Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters
Genres: Science Engineering
Book Preface
Radiation—the emission or transmission of energy—comes in a variety of forms. The ionizing radiation produced by nuclear explosions and accidents carries enough energy to detach electrons from atoms and molecules. It combines electromagnetic radiation, including gamma rays and X-rays, with particle radiation, which consists of alpha and beta particles and neutrons.
There are three different ways of measuring ionizing radiation. First is the radiation emitted by the radioactive object, the second determines the level absorbed by the human body, and the third estimates the amount of biological damage caused by the absorption of radiation. Each of these categories has its own unit of measure, and in all cases old units are gradually being replaced by new ones in the International System of Units (SI). A unit of emitted radiation, formerly known as the curie, has been replaced by the becquerel (Bq), with 1 curie equaling 37 gigabecquerels (GBq). The older unit of radiation absorption, the rad, has been replaced with an SI unit called the gray (Gy), which equals 100 rads. Biological damage, formerly measured in rem, has been replaced by the SI unit known as the sievert (Sv).
Different units were used to measure the radiation impact of the six accidents described in this book. The first dosimeters measured radiation exposure in micro-roentgens per second. Converting old units of measure into new SI units is cumbersome, with rem being a welcome exception: “rem” stands for “roentgen equivalent man” and is equal to 0.88 of a roentgen, a legacy unit used to measure exposure to the ionizing electromagnetic radiation produced by X-rays and gamma rays; 100 rem equal 1 sievert and, in measuring gamma and beta radiation, amount to 1 gray. Today, 10 rem, or 0.1 Sv, is the standard five-year limit of biological damage sustained by nuclear industry workers in the West.
Stolen Fire
A statue of Prometheus, a Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humankind as a gift, was erected in the city of Prypiat a few years before the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. Half-naked, rising from his knees and releasing the unruly tongues of fire into the air, Prometheus symbolized the victory of humanity over the forces of nature and its ability to wrest from the gods their secrets about the creation of the universe and the structure of the atom.
The bronze monument, six meters tall, survived the explosion of the nuclear reactor on the night of April 26, 1986, and the subsequent catastrophe, but it changed location and symbolism. It now stands before the entrance to the office of the Chernobyl nuclear power station and is the centerpiece of the public space dedicated to the memory of the plant operators, firefighters, and other first responders who sacrificed their lives in the battle with the fire and radiation unleashed by the explosion. The Prometheus of the monument turned out not to have control of the fire he unleashed and serves today as a symbol of human arrogance rather than the triumph of humankind over the forces of nature.1
The relocation and transmutation of the meaning of this Chernobyl Prometheus provides a sad but telling metaphor of changed attitudes toward nuclear energy in many parts of the world, some of which have survived nuclear accidents, while others have been fortunate or prudent enough to avoid them. Nuclear weapons, or “atoms for war,” have never been favorably regarded by the world at large, starting with their first use in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. But nuclear energy per se, or “atoms for peace,” as President Dwight Eisenhower called it in his famous speech to the United Nations in 1953, raised high hopes and had a good reputation throughout the world at the height of the nuclear industry in the 1960s and 1970s.
Eisenhower promised to “take this weapon out of the hands of soldiers” and put it “into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.” His goal was to reassure the American and world public about the safety of the growing American nuclear arsenal, stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and promote world economic development. Following President Eisenhower, Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, declared in the fall of 1954 that atoms would deliver electrical energy too cheap to meter. Many believed that it would also heal diseases, help keep houses warm with every home having its own atomic power plant, dig channels, and power not only submarines and icebreakers but also ships and locomotives.2
The nuclear industry has indeed made a major contribution to our lives, most notably in the production of electricity. Today, almost seventy years after the “Atoms for Peace” speech, with 440 nuclear reactors operating throughout the world, nuclear power provides about 10 percent of world electricity. That is a considerable amount but hardly a game changer. The main reason why “atoms for peace” have not delivered on their original promise is economic. In North America and Europe today, if one counts direct and indirect costs, nuclear-generated electricity costs more per unit than electricity produced not only by fossil fuels such as coal or gas, but also by renewables—water, wind, and solar.
The main economic argument against nuclear energy that affects the cost per unit of electricity is the cost of building a nuclear power plant. It now costs at least $112.00 per megawatt to build a nuclear plant, as compared to $46.00 for solar, $42.00 for gas, and $30.00 for a wind farm. With the construction of nuclear plants taking as long as ten years, and returns on investment realized incrementally over decades, it is difficult if not impossible to develop nuclear energy without government subsidies and guarantees. That was true back in the 1950s and remains true today. The existing nuclear industry is an open-ended liability. Nobody ever fully decommissioned (as opposed to shutting down) a nuclear power station. We do not know how much that process would cost in total, but there are good reasons to believe that it would be more than the original construction.3
Nuclear energy has also underperformed as an instrument of nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. The sharing of nuclear power technology failed to stop nuclear weapons development and sometimes helped put such weapons into the hands of governments that did not possess them earlier. A case in point is India, which produced its first plutonium in a reactor supplied by Canada and called its first nuclear test a “peaceful nuclear explosion.” Today, many are concerned that Iran is following in India’s footsteps, and that its uranium enrichment program constitutes a step toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons.4
Does this mean that nuclear energy is too costly and too dangerous to have a sustainable future—a mid-twentieth-century technology that raised high hopes but failed to deliver on its promises and will die out on its own, crushed by insuperable economic forces? While the economic handicaps of nuclear energy are obvious, it is too early to count it out and deny its chances of gaining much more prominence in the future than it possesses today. As in the past, there remain strong political incentives for individual states to go nuclear, whether for economic, military, or prestige reasons. Most countries do not have access to nuclear energy, while some parts of the world simply lack non-nuclear sources of energy.
In the last decade or so, however, a new and powerful argument has emerged for the use of nuclear energy. That argument is climate change. We are threatened by carbon emissions as never before, and our considerable dependence on fossil fuels is growing at an unprecedented rate. In 2017, almost 65 percent of electricity was produced by burning fossil fuels, up from 62 percent in 1990, and the year 2018 surpassed the preceding one in absolute and relative terms. How to resolve that conundrum? Many point to the low-carbon nuclear industry as a solution to our current problems. To help combat climate change, in February 2022 the European Commission designated nuclear as a “green” energy. The International Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development envisions a “Sustainable Development Scenario” in its 2019 World Energy Outlook, calling for a 67 percent increase in nuclear power generation, which would require the growth of nuclear generation capacity by 46 percent between the years 2017 and 2040. Coming from an agency that represents thirty-six member countries and is concerned with all forms of energy generation, not just nuclear, this proposition sounds not only reasonable but also nonpartisan. Why not adopt it?5
While nuclear energy generation cannot compete with renewables in cost, the share of wind and solar energy in world electricity production remains insignificant, accounting in the United States for 8.4 percent and 2.3 percent respectively in the year 2020. Although the share of wind and solar doubled between 2017 and 2020 and solar is the fastest growing sector of energy, the argument is being made that renewables simply cannot replace fossil fuel on their own in the near future, and, even if they could, they would need a steady supply of relatively clean electrical energy as a backup to ensure the stability of the grid in days or months without sun or wind. The production of batteries capable of storing excess electricity and releasing it as needed is a major scientific and technological problem.6
Why, then, not go nuclear? Both proponents and opponents of the development of nuclear energy suggest that a major contributing factor to the problems of the nuclear industry is the continuing and, in some countries, growing public concern about the safety of nuclear reactors. That concern makes the construction of new reactors a much longer and more costly process than it would be otherwise. In most countries that jumped on the nuclear energy bandwagon between the 1950s and 1970s, the public is concerned about the risk of reactor meltdowns and consequent radioactive fallout. Whether governments favor or oppose nuclear energy per se, they cannot commit taxpayer funds to develop it as long as the public feels uneasy about the nuclear industry.
The main reason for continuing mistrust of the nuclear industry and the governments that promote it is the series of nuclear accidents that have dogged the industry in its military and civil incarnations since the 1950s. The three major accidents that have rocked the civil nuclear sector are the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident of 1979, the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, and the Fukushima multiple reactor meltdown of 2011. Those accidents not only created profound public concern about the safety of nuclear reactors but also unexpectedly turned the nuclear industry into a cyclical one. Each accident was followed by a drop in the number of reactors ordered and launched.7
While there were other factors, mainly economic ones, that contributed to the cyclicality of the industry, it is hard to ignore a degree of correlation between the major nuclear accidents and the industry’s downturns. The number of reactors under construction worldwide reached its peak in 1979, the year of the Three Mile Island accident; the number of reactor startups approached the same point in 1985, one year before the Chernobyl accident. The 2011 Fukushima disaster led to the immediate shutdown of dozens of reactors and is at least partly responsible for the decline in construction starts, which has continued since 2010.8
The nuclear accidents are recognized as a major problem hindering the development of nuclear energy by both its opponents and supporters. Among the latter, by far the most powerful voice belongs to Bill Gates. In his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (2021), he has acknowledged that “real problems” with the nuclear industry and technology led to those disasters, but he also claims that giving up on nuclear energy would be like giving up on cars because they kill people. “Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do,” writes Gates. He puts his faith (and hundreds of millions of dollars) into the development of the next generation of nuclear reactors.9
The debate on the safety of nuclear energy can be advanced by taking a fresh look at the history of nuclear accidents and trying to understand why they happened, how bad they were, what we can learn from them, and whether they can happen again. That is the main purpose of this book, which examines an international industry jealously guarded by national governments—what other industry has had its own “atomic spies” put on trial and electrocuted?—by analyzing the six accidents that consistently top the list of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.
I begin with the Castle Bravo nuclear test, which took place in March 1954 on the Marshall Islands and caused significant damage to human health and the environment as a result of miscalculation of the radiation yield of a hydrogen bomb and the direction of the winds. The test that went wrong became the first major accident of the nuclear era. This is followed by two disasters of the “atoms for war” sector of nuclear industry that took place within days of each other.
The first occurred in late September 1957 at a plutonium complex near the town of Kyshtym in the Ural Mountains, where the explosion of a nuclear waste tank released tens of millions of curies of radiation into the atmosphere. The second happened in October of the same year at the Windscale Works in England, where a reactor that produced plutonium and tritium for the British atomic and hydrogen bombs caught fire—the first major reactor accident in world history. I then turn to the Three Mile Island accident in March 1979, Chernobyl in April 1986, and Fukushima in March 2011, all of which took place in the “atoms for peace” sector of the nuclear industry and cemented its reputation as inherently unsafe.
As my choice of accidents attests, I do not separate the military origins and “childhood” of the nuclear industry from its mature period, because such separation obscures the fact that “atoms for peace” inherited reactor designs, cadres, and culture, to say nothing of financial support and backing, from the “atoms for war” project. It is therefore hardly surprising that two of the plutonium production accidents, at Kyshtym and Windscale, and three of the electricity production disasters, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, are considered the worst accidents that have happened up to now.10
The story told here is a global one. Although national governments did their best to protect their nuclear secrets, the nuclear industry evolved from the very beginning as an international project. Scientists and practitioners of the industry knew that they were part of an international effort, followed one another’s work openly or in secret, and thus shared common beginnings, misperceptions, and mistakes. While there are 440 nuclear reactors in operation today, there are fewer than a dozen basic models of reactors, originating in the US, Soviet/Russian, Canadian, and Chinese designs. Accidents were both international and local to the same degree as the industry that produced them. Looking closely at what led to these accidents and the ways in which the industry and governments dealt with them, from the use and misuse of information to the mobilization of resources to cope with their consequences, is the most effective way of understanding the perils associated with reliance on nuclear energy.
I invite readers to join me on a sometimes terrifying dive into the dramatic history of nuclear disasters. I examine not only the actions and omissions of those directly involved but also the ideologies, politics, and cultures that contributed to the disasters. After every accident discussed here, a commission was formed to examine causes and draw lessons. Technology was improved as a result, and every accident contributed to the shaping of subsequent safety procedures and culture. And yet nuclear accidents occur again and again. Is it possible that we neglect the political, social, and cultural causes of nuclear disasters of the past that are still with us today? We can’t pass an informed judgment about the future of the nuclear industry without tackling these questions first.
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