And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.
—Revelation 8:10-11
Chernobyl—or, in Ukrainian, Chornobyl—was founded in 1193 as a hunting lodge. As the place slowly grew, it mostly prospered, passing successively from Lithuania to Poland to the Russian Empire to the USSR to Ukraine.
Today it is a ghost town. No human being will be able to safely live there full-time, or anywhere else in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, for a minimum of several centuries.
“Chornobyl” is the Ukrainian word for “wormwood”—combining chornyi, or black, with byllia, or grass blades. The literal meaning, then, is “black grass.” A name prophetic.
Chernobyl for many years was home to a thriving Jewish community. The 17th Century Hasidic rabbi and Kabbalist mystic Menahem Nahum lived and taught in Chernobyl. This is a man who said many marvelous things. One of them Martin Cruz Smith relates in his novel Wolves Eat Dogs, through the character Yakov:
“Rabbi Nahum said no man was beyond redemption. He said redemption was established before the creation of the world itself, that’s how important redemption is. No one can take it away.”
Yakov is a fictional character, rooted in the real. His father escaped the unfortunately completely historical pogrom in Chernobyl during the Russian Civil War, when rightist counter-revolutionaries gathered together the Jews of the town, packed them onto boats, steered them out into the Pripyat River, scuttled the boats, and then shot anyone who tried to swim for shore.
Boris Brasol, one of the leaders of these vicious, murderous anti-semites, later emigrated to the US, where he was responsible for the first American edition of the notorious anti-semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Through this, Brasol came to the attention of automaker Henry Ford, who gave him a job on his Dearborn Independent; Brasol collaborated with Ford on the latter’s own despicable anti-semitic tract, The International Jew. That is a book that found favor with the forming Adolph Hitler, whose government later bought vehicles and parts from the Ford Motor Company, even after Germany was at war with Europe. When Hitler’s troops came to occupy Chernobyl, they exterminated those Jews remaining in the region. Every one.
Today Chernobyl kills people all over the world. Jew, Gentile, without distinction.
As Smith wrote in his novel, set largely in the largely abandoned Ukrainian city of Pripyat, part of the present-day “Exclusion Zone” around the crypt of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor:
Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Danes, Eskimos, Italians, Mexicans and Africans touched by the poison as it spread around the world had no connection to Chernobyl, and they would die, too. The first ones, Pripyat’s firemen, irradiated inside and out, died in a day. The rest would die obliquely over generations.
One of Smith’s character’s, Eva, was a thirteen-year-old girl at the time of the accident. As did thousands of young girls and boys in “real” life, the life outside of books, Eva, a few days after the roof blew off the reactor, marched in a May Day parade in Kiev, a city located less than 80 miles downwind from Chernobyl. Unwarned by her government that the haze over the sun, the wind from upriver, might, as with thousands of young boys and girls in real life, transform her “young body, a wonder of growth,” into “a new person.” Thereby “ending her days of dancing, and beginning her acquaintanceship with Soviet surgery.”
Eva, in the fictional book, says what is true, in the nonfictional world of the Real:
“No one keeps track. There were forty-one official deaths from the accident and half a million unofficial. An honest list would reach to the moon.”
It is an easy thing to deny the honest list that would reach to the moon. For although human beings have proved fully capable of blowing blazing tons of highly carcinogenic and mutagenic materials into the air, they remain laggards in limping along after, pinpointing who was poisoned, how, how badly, and where.
It is known, though, that a quarter-century after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the wild boar of Germany remain radioactive. Der Spiegel reports that government payments compensating boar hunters for lost income have quadrupled since 2007.
Germany’s Atomic Energy Law mandates government compensation to hunters who shoot animals that are too radioactive to consume. In regions particularly problematic, all boar shot are checked for radiation; there are 70 measuring stations in Bavaria alone. Especially in southern Germany, boar routinely test out with high levels of cesium-137, rendering them unfit to eat.
Wild boar are prone to the glow because they consume in large quantities mushrooms and truffles, which are very efficient in absorbing radioactivity. According to Der Spiegel, “the contamination of some types of mushrooms and truffles will likely remain the same, and may even rise slightly—even a quarter century after the Chernobyl accident.”
And it is known that, 25 years after Chernobyl went glow-tomb, area children and teenagers who drank contaminated milk or ate affected cheese in the days and weeks after the accident still suffer increased risks of thyroid cancer. This is believed due to radioactive iodine, which has a half-life of “only” eight days. But, it is now clear, this iodine, in its relatively brief life—relative say, to cesium, which kills for centuries, and plutonium, which is fatal forever—can do damage that will not show up until decades later.
Some of those tested, and affected, lived as far away as 90 miles from the Chernobyl glow-tomb, “demonstrating the risks of eating or drinking contaminated foods among people who were exposed to little or no radioactive iodine from the immediate fallout.”
Because the full impact on human beings of radiation exposure is still not well understood, these thyroid results came as a complete surprise to the Science Men involved: going in to the study, they had No Idea it would be That Bad.
What is understood is that there is no "safe" level of radiation, and that doses are cumulative. So when you hear somebody say that some level or another of radiation, in the air, in the water, in food, in your body, poses a risk that is “low,” or “minimal,” or “nonexistent,” you know that these people are slinging bollocks.
George Johnson put it well in apiece for the New York Times:
With radiation, the terror lies in the abstraction. It kills incrementally—slowly, diffusely, invisibly. “Afterheat,” Robert Socolow, a Princeton University professor, called it in an essay for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “the fire that you can’t put out.”
The fire that you can't put out birthed this boy. If you are for nuclear power, you are for that boy. Simple as that.
In my view, no conversation on the subject of nuclear power should ever occur without that boy. Because he is the reality, the thing itself, of nuclear power. He is what Chernobyl brought to the Ukraine. And he is what Fukushima will bring to Japan. He is the future waiting to be born of any nuclear power plant. Because any nuclear power plant can become Three Mile Meltdown, Chernobyl, Fukushima. All it takes is Mr. Ha-Ha. And Mr. Ha-Ha never sleeps.
Nuclear-power advocates, so often zealots as boorish and relentless as religious fundamentalists, will try very hard to get you lost in their numbers and their graphs. And, like religious fundamentalists, they so often sneer that you Just Don’t Get It unless you have drunk deeply enough from their sacred texts. But never, do they have an answer to that boy.
So when, as they inevitably will, the nuclear zealots come torch-and-pitchforking into this diary, they can talk among themselves. I am not interested in them. Because they are for this boy.
In January CNN trotted out a story presenting some folks who would have us throw a sheet over that boy, and gaze instead on a sort of shiny happy Chernobyl smiley-face.
We are first introduced to the ghost town of Pripyat, once inhabited by some 50,000 people, until it was belatedly mass-evacuated several days after Chernobyl blew its top. The town has been abandoned by all sane humans ever since.
Yet we are told that “nature seemingly flourish[es] in the town’s deserted streets, squares and buildings,” that the seeds of soybeans and flax grown nearby are “relatively unaffected by radiation.” Why, seeds grown in the glow-zone “compare[] favorably with ones grown in non-contaminated soil outside.”
“I cannot recommend eating something from Chernobyl,” says one Martin Hajduch, “but I think it will be possible at some stage.”
This same Hajduch person ebulliently describes the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone as “full of life.”
And that it is—in one sense. Because human beings do not live there, plants and animals in the Zone are not under the sort of ceaseless assault that afflicts them everywhere else on the planet. Because humans are so rarely encountered, many Chernobyl-area animals have no fear of them; animals elsewhere persecuted, like wolves, now populate the area. Plants and animals in the Zone may go about their business without much human interference. And in this, the Zone is indeed a sort of “eco-haven.”
But the reason that human beings do not live in the Zone is because it is a dead zone. And as the biologist Anders Moller of the University of Paris puts it, Zone ”[a]reas with higher radiation have fewer animals, survival and reproduction is reduced, sperm are abnormal and have reduced swimming ability. Abnormalities are commonplace and mutations rates are much elevated.” The mutation rate of birds in the Zone is 1 in 10, a rate Moller terms “astonishing.”
And biodiversity in the region is declining, among insects, birds, and mammals. With some of the most radiation-vulnerable species being migratory birds, which means the glow-effects travel far and wide, hundreds and thousands of miles beyond the Zone.
Over 40 types of radiation were unleashed by Chernobyl; some will remain dangerous for far beyond the lifetimes of anyone reading this piece, or their children, or their children’s children. Plutonium, in truth, is dangerous for more than twenty times as long as there have been human beings on this planet.
But some human beings have no sense . . . which is why Chernobyl was built in the first place. And why the government of Ukraine has commenced to lead tours through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Ukraine’s emergency situations ministry said today that visitors would be offered tours inside the 30-mile exclusion zone set up after reactor four at the plant exploded on 26 April 1986, showering northern Europe in radioactive fallout.
While the area remains heavily contaminated, a ministry spokeswoman said, tourism routes had been drawn up which would cover the main sights while steering clear of the dangerous spots.
Wandering would not be encouraged, Yulia Yershova said: “There are things to see there if one follows the official route and doesn’t stray away from the group.”
There is a reason why it is a Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, rather than, say, Chernobyl Exclusion Hot Spots. And that is because although it may be perfectly true that a particular bit of soil may contain no measurable radioactive detritus, the bit of soil right next to it may be glowing with toxins. That’s what it’s like, there in the Zone. And soil—as well as plants, and animals, and air, and water—tend to move around. Glow-atoms do not stay put within the Zone. Which is why it is folly for the government to contend that some state-sanctified “tourism route” has been declared “safe.” When “safe” can be transformed into “fatal” in a simple gust of wind.
As Bill Wattenburg, the nasty, bitter old man who befouls the airwaves of KGO-AM Saturday and Sunday nights, a pro-nuclear zealot rocked by the Fukushima glow-tombs, and desperately trying to find a way to make it All Right, recently allowed: “I have never said that anything is perfectly safe; and Mother Nature will always throw us a curveball.”
Absolutely goddam right. And so sometimes it’s best not to get into the batter’s box with her at all. Some games sane people just don’t play.
I don’t forget Chernobyl because my daughter was in utero when the roof blew. I tracked on the news the progress of the radioactive cloud, as it slowly drifted round the globe, until it passed over where my daughter lay arest, growing inside my wife’s body. The newspeople claimed that there could occur “no measurable effects” by the time the Chernobyl cloud reached California, but I had already lived through Three Mile Meltdown, and so I knew from experience that it is best to regard anything to emerge from any government or corporate or media spokesmouth concerning any nuclear accident as nothing more than a toxic, steaming pile of lies.
I had seen on TV the Swedes testing, and slaughtering, tens of thousands of reindeer in the Swedish alps, animals contaminated with toxic levels of cesium that had floated over from Chernobyl.
Swedes, so go the stereotype, are both sensible and thrifty. Not the sort of people to kill reindeer if there is no reason to. But if there is, they will.
And full-grown reindeer are nowhere near as delightful a host for the carcinogenic and mutagenic beasties that pour forth from the Pandora’s Box of a nuclear accident as is a developing human fetus.
In the event, my daughter was born alive, and with all the requisite parts, and in all the proper places. And it is true that mutations are not always negative. In fact, that is how organisms evolve: they mutate and survive. So it is perhaps possible that my daughter’s exposure to Chernobyl actually helped to make her so smart and so pretty. And maybe that also accounts for her otherwise frankly bizarre decision to relocate in young adulthood to a town a few miles downwind from Three Mile Meltdown.
Three Mile Meltdown is more of a cautionary tale than is Chernobyl, because, as will be seen, the roof blew off Chernobyl during an experiment designed to deliberately place the reactor under stress. The reactor at Three Mile Island, however, ran amok during the course of “normal operations.”
When you enter the terms “Chernobyl” and “Three Mile Island” into the tubes, you are in each instance directed first to Wikipedia. This is useful, if distressing, fodder for my continuing jeremiad against Wikipedia. Because the realities of both disasters have been thoroughly, relentlessly distorted there in entries quite clearly shaped by pro-nuclear zealots.
The Chernobyl entry drifts so far loose from the moorings of the Real that it will not even credit the official death toll of 41, instead but begrudgingly allowing that only 31 people perished. And the Three Mile Meltdown entry more or less echoes the suppurating lies that were discharged at the time: there was No Danger.
Here is a little taste of the Newspeak we were subjected to even while the thing was melting down, and no one really knew whether said melting could be stopped:
The reactors at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl failed for the same reason: a combination of human error and mechanical error. Human beings are imperfect creatures, and thus the machines that they build are likewise imperfect. Both people, and the machines that they build, will eventually, inevitably, fall into error. Always. That is why a nuclear power plant is quite literally madness. As Buckminster Fuller observed, nature herself has shown us that the safe distance between a nuclear reactor and ourselves is 90 million miles—the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
At Three Mile Meltdown, first a series of pumps stopped working, for No Known Reason. (This occurred in the very early morning hours—a favorite time for Mr. Ha-Ha to start the ball rolling.) The failure of these pumps caused a turbine to shut down. Three auxiliary pumps “automatically activated,” but because the pump valves had been closed for “routine maintenance,” those pumps didn’t do diddly. Then a relief valve popped open, but, and again for No Known Reason, it failed to close.
Meanwhile, out in the control room, humans saw a lamp go out, indicating that power had been removed from the solenoid of the relief valve. The humans incorrectly interpreted the dimming of this lamp as meaning the valve had closed—though it had not; it was still open. But the humans didn’t know this. And so they proceeded to get very confused by their instruments, which were telling them things that they could not understand: because they believed the valve to be closed.
There did exist an indicator that would have unambiguously alerted the humans that the valve was indeed still open. But this indicator was located on the back of a desk, where no one could see it.
Down in the reactor, coolant was boiling in the core. This is Wrong, in a nuclear-power plant. In the control room, the humans looked at instruments that did not tell them the truth of what was occurring in the core: they thought, from the instruments, that the core was sufficiently covered with coolant. It was not.
Then an alarm went off. The humans ignored it. They thought it was Lying.
Meanwhile, back at the core, things began rupturing. Radioactive coolant started leaking into the containment building, then into an auxiliary building. Things were really heating up in the core: water had become steam. Humans decided to let some steam out into the world. Except it was radioactive. But they didn’t know this.
When a new control-room shift came on, it started discovering the truth . . . which plant operators then decided to Hide from Everybody. By the time company officials first contacted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, more than half the uranium fuel in the reactor had melted. Plant officials lied that no radiation had been released, even as radiation detectors outside the plant proved that it had been. Five weeks went by before it was admitted that plant workers had measured fuel temperatures near the melting point.
And while they were busy hiding all this shit, they still didn’t really know what was going on: mainly, that half the core was bereft of coolant, totally exposed, and that a large part of it had melted. In the end, it was mostly pure dumb luck that the whole thing didn’t go.
To assume that something like this would not happen again was and is just nuts. It was ultimately concluded that Three Mile Meltdown workers were simply overwhelmed by information, much of it misleading, irrelevant, or incorrect. In the future such a problem can be expected to be worse. Because every time there is a failure such as this, the first human instinct is to install even more gewgaws and doodads, to impart even more information . . . which, the next time something goes wrong, will pour forth even more misleading, irrelevant, or incorrect information.
Too, it was belatedly discovered that the ornery valve, the one that stayed open when it should have closed, had previously failed on 11 separate occasions. And that virtually the entire sequence of events that plagued Three Mile Meltdown had occurred 18 months earlier at another reactor, which, like TMM, had been built by the firm of Babcock and Wilcox. Only difference was that in the prior fiasco, operators identified the valve failure within 20 minutes, and the reactor was operating at only 9% power, rather than TMM’s 97%.
Finally, although Babcock and Wilcox engineers were aware of the valve problem, they didn’t tell anybody. Because that’s capitalism. If something you sell has a tendency to get broke, you don’t tell people. You just send it out there, and hope nobody notices. That’s true whether the product is a toy, a car, or a valve in a nuclear reactor. And that’s not going to change. Not so long as the wheel of the world turns on profit.
Let us pause for a moment, for some Three Mile Meltdown music from The Clash:
working down in Harrisburg
waiting to be melted down . . . .
It was Chernobyl that truly radicalized Mikhail Gorbachev. As the disaster continued, he found that even he, the head of the country, couldn’t get straight information—from anybody. From workers in the Chernobyl control room to his own ministers, everybody was living in a dream world: reporting what they wanted to be true, rather than what was true. Thousands of people were suffering, some were dying, evacuations of grossly contaminated areas were delayed for days and even weeks, as Soviet officials refused to admit error. To render the country’s milk supply “safe,” officials had ordered that radioactive milk be mixed with clean milk; the national standard for “safe” milk was then elevated to the geiger-howling level of this poisonous hellbroth.
He’d had it.
On July 3, 1986, Gorbachev turned on both the lords of the country’s nuclear industry, and his own Politburo.
“For thirty years, you told us that everything was perfectly safe,” he said. “You assumed we would all look up to you as gods. That’s why all this happened, why it ended in disaster. There was nobody controlling the ministries and scientific centers. And for the moment, I can see no signs that you have drawn the necessary conclusions. In fact, it seems that you are attempting to cover everything up.”
Gorbachev learned through Chernobyl that the entire country lay concealed behind a rotting Potemkin facade. And he was determined to kick the thing down.
“We’re going to put an end to all this,” he said. “We have suffered great losses, and not only economic ones. There have been human victims, and there will be more. We have been damaged politically. All our work has been compromised. Our science and technology have been discredited as a result of what happened. From now on, what we do is going to be visible to our entire people and the whole world. We need full information.”
Thus, glasnost (openness). With Gorbachev setting off down that path which, within a few short years, would see him entering—eventually, for his accomplishment today remains largely unacknowledged and unappreciated—the histories as a truly great man . . . for what he didn’t do. By declining to exercise the powers available to him, by allowing events to take their course, he presided over the dissolution of an empire.
The glow-tombing of Chernobyl is described by the character Alex, in Smith’s Wolves Eat Dogs, this way. It is fact—the Real—embedded in fiction. And, as at Three Mile Meltdown, Mr. Ha-Ha arranged for all to begin in the early morning hours.
“April twenty-sixth, 1986. The setting: the control room of Reactor Four. The actors: a night shift of fifteen technicians and engineers conducting an experiment—to see whether the reactor can restart itself if all external power for the machinery is cut off. The experiment has been performed before with safety systems on. This time they want to be more realistic. To defeat the safety system of a nuclear reactor, however, is no simple matter. It involves application. You have to disconnect the emergency core cooling system and close and lock the gate valves. Turn off the automatic control, block the steam control, disable the pre-sets, switch off design protection and neutralize the emergency generators. Then start pulling graphite rods from the core by remote control. There are a hundred and twenty rods in all, a minimum of thirty to be inserted at all times, because this was a Soviet reactor, a military model that was a little unstable at low efficiency, a fact that was, unfortunately, a state secret.
“Alas, the power plunged.
“The reactor efficiency is dropping through the floor, and the core is flooding with radioactive zenon and iodine and combustible hydrogen. And somehow they have lost count—they have lost count!—and pulled all but eighteen control rods from the core, twelve below the limit. All the same, there is one last disastrous step to take. They can replace the rods, turn on the safety systems and shut down the reactor. They have not yet turned off the turbine valves and started the actual experiment. They have not pushed the final button.
“Let’s pause and consider what is at stake. There is a monthly bonus. There is a May Day bonus. If they run the test successfully they will likely win promotions and awards. On the other hand, if they shut down the reactor, there would certainly be embarrassing questions asked and consequences felt. There it is, bonuses versus disaster.”
Alex pushed the button.
“In a second the reactor coolant began to boil. The reactor hall started to pound. An engineer hit the panic switch for the control rods, but the rod channels in the reactor melted, the rods jammed and superheated hydrogen blew off the roof, carrying reactor core, graphite and burning tar into the sky. A black fire-ball stood over the building, and a blue beam of ionized light shot from the open core. Fifty tons of radioactive fuel flew up, equal to fifty Hiroshima bombs. Cool heads in the control room refused to believe that they had done anything wrong. They sent a man down to check the core. He returned, his skin black from radiation, like a man who had seen the sun, to report that there was no core. Since this was not an acceptable report, they sacrificed a second man, who returned in the same fatal condition. Now, of course, the men in the control room faced their greatest test of all: the call to Moscow.
“And what did our heroes say when Moscow asked, ‘How is the reactor core?’ They answered, ‘The core is fine, not to worry, the core is completely intact.’ Moscow is relieved. That’s the punch line: ‘Don’t worry.’ And here is my toast: ‘To the Zone! Sooner or later, it will be everywhere!’”
The logic of Smith’s plot eventually brings Yakov, together with a fugitive American Jew, Bobby Hoffman, to the concrete sarcophagus containing Chernobyl’s destroyed Reactor Four.
This is what a third character, Arkady, discovers them doing there:
Bobby Hoffman and Yakov stood in the middle of the road facing a security wall decked with shiny coils of wire. Each man wore a yarmulke and a tasselled shawl. Arkady couldn’t make out what they were saying, though they rocked back and forth to its rhythm.
Beyond the wall was another wire-draped wall and, fifty meters farther on, the sarcophagus, as stained and massive as a windowless cathedral. Dim security lamps glowed here and there. A crane and a chimney stack towered over the sarcophagus, but compared to it, they were insignificant. The sarcophagus was apart, alone, alive.
Arkady didn’t need to use his dosimeter; he felt his hair rise.
The chanting wasn’t loud enough to carry far. Bobby’s voice was whispery. Yakov’s was deep and worn, and Arkady recognized the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Their voices overlapped, separated, joined again. Standing outside the corrupted shell of a nuclear disaster, rocking back and forth like human metronomes and intoning the same verses over and over, “Ose sholom himromov hu yaase sholom.” When they finished the prayer, they simply began again.
Arkady moved into their line of vision. Each step brought the sarcophagus closer, too, as if it had been waiting for the right hour to leap the wall, a hard sight to face without a prayer. Yakov acknowledged Arkady with the briefest nod, to say not to worry, that he and Bobby were fine. Bobby clutched a list of names that Arkady could see because of a rising moon that spilled over the station yard. The list looked long. Arkady remembered Eva saying that a complete list would reach the moon.
This is to me an achingly beautiful moment in literature. One that should be replicated in life. Because that is what needs to be done.
It doesn’t matter if one is or is not Jewish, if the prayer is or is not the Kaddish. It is the reverent reading of the names of the dead, of the suffering, that is important. It is something that needs to be done. Atonement for the hubris of human beings who believed they could harness and control the power of the sun. And the disasters that they have wrought. The Kaddish needs to be intoned at Chernobyl, at Three Mile Meltdown, at Hiroshima, and at Nagasaki. And now at Fukushima. All the names need to be read. Those names, as Eva said, that reach to the moon.
Back in the day, of course, nuclear power was supposed to be clean, friendly, cheap, safe, and abundant—all the science-fiction stories told us so. It would power everything from our dishwashers to our cars, and happy indeed would be life under the split atom.
As Elizabeth Kolbert recalled in the March 28 New Yorker,
The age of atomic energy could be said to have begun, literally, with the wave of a wand. On September 6, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was vacationing in Denver, passed a pole with a gleaming tip over a cabinet full of electronic equipment. This “neutron wand” supposedly sent a signal that was then conveyed to an unmanned power shovel, twelve hundred miles away, in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. The shovel lurched forward and scooped up three tons of dirt, breaking ground for the country’s first commercial nuclear power plant. “My friends, through such measures as these, and through knowledge we are sure to gain from this new plant we begin today, I am confident that the atom will not be devoted exclusively to the destruction of man, but will be his mighty servant and tireless benefactor,” the President said.
The rapidly industrializing nation of Japan, its coal supplies nearly exhausted, its great forests long ago felled, with little hydroelectric power to speak of, fought WWII more or less for access to oil. When that didn’t work out, post-war Japan needed to make more pacific decisions as to where it would obtain its energy. Like France, Japan wished to remain independent of the vagaries of other nations, and so, like France, it increasingly invested in nuclear power, particularly after the OPEC effrontery of the early 1970s. Today, Japan must import 99% of its oil, and is the industrial powerhouse that it is because it is awash in once and future glow-tombs.
The first thing we have been led to believe about the glow-tombing of Fukushima is that it is all the fault of the company in charge, Tepco, which is portrayed as a sort of avaricious crew of nitwits who couldn’t glow straight, who shouldn’t be trusted to properly paint a fence, much less run a nuclear-power plant.
And there is some truth to that. In 2002, for instance, Tepco was found to have blithely falsified safety reports, and so all 17 of its boiling-water nuclear reactors were shut down, briefly, for inspection.
“This company is really rotten to the core,” says Kenichi Ohmae, a management consultant and former nuclear engineer. He blames Tepco for storing too much spent fuel on the site; for placing too many reactors in the same place (there are six in the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant and seven in a nuclear complex on an earthquake fault-line in Niigata); and for not having enough varied sources of power.
Yet it is more complicated than that. The Japanese people increasingly do not want glow-tombs, at least in their own backyards, and so companies like Tepco have been encouraged to place multiple reactors on crowded sites. No one will allow companies like Tepco to take their spent fuel rods off site, and so they are stored—awaiting heaven knows what—in makeshift nooks and crannies; in the case of Fukushima, in what we have learned were the functional equivalent of watery cardboard boxes placed atop the reactor cores. Finally, since the people balk at new plants, old ones are kept running longer than originally envisioned: the Fukushima glow-tomb, for instance, was originally scheduled for decommissioning in March of 2011.
The Japanese can be a careful and prepared people. But they were not prepared for the glow-tombing of Fukushima.
Once having made the decision to proceed eyes wide shut with nuclear power, the Japanese first seriously underguesstimated how badly an earthquake might shake a Fukushima plant. They arrived at their estimates by returning to quakes of the past, employing pocket-protectors who “researched old documents for information on how many tombstones had toppled over and such.” Based on this rearview soothsaying, they figured maybe the worst quake to hit Fukushima would rattle at around 7.0. Oops. A mere aftershock of the March 11 quake, arriving on April 7, measured 7.1
Once plant directors had settled on a relatively cheery scenario of Maximum Badness, they refused, as the decades rolled by, to revise their estimates as scientists produced more detailed and sophisticated information. The government was just as foolhardy—the word “tsunami” did not even appear in its written guidelines for nuclear-plant construction until 2006. “We can only work on precedent, and there was no precedent,” says Tsuneo Futami, director of Fukushima in the late 1990s. “When I headed the plant, the thought of a tsunami never crossed my mind.”
The Wall Street Journal obtained absurdly over-confident and in some cases downright mental Fukushima “disaster-readiness plans,” ones that involved, as an example, equipping the plant, in case of a complete disaster, with a single satellite phone, and one stretcher.
In the event of a “worst-case scenario,” plant mandarins proposed a fax machine as the primary means of communication with the outer world. The plans instructed workers to blithely rev up that fax even when faced with a “probable nuclear chain reaction outside the reactor”—which sounds to me like, oh, maybe an atomic explosion.
The main disaster-readiness manual, updated annually, envisions the fax machine as a principal means of communication with the outside world and includes detailed forms for Tepco managers when faxing government officials. One form offers a multiple-choice list of disasters, including “loss of AC power,” “inability to use the control room” and “probable nuclear chain reaction outside the reactor.”
The plans refused to even consider the possibility of any situation in which out-of-town firefighters or troops might be needed. The plant people’s report on its accident-management protocols says: “The possibility of a severe accident occurring is so small that from an engineering standpoint it is practically unthinkable.”
Ha. Ha.
Reacting to the Journal article, Tepco spokespeak Hiro Hasegawa hallucinated that the plans “followed and sometimes exceeded legal requirements, and proved useful in the crisis.” A former Tepco executive—his “former” status meaning he is no longer required to spew balderdash—demurred: “The disaster plan didn’t function. It didn’t envision something this big.”
Seems to me like the Tepco people learned the wrong lesson from Three Mile Meltdown and Chernobyl.
They shrugged off those disasters as “result[ing] from poor safety standards and bad management,” no doubt concluding that such cock-ups by brain-addled foreigners could never afflict Japanese plants (as President Obama correctly observed, all peoples, not just Americans, believe themselves to be "exceptional").
But the real lesson is that, when dealing with glow-atoms, if something can go wrong, someday it will. And the result will be near-permanent pollution of the planet.
As a writer for the Jakarta Post put it shortly after Fukushima went glow-tomb:
Once again, we are reminded of the inherent risks of nuclear power, which will always be vulnerable to the potentially deadly combination of human error, design failure and natural disaster.
The history of nuclear energy is a history of accidents, right up to today—from partial meltdowns to radioactive leaks to internal system failures. Records show that these accidents are not confined to a particular time, country or reactor type.
Nuclear reactors may have undergone modernisation since Chernobyl, but the root causes of the technology’s vulnerability to accidents remain the same: unexpected technological failures, operator error, lack of transparency in the industry as a whole, economic or political pressures, and potential terrorist attacks.
And most importantly the obvious—earthquakes, tsunamis and extreme weather events like hurricanes that cannot be predicted but have certainly become more recurrent than ever.
If the Tepco people had accepted this, they would have accepted the possibility of just what happened: a 9.0 earthquake and 45-foot tsunami that avidly erased both the plant’s primary power sources and its backup generators, and demolished all roads and communication lines serving the area. And then they would have quietly decommissioned the plant, and gone into real estate.
But people won’t learn. Just as the Japanese were confident that they would never preside over glow-tombs, like those fumble-fingered Americans and Russians, today over in the US people are presently being deafened by the earnest bleatings of nincompoops averring that Fukushima could never happen in the US, because US reactors are—or at least will be—designed and built in ways that are way more spiffy and bitchin’, and, also because, they’re, like, you know, Americans, and therefore exceptional and stuff.
Peter Coy, a Yank-side Sunny Jim writing for Bloomberg, concedes that “nuclear power plants will never be completely safe.” But then the wheels come off, as Coy opines that folks should go ahead and keep building glow-tombs because “they can be made far safer than they are today.”
The key to nuclear power, he says, is “humility.” In this he is right. But then comes the eyes-wide-shut Sunny Jimsing:
The next generation of plants must be built to work with nature, and human nature, rather than against them[.] They must be safe by design, so that even if everything goes wrong, the outcome won’t be disaster.
In the language of the nuclear industry, they must be “walkaway safe,” meaning that even if all power is lost and the coolant leaks and the operators flee the scene, there will be no meltdown of the core, no fire in the spent fuel rods, and no bursts of radioactive steam into the atmosphere.
The problem with all this is that it does not truly evince the requisite humility, which Coy himself identifies as first principle. The fact of the matter is that despite Coy’s would-be respect for nature, nature has made it very clear that it does not want nuclear power plants on planet earth. If it did, it would have put them here. Instead, as Buckminster Fuller observed, nature sited the nearest nuclear power plant some 90 million miles away.
And, as with Fukushima, nature recurrently offers lessons teaching us that no matter what we humans may consider “safe,” in re nuclear power, she can, and will, show us otherwise.
Coy-style Sunny Jimsing also neglects to take into account the fact that no matter how “foolproof” a glow-tomb system may be devised and designed, that system will be placed in the hands of fools—that is, human beings. No knock on human beings: that’s just the way we are. Both Three Mile Meltdown and Chernobyl were replete with human error, and when the histories are written on Fukushima, we will learn that this fiasco was and is knee-deep in human error, as well.
Here on this site, the Kossack Empty Vessel wrote a very illuminating recollection of his days staffing a research nuclear reactor. His story rang completely true to me, because it closely tracks the remembrances of time served at an American nuclear weapons installation in Germany, written by a journo co-conspirator for a newspaper I once ran. The piece is very worth reading in full, but here is how the Vessel begins, and ends:
I want to be clear at the outset. I am not a nuclear engineer. I do not really understand much about the physics or details of reactor construction. I am an anthropologist, so I’m just a people person. But what I learned working in a reactor was this . . . no matter how dangerous something is, eventually people become complacent and do stupid things. It’s natural . . . we just can’t keep our attention up, our guard up, or live with that level of anxiety. When working with dangerous things, eventually people forget about the danger.
The whole point of this is simple—people are people. If you want to know what the staff of a nuclear reactor is like, just imagine the people you work with at whatever job you do—then imagine them operating a machine that could kill everyone in a small city and render that town unlivable for several hundred years.
I have listened to many nuclear engineers explain to me why the latest designs are safe, why we can engineer safety and redundancy into reactor designs—but I have never heard a nuclear engineer explain how they will stop reactor operators from jerking off in the middle of their shift. They may be able to engineer a safe reactor design—but as long as reactors are designed by, built by, and operated by people, they will never be safe.
No, they won't. What the Fukushima glow-tomb will now do instead is kill, injure, and mutate, generation after generation, Japanese (and other) human beings like these:
Thomas Noyes pointed out in the Guardian that when the pocket-protector people start toting up the costs of various energy sources, they invariably neglect to note that the costs of nuclear power are “incalculable.”
It is for this reason that people of private capital are reluctant to go there unless they receive assurances that government will bail them out, if and when a nuclear reactor is transformed into a glow-tomb.
If the costs and benefits of nuclear power are so attractive, where are the investors? At least with wind and solar power, it is possible to see the cost curve dropping to the break-even point in the near future. Nuclear power, by contrast, may never be able to convince investors to put their money down without government guarantees.
Several years ago, I heard Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, say that commercial nuclear power won’t be developed in the US without federal liability or financing guarantees. The risks, however remote, are so expensive that investors don’t want to take them on, no matter what the return.
[T]he total costs of nuclear power are, in any meaningful sense, incalculable. Investors face cost overruns that could burn through even the deepest pockets. The true cost of waste disposal still is not known. The cost of decommissioning, even decades away, is also a big unknown. And the cost of catastrophic failure is more than a company as large as GE is willing to face. How can any investor calculate the return on investment with such large uncertainties?
Looking at the bigger picture, I don’t see why I or anyone should apologise for advocating developing energy resources that don’t blow up and take their investors with them. The renewable energy advocates I work with are willing, and even eager, to discuss the full costs and benefits of all sources of energy. Supporters of nuclear power should be willing to hold themselves to the same standard.
But they’re not. A recent piece in the Connecticut Post notes that taxpayers in New England have over the past three decades contributed nearly $1 billion to a fund intended to secure permanent storage for spent fuel from the region’s nuclear reactors. But that money has instead bought them but “an empty $11 billion hole in a Nevada mountainside, a broken promise from the U.S. government to remove the radioactive waste, and mounting bills that could still saddle New England with mothballed plants and hundreds of spent-fuel casks, turning communities into mini-nuclear waste dumps for decades, if not forever.”
While safety, not finances, has been at the core of the intense debate about the industry following the Japan calamity earlier this month, analysts, antinuclear activists, New England politicians and even plant operators said the cost issue sorely needs public attention.
“Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past 50 years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away,” the report summary states.
And after 40 years of operation, the plants still can’t stand on their own financial footing, the report continues.
“The financial story is that nuclear power is not viable without subsidies,” said Ellen Vancko, who runs UCS’s nuclear energy division.
Furthermore:
Operators or owners of some New England plants have a limited-liability corporate structure, meaning taxpayers could be financially responsible for a plant disaster.
In attempting to discover how the word “fukushima” would translate into English, I learned that in some areas of Japan the notorious fugu, or pufferfish, is instead known as fuku.
This seems to me perfectly apt. The fugu, or fuku, is a fish that will quite definitely kill you, when you eat it, unless it is prepared just so. The toxic portions of the fish must be wholly removed, and in a way that does not contaminate the rest of the flesh. Only chefs who undergo rigorous training are permitted to prepare and serve fuku. And yet, every year, some people die from consuming the fish. But there is always another daredevil, ready to shove the corpse out of the seat, and take its place.
Why anyone would want to eat a fish that can kill you, when there are plenty of other fish that are just as tasty, that will not kill you, is one of the true bafflements of human nature. So, too: nuclear power. Why anyone would want to pursue a power source that “may blow up and take [its] investors with [it],” when there are so many other sources that will not . . . well, beats me.
Maybe the most depressing piece I’ve encountered throughout the glow-tombing of Fukushima is this one, from Voice of America. It seems, you see, that researchers are developing a drug “that can both prevent and repair cell damage from all types of radiation exposure.”
And why, you may ask, do I find such a thing “depressing”? Shouldn’t that be Good News, that people suffering from radiation damage might be healed?
It should indeed. But get this:
Such a healing medication has the potential to lessen panic and fear generated by catastrophic reactor accidents. Plant workers trying to make repairs near a crippled reactor’s radioactive core might be less fearful if they could take a pill to repair their own radiation-damaged cells.
See? Once such a wonderment reaches the market, why then, when a nuclear-power plant goes glow-tomb, the public can be definitively assured that, as ever, there is No Danger—why, all you have to do is take this pill. Workers can be dosed and sent back into the glow-tomb, to clean up for the company good. People living around the glow-tomb can be slipped a pill, patted on the head, and told to go back home—because Everything Is Fine.
The folks driving production of such a pill are people in the United States military—you know, those who control the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Ramesh Kumar, the CEO of a U.S. drug research firm called Onconova, says his company has just such a wonder drug in the works. The company has been collaborating on the drug, called Ex-Rad, with scientists at a U.S. Defense Department research laboratory.
“Ex-Rad is a drug which is effective in saving a cell damaged by radiation,” he says, “and we have found that it can be given in advance of exposure to radiation up to a day ahead or it can be given up to a day after the exposure to radiation.”
The Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute has been leading the Pentagon’s quest for a more effective antidote to radiation sickness, which has a wide range of symptoms.
The Pentagon’s search for radiation sickness treatments is intensifying.
[T]he Department of Defense and Onconova have collaborated on the development of Ex-Rad.
Oh happy day. Glow-tombs may melt, may explode; nuclear weapons may fly hither and yon; but All will be All Right. For, as long as you’re not actually crisped, you can just take a pill. And then life will go on. It may be life like this boy, but hey, you can still serve Nation and Profit, scuttling into a glow-tomb to scoop up radioactive water, even on stunted legs, and with only one arm.
(This piece is a mash-up of two earlier posts, that appeared, illustrated, here and here, in red)