Nuclear is unwieldy, terrifying – and the world’s best bet
Jimmy Carter, the only US president to have had first-hand experience of nuclear power (he was selected for the US navy’s nuclear submarine programme), was measured in his enthusiasm for it. “US dependence on nuclear power should be kept to the minimum necessary to meet our needs,” he told the UN general assembly in 1976, tying the fortunes of the industry ever tighter to geopolitical demands.
But the nuclear industry has never been able to respond to such demands quickly enough. Right now, Germany is finding this out the hard way. The country decommissioned its nuclear fleet after the 2011 Fukushima accident. Ill-suited to renewables, beset by winter doldrums and long overcasts, it bet on being able to import its energy. Now, it finds itself in a hopeless tangle, under pressure to stop importing Russian gas, yet unable to reverse its nuclear decommissioning programme.
It’s this unwieldiness, this inflexibility that puts nuclear power, time and again, on the wrong side of history, and powers the deeper arguments running under Serhii Plokhy’s terrifying compendium of notorious nuclear mishaps. The ostensible theme of Atoms and Ashes is straightforward: what happens when nuclear power generation goes wrong?
Rejecting the distinction between military and civil nuclear programmes, Plokhy begins in the Marshall Islands in March 1954 where, according to a notorious White House briefing, “the wind failed to follow the predictions”, spreading fallout from a US thermonuclear test across Rongelap and other inhabited islands. In the UK, around 12kg of uranium escaped through the stacks of the Windscale piles between 1954 and 1957, giving maybe 300 people terminal cancer. In 1979, a nuclear core melted down inside a reactor on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. No uncontrolled release of radiation ever occurred.
There’s a pattern here, and let’s not be bashful: the West won. Compare these chapters with the ones about the nuclear waste fires at Kyshtym in the Urals in 1957 (nadir of an environmental catastrophe so severe that some of the 20,000 square miles contaminated were turned into a nature park to keep people out) and the explosion at Chernobyl in Soviet Ukraine in 1986 (which killed over 30 outright and over the years has likely seeded 4,000 people with terminal cancer), which Plokhy previously explored in 2018’s acclaimed Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy. These accounts spell out exactly what to expect when you deny vital information to people and then bully them into performing impossible miracles on shoddy equipment.
If cataloguing industrial accidents were all this book was about, we could dismiss it. Notwithstanding the downright terrifying narratives spun here, nuclear power is clean-ish and safe-ish. The oil industry kills 264 times as many people as the nuclear industry, to produce just over seven times the amount of useful energy. Nuclear power produces barely three fifths the amount of carbon that solar energy does, and generates four times as much power. What’s not to like? Like the oil and hydroelectric industries, it’s surely evolving and improving and becoming safer year on year – right? Well, globally, the build quality of nuclear reactors is probably going down, not up, as reactor design loses research funding in the developed world, while relatively primitive reactors, further “simplified” to cut costs, are sold to unstable states hungry for nuclear prestige.
Civil nuclear power cannot even shed its military past of 80 years ago – not while the uranium-235 and plutonium used in nuclear munitions are obtained from nuclear reactors. “Atoms for peace” were meant to end want and war. Instead, they encourage nuclear proliferation. India produced its first plutonium in a reactor supplied by Canada and called its first nuclear test a “peaceful nuclear explosion”.
Plokhy’s last major chapter analyses the multiple-reactor meltdown at Fukushima in 2011. The earthquake which hit on March 11 – an 8.9 on the Richter scale – shook the entire planet on its axis and jolted Japan several feet sideways. The tsunami that followed was far more terrible than the plant’s designers had allowed for. Yet no one died from acute radiation poisoning, and while cancer deaths cannot be ruled out, studies have as yet found no increase in the rate of such deaths.
Reasons for the deep unease that swept the globe following the Fukushima accident will be found neither in the figures, nor in the historical circumstances. (The worst that happened politically was that the prime minister, Naoto Kan, was pilloried for grandstanding on Japanese TV.) No, what really got under the skin were the eight painfully long days of terror during which the Fukushima disaster unfolded, with its equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactive materials. Look at it this way: were some poor sod to lose control of his car on a cattle grid, we would merely shrug and sigh.
But imagine if the act of wrapping that car around a tree took over a week, and each excruciating moment of it
Deep unease swept the globe after Fukushima, and yet no one died from radiation poisoning
were broadcast live on television. What would our reactions be then? Come Monday, how many of us would leave our cars in the garage?
On the outside, Atoms and Ashes looks like an unnecessary contribution to the “what if something should happen?” argument against nuclear power. But Plokhy’s gripping, measured accounts of human error and staggering heroism in the face of the slow, unwieldy and terrifying forces of nuclear power get under the skin of the problem.
We’ve developed a clean, safe energy generation system. But never mind the materials it uses, the machine itself scares the living daylights out of us: slow, inexorable, mysterious, and persistent (no nuclear power station has ever been fully decommissioned).
Nuclear power is safe, and clean, and a nightmare – and one cannot simply reason one’s way out of a nightmare.