GOING NUCLEAR
Fears grow that Chernobyl’s rector core is waking up – but at least we have vodka from the Exclusion Zone and irradiated peanuts
CHERNOBYL WAKES
In 2016, Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine finally received a permanent containment structure. This reinforced the hastily constructed concrete “sarcophagus” poured over it in the immediate aftermath of the 1986 meltdown that spread radioactive contamination across Europe, turned the nearby city of Pripyat into a ghost town ( FT179:76-79) and created an eerie exclusion zone of nearly 1,000 square miles (2,600km2). It was intended to minimise the continuing risk from the tons of radioactive fuel that remain in the reactor. This has melted into the basement of the building and will be dangerously radioactive for at least 20,000 years.
What scientists did not expect was a steady increase in radiation given off by the fuel, coming from an unreachable chamber deep within the structure. None are entirely sure why this is happening, but Neil Hyatt, a nuclear chemist from Sheffield University, has pointed out that, much as a glowing ember can reignite a barbecue, residual radioactivity has the potential to reignite the entire core, causing a vast increase in radiation output and a potential second explosion. One of the problems that the new containment structure was meant to solve was rainwater leaking into the remaining radioactive core and leaching radioactivity out into the environment. Water, however, is used in nuclear power stations to moderate radiation release – the reactor’s water boiling off was a key factor in the original disaster – and it is possible that the rainwater was damping down the melted core; without that, it is waking up again, although a second disaster is only a remote possibility.
On the other hand, something unexpected could be going on; as the building is now totally sealed and far too radioactive to enter, it’s almost impossible to tell what is happening inside. historyofyesterday.com, 17 Sept 2021.
ATOMIK VODKA
On a happier note, Professor Jim Smith of Portsmouth University has been given the go-ahead to market vodka made from apples harvested in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The spirit, named ATOMIK, is being sold by the Chernobyl Spirit Company, a social enterprise set up by scientists from Portsmouth with colleagues in Ukraine, where the vodka is being made. The first shipment was seized by Ukrainian authorities as a potential health hazard, but after investigation, it has been released for sale in the UK. Professor Smith, an expert on radioactive pollution, says that ATOMIK, which is made with water from the aquifer under Chernobyl as well as the local apples, is actually no more radioactive than any other vodka. Smith says that “the accident’s social and economic impacts are now a much bigger problem than the radiation,” so 75 per cent of the venture’s profits will go to support Ukrainian communities and for nature conservation in the Chernobyl region. Viktor Feer, director of the Palinochka Distillery that makes the vodka, says “ATOMIK is a premium spirit: it is robust but smooth with hints of apple reminiscent of a beautiful Ukrainian autumn.” The News (Portsmouth), 16 Oct 2021.
ATOM AND EVE
Were she still alive, Muriel Howorth would have been first in the queue for ATOMIK. On reading The Interpretation of Radium by Nobel Prize winner
TOP LEFT: The Reactor 4 sarcophagus photographed in 2006. BELOW LEFT: Muriel Howorth shows garden writer Beverly Nichols a peanut plant she grew from an irradiated nut.
Frederick Soddy in 1948 she became his ardent devotee, saying, “by the time I reached page 183, I was a firm believer in the power of the atom for good.” She went on to publish his biography and established the Ladies’ Atomic Energy Club through which she staged various stunts to promote efforts to find peaceful uses for nuclear fission. She would serve irradiated peanuts to her dinner guests, publicly consumed three-yearold potatoes and onions that had been preserved by radiation at the Harwell nuclear research laboratory, wrote a book called
Atom and Eve and publicly presented a model of a lithium atom to a rather nonplussed mayor of Eastbourne. In October 1950 Howorth staged an event entitled Isotopia at the Waldorf Hotel in London, with which
Time magazine seemed rather unimpressed, saying: “Before a select audience of 250 rapt ladies and a dozen faintly bored gentlemen, some 13 bosomy ladies’ Atomic Energy Club associates in flowing evening gowns gyrated about a stage in earnest imitation of atomic forces at work.” He went on to describe the climax, when, “Mrs Monica Davial raced across the stage in a spirited representation of a rat eating radioactive cheese.”
Howarth later set up the Atomic Gardening Society, whose members irradiated plants in the hope of creating giant mutants that could alleviate world hunger; at its peak, it had 800 members. As far as can be discerned, the Atomic Gardening Society never produced the hoped-for world beating monster, but irradiation of seeds in research laboratories did result in new commercial strains of major crops that form the basis of many varieties in use today.
D.Mail, 5 Oct 2021.