Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima

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Ever since scientists first split the atom in 1938, nuclear power has both fascinated and terrified millions. Today, ten percent of world energy is supplied by almost 440 nuclear reactors. In the US, closer to twenty percent of electricity comes from nuclear power. Regarded as a highly efficient, low-emission energy source, nuclear energy is an attractive option for many countries seeking to reduce their carbon footprint while meeting population needs. Yet, nuclear disasters like Chernobyl have shown the risks of working with radioactive material. Considering the industry’s troubled history raises the question: Just how safe is nuclear energy? On February 24, 2022, Russian troops began occupying Ukrainian territory in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant 26 years earlier remains the worst nuclear disaster the world has yet experienced. In the days following the original accident, the winds blew northwest, showering significant levels of radiation over what were then the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia, as well as Finland, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Austria, and the two Germanys. This meteorological history raised a terrifying possibility: Did Russia plan to weaponize Chernobyl as retaliation for Western sanctions?

Nuclear power stations are often portrayed as calm laboratories where the experts are in charge. Bill Gates, a founder of nuclear innovation company TerraPower, has said that any problems will be solved by “innovation” and the “laws of physics”.

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In the early years of nuclear technology, engineers, designers, operators and managers of nuclear energy “were all entering truly uncharted waters,” Plokhy writes. They “were dealing with new science and technology that was not fully understood and tested, especially in the early decades, and was bound to prove risky and unpredictable in emergencies. They all took huge risks that made accidents well-nigh inevitable.” At Chernobyl, for example, the combination of an inherently dangerous and obsolete reactor design and pressure to meet arbitrary production goals by cutting corners on safe procedures led to catastrophe. As Plokhy explains, “While nuclear scientists and engineers in all countries shared a ‘can-do’ attitude, only in the Soviet Union did managers and engineers consciously violate safety instructions and regulations to achieve their goals, doing so with the tacit blessing of the authorities.”

In a world where the US has just got a minor debt downgrade because of the scale of its debt, no one is calculating the fact that the private-public balance is actually thoroughly skewed. The taxpayer is going to pay through the nose for subsidising building, decommissioning and accident clean-up. Plokhy covers that history in considerable detail while not loosing sight of the humanity of all the various people directly and indirectly involved in the six case studies he explores. In each and every instance there have been shortcuts taken, subsequent cover-ups, and enormous financial, environmental and health sacrifices faced by future generations. The several different measurements of radioactivity used in this book were very confusing - roentgens, rem, curies, becquerel, rads, sieverts, grays. Although there was an explanation of these at the beginning, it didn't really help, as there were a variety of them used in each chapter. For me, they became meaningless numbers without much context.One thing that could have improved the presentation would have been to standardize the units used for describing radiation dose and radioactivity. This would have also allowed a brief description of the biological effects of radiation as a function of dose, which is now well-known, but of course was not when most of these disasters occurred. This would help the reader understand the biological impact of each event and see better how they relate in scale to each other. After each major accident, the authorities say they’ve learned the lessons and developed new technology that will prevent anything similar from happening. However, Plokhy highlights that there was – and still is—an inherent safety problem with nuclear reactors being used to generate power. They were never designed for that purpose. The reactors were developed from military prototypes to produce plutonium or to power nuclear submarines. Those eminent scientists, however, made a fatal error. The fusion fuel in Ivy Mike was liquid deuterium; in Shrimp it was replaced by lithium deuteride. The Los Alamos scientists had not realised that the lithium in lithium deuteride, when bombarded with very high-energy neutrons, would fission, releasing colossal amounts of energy and drastically increasing the yield of the bomb. Owing to this mistake, the bomb was many times more powerful than expected. Where they had estimated a yield of 6 megatons, the actual yield was 15 megatons, about a thousand times more powerful than the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. In all cases, there is no malice here. These are warriors, scientists, engineers and business people 'learning through doing' and getting it horribly wrong (quite rarely in fact) from ignorance, inexperience and/or basic human error often derived from local organisational realities.