The Death of a Nuclear Future?

We were once promised faithfully that it would never happen again yet for some reason, quarter of a century later here we are up the same creek without a paddle. What events do I refer to? Chernobyl of course and its new baby brother – Fukushima Dai-ichi.

The facts coming out of Japan have so far been scarce from the initial denial of any kind of meltdown to the gradual admission of a partial meltdown to the admission of a partial meltdown in three reactors, to the admission they have no ability to cool the fuel whatsoever. This much was already obvious long before they admitted it for several reasons - the detection of radiometric caesium and iodine in the atmosphere indicated that radioactive material had escaped the containment vessel. The explosions were also a dead give away - the presence of hydrogen alone indicated that the zirconium casing around the fuel rods had begun to melt because they had to be hot enough to strip oxygen atoms from the steam inside the reactor through dissociation. This is what caused the hydrogen build-up in the upper part of the reactor building leading to the subsequent explosions. Initially TEPCO chose to lie about these things, either that or worse – they didn’t have a clue. One thing is so far certain – we aren’t being told the whole story. And as with all nuclear accidents it will likely take an age before we finally know the truth.

The media have in recent days been criticized for showing ‘disproportionate coverage’ of the disaster unfolding at Fukushima Dai-ichi. Especially amidst the backdrop of a humanitarian tragedy that totally eclipses it in scale. I disagree with that consensus. People across the world have been deeply worried that this could be a repeat of Chernobyl and the world in general has been spooked by the very thought of the prospect. Indeed in recent days its ghost has come back to haunt us once more. The Chernobyl disaster was ultimately a hundred times worse than the recent Earthquake in Japan. It wasn’t just a disaster either, it was a nightmare. Let's be fair about this as well - nightmare isn't even a strong enough word to describe that event. For as long as the human race exists, people will continue to pay the price for that disaster and even after we’re long gone – nature will continue to pay that price in our absence. Even though Chernobyl can only be directly connected to the deaths of 31 people due to the initial criticality event, the consequences were catastrophic. Vast tracts of land across the Ukraine and Belarus were rendered uninhabitable. Hundreds of thousands of people had to be forcibly relocated. Cities across the Ukraine and Belarus were reduced to ghost towns. Radioactive fallout contaminated land across most of Europe and the northern hemisphere. But it continues to get worse. Of the 800,000 liquidators sent into to clean up the disaster, around 100,000 are now dead with another 100,000 permanently disabled. The fallout has been responsible for innumerable health problems in the affected populations and not just from cancers, from intestinal problems, circulation problems, respiratory problems, endocrine problems and autoimmune diseases. Many of the people suffering will ultimately die from exposure to the fallout, numbers now estimated to be over a million people since 1986. The economic cost of the disaster alone is in the realm of at least several hundred billion dollars. Then we have the the massive number of birth defects and stillborn children. The deep psychological scarring of its victims. The 200,000 women forced to have abortions. The farmland deemed unfit to grow produce. The mass slaughter of irradiated livestock. The pollution of the water table in affected areas. The list just goes on and on and on. The accident at Chernobyl didn’t just kill people, it destroyed their souls.

So 25 years later had we really learned anything. It turns out not. The entire world was gearing up for a nuclear renaissance, the horrors of Chernobyl having faded sufficiently from the public consciousness. With the threat of global warming, our dependence on middle-eastern oil imports, safe nuclear power was supposed to be our salvation and now the dream lies in ruins. Governments were convinced that nuclear energy was somehow now safer than it had been in that much simpler time only a generation ago. Then all of a sudden events in Japan threw a massive spanner into the works. Now granted it was on the part of the Japanese an act of extreme stupidity to not only build one of these reactors on seismically active ground but also near a stretch of coastline guaranteed to be hit by tsunamis. Their hubris and faith in technology has bitten them hard. But it was a faith shared by the rest of the world. We have been repeatedly assured by our governments over the years that it could never happen again, that reactor design in the west is much safer, that meltdowns cannot happen now. That is correct apparently, until they do. So now the pro-nuclear lobby has naturally got to change its tune a little and point out that in Britain we’re not on a fault line. That’s correct so therefore it’s safe, I mean it’s not like there are any other threats to our country that would see a nuclear reactor as being a good target now is it? Not like terrorism for instance.

One of the reasons this accident has the world on edge is because it is so reminiscent of Chernobyl. The parallels are obvious. Granted I doubt the radiological release from the plant will be anything close but the rest of it has the same modus operandi. The evacuations, the radiation warnings, the exclusion zone, the explosions, the fires, the panic, even the pictures of the damaged reactor buildings look the same. The initial surge in radiation was detected hundreds of miles away from the Fukushima site, similarly the first clue that the Soviet Union had a serious nuclear problem came from Sweden. After the Chernobyl accident, the Soviet authorities went into a state of denial. Currently the Japanese authorities are in a state of denial. Initially the Soviet government lied about the seriousness of the Chernobyl incident, the Japanese authorities are currently lying about the seriousness of the Fukushima incident. I think I may be doing the Japanese a disservice here though, they are dealing with the problem a hundred times better than the Soviet Union dealt with Chernobyl. The Japanese at least admitted they had a serious problem and began evacuating straight away unlike the Soviets who tried at first to make-believe that nothing was wrong. That’s not to pour scorn on the bravery of the Soviets who originally dealt with Chernobyl, each one of them tried to rectify the situation knowing with absolute certainty they were going to die. In the same vain and before the eyes of the world the faceless Fukushima 50 has been used to personify the disaster in Japan – giving us a real life fairy-tale to believe in as they embark on a suicide mission to fight their own nuclear nightmare against insurmountable odds. That sounds sickeningly pretentious but I like it, it’s poetic. These men took on the mission to cool the reactors knowing full well it could mean their lives and in doing so they have won the admiration of the world.

Ultimately the problem with nuclear energy is it's a lethally toxic technology. It wasn’t developed as a technology of peace, it was developed as a weapon of war that has since been adapted for peaceful purposes. In so doing so we created our own metaphorical Frankenstein and when this stuff goes wrong it goes very badly wrong – people will pay the price… forever. We’re kind of like children playing with fire and every now again we will get burnt. In order for us to fully utilise this technology we should really need to be assured that it's 100% safe but as the events at Fukushima illustrate, no matter how many safety measures, false assurances and propaganda we are given, there is no such thing. Pro-nuclear activists will nevertheless continue to insist this technology is safe. Let me give them a clue, it isn't and it never will be. The spin they’ve tried to put on this event has been interesting – spin like ‘things are under control’ and ‘the radiation is not a threat’. The problem I have here is do they seriously believe that anyone will ever believe that explosions and fires anywhere near the vicinity of a nuclear reactor is an acceptable state of affairs? The question as to whether this technology is safe has already been answered, it was answered at Windscale, it was answered at Three Mile Island, it was answered at Chernobyl and now it has been answered at Fukushima. But this isn’t the question that really needs to be asked is it? Because surely by now we know the answer. The question here isn't a question of whether we should use nuclear energy as it is a question of whether it's worth the price we could potentially pay. Without nuclear we can likely kiss goodbye to the electronic utopia we've built for ourselves because there simply isn’t another alternative. Our technological civilisation is built on a thirst for energy that can’t be quenched any other way. Renewable energy will never cover the void and oil as well as not lasting forever comes mainly from countries we simply cannot trust. The latter comes with massive environmental problems of its own. People could I suppose sacrifice the luxuries but no government on Earth is going to make that call and I can’t see the world turning back to candlelight somehow so regardless of the political fallout from Fukushima, nuclear is here to stay. As an added bonus we’ll get plenty of reassurance from governments that they’ve run numerous tests on our reactors and that nothing can possibly go wrong with them. Which is obviously quite comforting until you realise that man made disasters don’t occur because of what we thought of, they occur mainly because of what we didn’t think of. If we get away with one calamity every twenty years which seems to be the going rate, we may only be due two more before more practical power sources are developed. As to where and when those calamities strike we leave that to chance.

This incident has at the very least highlighted the desperate need for openness, honesty and transparency in the wake of a nuclear accident. The public need to know exactly where they stand so they can make informed decisions. This obviously can’t happen if a private company is trying to protect its own financial interests. Perhaps the IAEA will reach some sort of agreement about this in the coming months. If the nuclear beast is here to stay, we deserve the right to know when we’ve got to run away from it. My own preference would be this... invest heavily in nuclear fusion. No matter how expensive it is, ultimately it buys us an alternative. Convincing people that it’s safe is going to be tricky given how tarnished the word nuclear has become but sooner or later we really need to crack this problem because a safe sustainable future depends on it. For the size of the economic hit the world would have to take if we ever had to evacuate a city the size of Tokyo, this seems to me to be a more acceptable gamble. For the cost of one Chernobyl, we could have had a limitless clean environmentally friendly energy source. But alas it’s not like humans to exercise that kind of foresight.