(Cross-posted on Someone Took In These Pants...)
The Chernobyl disaster happened twenty years ago this Wednesday.
More than 200 times as much radioactivity was released as by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The reactor's operators switched off all its safety systems while trying to carry out an officially authorised, but dangerous, experiment.
Suddenly, as the official investigator of the accident put it, the reactor "was free to do as it wished". Its power surged to several hundred times its normal level in the very last second of its life, and a massive explosion blew its 1,000-ton lid clean off, blasting highly radioactive material more than 7km up into the atmosphere. Its core then caught fire, pouring out yet more radioactivity. [Source: Independent (UK), Sunday]
Reactor 4, 11 hours after the accident on 4/26/86. Source:
Time Magazine
...the very fierceness of the fire sent the radioactive emissions high into the air, as if contained in an invisible chimney.
[snip]
...the radioactivity spread far and wide.
[snip]
For days the Chernobyl cloud wandered over Europe, blown by varying winds, and shedding some of its radioactive cargo whenever it rained.
European Union measurements show that, in all, 40 per cent of the continent was contaminated. Areas with particularly high fallout - apart from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, all near the plant in what was then the Soviet Union - include Austria, Slovenia, northern Greece, southern Finland, parts of Norway and Sweden, Cumbria, north Wales and parts of Scotland.
In his creation myth, Hesiod chronicled five ages of humans, the last - and worst - of which was the Iron Age. This is how Ovid (through translation) described it:
Hard steel succeeded then:
And stubborn as the metal, were the men.
Truth, modesty, and shame, the world forsook:
Fraud, avarice, and force, their places took.
[snip]
Then land-marks limited to each his right:
For all before was common as the light.
Nor was the ground alone requir'd to bear
Her annual income to the crooked share,
But greedy mortals, rummaging her store,
Digg'd from her entrails first the precious oar [read: ore];
Which next to Hell, the prudent Gods had laid;
And that alluring ill, to sight display'd.
Thus cursed steel, and more accursed gold,
Gave mischief birth, and made that mischief bold:
And double death did wretched Man invade,
By steel assaulted, and by gold betray'd,
Now (brandish'd weapons glittering in their hands)
Mankind is broken loose from moral bands.
It is not difficult to see the similarities to the Iron Age in today's world. The Bush administration has stubbornly forsaken "truth, modesty, and shame" in its misguided war, which was driven by avarice (for oil), conducted with force ("shock and awe"), and sold through defrauding the American public about weapons of mass destruction. Because the earth's ground is no longer "requir'd [read: expected] to bear / Her annual income [read: cheap oil]," we needed to invade Iraq to rummage its "store" and annex its vast oil resources for ourselves, a war "broken loose from moral bands."
But, as the twentieth anniversary of Chernobyl may remind us, the "Iron Age" in today's world might not be the worst. If we are too stubborn to pursue drastic energy conservation goals, we will be forced into the "Uranium Age," fulfilling Dick Cheney's fantasy of a nation replete with nuclear power plants.
We absolutely cannot let this happen.
1996 file photo of then-five-year-old child with Leukemia due to radioactivity from the Chernobyl accident. (Source)
Unexpectedly high levels of thyroid cancer, in people who were children at the time of the accident, have emerged in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. And as we report today, rates of the same rare cancer in children have risen twelvefold in Cumbria.
Nobody knows what the final toll from Chernobyl will be - not least because the solid cancers that will be some of its main effects take decades to develop, while genetic damage will take generations to show.
Last year the International Atomic Energy Agency predicted 4,000 deaths, but this has been widely discredited as too low. Equally, a Greenpeace estimate of 100,000 deaths published last week seems overblown. The best estimates range between 16,000 deaths (the International Agency for Research on Cancer, on Thursday) and 60,000, most outside the old USSR. [Source: Independent (UK), Sunday]
Some would no doubt say: "But Chernobyl had a tin roof. And they were purposely doing an unsafe experiment. That was then. The nuclear power plants of today are virtually accident-proof. Technology has made power generation and storage of spent graphite rods as safe as can be." To that I reply: There is no way nuclear power will ever be safe enough for us to risk relying on it. The very nature of it requires risking (albeit a somewhat smaller risk than 20 years ago) horrifying consequences. As the Independent article mentions,
At the time [of the Chernobyl accident] Dr Pierre Tanguy, a leader of the aggressive French nuclear industry, confessed that the catastrophe was caused by "the kind of operator error that we all experience in our plants, and is hard to eliminate".
Furthermore, as this article argues, nuclear power is not safe enough for insurance companies to insure without a federally-enforced low liability limit. And the most safe reactors are often too expensive to build. Then there is the increased risk of a terrorist attack.
Nuclear power seems, at first, to be a very attractive alternative. It appears to be relatively cheap and relatively safe, and it produces no greenhouse gases.
This belief is dead wrong.
In general, the safer a reactor is, the more costly it is to build and operate. American-style reactors with redundant safety systems, containment shells and ever-more-elaborate security provisions are so expensive that no company will build them without subsidies.
Even with safeguards, the insurance industry considers nuclear plants risky. The industry was willing to insure New Orleans against a hurricane, but will not insure a nuclear power plant without a strict, low, absolute limit on liability guaranteed by federal law. If Congress repealed this liability cap, the nuclear industry would cease to exist.
Furthermore, American nuclear plants store their waste on site in above-ground casks, vulnerable to terrorist attack. Given the long radioactive life of nuclear material and ongoing terrorist concerns, it is wildly irresponsible to propose a major expansion of nuclear power until we know how to safeguard the waste for thousands of years.
One need only look at the situation today: a nation with reckless quantities of nuclear weapons is considering threatening to use one of them to stop another nation that feels that developing (at least) nuclear power is actually a desirable goal. Nuclear power is indeed making a comeback around the world.
When Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humankind, Jupiter punished him by banishing him to a distant mountain, binding him to a rock, and subjecting him to being eaten by a vulture every day. The message I take from this story, and from the Chernobyl disaster, is that there are some things that we should just leave alone, and nuclear power is one of them. Insofar as we (as a global population) continue to build nuclear power plants around the world, we are literally and metaphorically playing with fire.
Back in Chernobyl another disaster may be brewing. For the vast concrete "sarcophagus" shielding the shattered reactor is listing to one side, cracking and in danger of collapsing. [Source: Independent article]
The sarcophagus. (Source)
This image was taken 10 years after the accident, and radioactivity levels were still very high. Source: Time Magazine
The area around Chernobyl is hell on earth. It's what happens when we venture beyond the boundaries of common sense. And twenty years later, the consequences of that deadly accident are still devastating. The devastation could get worse if the sarcophagus collapses and Pandora's Box is reopened.
But the last spirit in Pandora's Box was hope, its only good spirit. So let us hope on this twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster that we can come together as a world and renounce not only nuclear weapons proliferation but also building more nuclear plants. It's the only way to guarantee something like that does not happen again.
Source: Greenpeace Argentina