legally but not socially responsible? What are examples of this?
I used the opportunity to quote from The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear by Dr. Petr Beckmann.
The paper requirements were fairly informal and we are encouraged to chose subjects that stimulate discussion so I wrote the following: (hopefully I didn't corrupt the intent of Dr. Bechmann's work)
Typically legally imposed responsibilities represent the minimum, socially acceptable standard. (In my opinion, laws are the social/cultural norms that have been legislated into law.) Always taking the minimum route, while possibly more profitable, does not translate into socially responsible.
One example that comes to mind is the activities of the press/media. Often, the media's quest for ratings and to "inform the people" ahead of one of their competitors, results in releasing information about a crime in such a way that the defendant cannot be assured a fair trial. This can lead to a couple of possibilities. The first being that the guilty party gets away. The other extreme, of course, is an innocent party gets convicted because of public pressure rather than evidence. Is it legal? Yes. Is it even close to being socially responsible? Absolutely not.
Now, what if a company/industry, in light of unquestionable scientific evidence, chose a technology for production of its product that was less subject to government regulations and had popular appeal with media? And this course of action ultimately reduced the stockholder's return on investment and took a much higher toll in human lives and damage to the environment? The actions of this industry brings with it an incredible social cost in terms of higher government expenditures. Would you say this company was socially irresponsible? Naturally, there is no question. Right?
Well this is exactly what happens every time a power generating company
chooses not to use nuclear power. (Assuming they could start up a
plant in this ridiculously over regulated industry.) I won't labor the
issue but here are some undisputable facts listed in the 1985 book, The
Health Hazards of NOT going Nuclear, by Dr. Petr Beckmann. It is
important to
note that Dr. Beckmann's thesis is not that nuclear power generation
is safe. On the contrary, he simply points out that all methods of
converting energy are inherently dangerous. Nuclear is simply the
least dangerous, most efficient method of doing so. This is just
one example of socially irresponsible management responding to criticisms
of the biased and uninformed media.
First of all Dr. Beckmann dispels the myth of a nuclear explosion. The technology used to convert energy via nuclear fission is entirely different from that used to create nuclear bombs and an explosion is impossible.
However, an oil fired power plant with a of capacity 1000 MW capacity usually stores 6 weeks worth of fuel or roughly 2 Million barrels of oil. What happens if the fuel catches on fire? In December 1952 3,900 human lives were lost due to such an accident and the ensuing black cloud that engulfed London. 24 years later another similar accident happened in Brooklyn NY when a 90,000 barrel oil storage complex caught fire. The fire could not be brought under control and burned for 4 days. Had the weather not been favorable, thousands of lives would have been lost (Beckmann, pp.88-89.) Now, think about the fact that there is a place (undisclosed) on the east cost that stores 151 million gallons of oil literally on top of a town of 37,000 people (Beckmann p.92).
The potential energy of a 200,000 ton oil tanker is roughly equivalent to that of a two megaton hydrogen bomb. Naturally if one caught fire and exploded it would not release all the energy at once so you can sleep well knowing the resultant blast would probably not exceed that of a couple of nuclear bombs like the ones dropped on Hiroshima (Beckmann p. 93).
Another example. Liquid natural gas (LNG) is far more dangerous than oil. In Cleveland, in October 1944 a LNG tank exploded taking 133 lives. The quantity of LNG stored in highly populated areas is 20 times that of the tank that exploded in Cleveland. An empty tank exploded in February 73, but since it was empty, it only took 33 lives. Minor accidents with natural gas claim about 100 lives/year. Not hypothetical lives of a computer simulation but actual lives counted by coroners. (Beckmann, p. 93).
[ "Professor Richard Wilson of Harvard University
has made an interesting
comparison on the money
spent to save human life from LNG tank explosions
versus the money spent to
save a human life from the radioactive emissions
of nuclear power plants.
[13] When in 1973, the maximum possible radiation
dose at the property line
of a nuclear power plant was reduced from 170 mrems/
year to 10 mrems/year, the
effect was to reduce the incidence of cancer from
4 to 1 per year (out of
a total of 300,000 cancers in the US). The cost of this
step
was $800,000,000 per saved
life.
On the other hand, there
are 75 LNG tanks located in US cities. The cost of moving
these tanks out of the cities
(calculated in the same way as the example above)
would amount to only $1,000
per saved life; but this cost has not been paid and
the LNG tanks remain
in the cities.
Now who is it (and here we
are no longer quoting Prof. Wilson) that decides to
pay $800,000,000 for saving
a human life from one danger, but refuses to pay $1,000
to save it from another?"
[13]R. Wilson, paper given
at Energy Conference, Center for Technology
and Political Thought, Denver, Colo., June 1974. . .
] (Beckmann pp. 93-94,183)
I submit this is a powerful example of an industry or company staying well within the letter of the law and being completely, socially irresponsible.