5/15/2014 Why Nuclear Power Will Always Be Scary

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B
Why Nuclear Power Will
Always Be Scary
reakfast was beef jerky at a gas station in Socorro, New Mexico, washed down
by 16 ounces of acrid Rockstar, followed by more beef jerky, followed by gum.
Then, back on the road, on the third loop of a dangerously soporific NPR
newscast: ObamacareCrimeaGlassholes
It was not yet dawn as I approached the White Sands Missile Range, the whole world
composed of bands of blue and darker blue and black. A missile test was taking place later
that morning, and the base was going to be closed to visitors, so if I wanted to see what I
had come to see, I would have to see it soon.
Dawn is the right time to see the Trinity Site, where at 5:29:45 on the morning of July 16,
1945, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon in human history took place. The sun has not
yet blanched the greens and reds of the high desert, now shedding the frigid darkness.
There is not much to see here anymore, as this site was chosen by the directors of the
Manhattan Project precisely because there was not much here in the first place. A black
obelisk stands at the exact spot of the explosion, a 12-foot-tall perfect cone stark against
the wavering, mountainous horizon. All that remains of the 100-foot tower that cradled
the Gadget is a couple of concrete nubs. Beneath your feet, you might still spot greenish
pebbles of trinitite, a glassy rock created as sand was sucked into a nuclear furnace of
stellar proportions. Down the road is the McDonald Ranch House, which has stood for a
century. A paper sign hangs from a string suspended from the ceiling: Plutonium
Assembly Room. Third-rate historical houses have more grandiose signage. Perhaps
thats because we are still not sure if this is a place to celebrate or forget.
A Bare Nucleus of Legend
By Alexander Nazaryan / May 14, 2014 5:03 PM EDT
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Nuclear bombs have leveled two citiesby my arithmetic, two too many. Nuclear energy,
on the other hand, keeps electricity flowing through the veins of Paris and New York. This
is a Janus-faced power that J. Robert Oppenheimer and his band of European exiles
unleashed from the nucleus of the atom, the turgid nugget of protons and neutrons held
together by the strong nuclear force. We had been toying with chemical reactions (that is,
those involving only the electrons of atoms) at least since the first hominid caused the
exothermic oxidation-reduction reaction known as fire; in the summer of 1945, the nucleus
itself finally came undone.
Raised on Manhattans Upper West Side and educated at Harvard, Oppenheimer, the
Manhattan Projects chief scientist, had a propensity for the poetical turn of phrase (he was
also adept at mixing martinis). It was a verse by the Metaphysical poet John Donne
Batter my heart, three persond Godthat led Oppenheimer to christen this swath of
desert Trinity. After the resounding success of the test blast there, Oppenheimer famously
resorted to Hindu scripture, saying that he had become death, the destroyer of worlds. A
more pedestrian assessment came from the physicist Kenneth T. Bainbridge, who told
Oppenheimer after the blast that now we are all sons of bitches.
And sons of bitches we remain. Vladimir Putin may not be stockpiling missiles in Cuba, but
a Russian television presenter decided to double down on the Cold War nostalgia by
suggesting, during the March hostilities over Crimea, that Russia was the only country in
the world capable of turning the USA into radioactive dust. Meanwhile, our long-standing
love of triads was fulfilled in March 2011, when a tsunami heading toward the eastern coast
of Japan gave the world a third major nuclear-energy catastrophe, Fukushima Daiichi, to
complement Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986).
Several recent books have tried to take stock of our century-long affair with the nucleus,
which began with Ernest Rutherfords investigations into the structure of the atom in the
early 20th century. Any book written about choses nuclaires today will inevitably be
judged against Richard Rhodess The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), which
encapsulated far more than just military history. In a 25th anniversary edition of the
Pulitzer Prizewinning volume, Rhodes worried that the story of our atomic conquests was
being worn down by time to a bare nucleus of legend. This is a valid concern, but the
current spate of books, including excellent graphic histories of both the Trinity site and
Marie and Pierre Curie, suggests that for all the talk of wind farms and solar panels, of
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stockpile stewardship instead of nuclear winter, the immense achievement of splitting a
nucleus remains as terrifying and enthralling to us as it was for the self-anointed destroyer
of worlds in the first light of that July morning.
Caves Teeming With Radon
We are now living in the twilight of the Atomic Age, the end of both nuclear arsenals and
nuclear power, yet, simultaneously, radiation has become so ubiquitous in contemporary
life that it is nearly invisible, at once everywhere and unnoticed, writes Craig Nelson in
The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era, an enjoyable
book that treads much the same ground traversed far more scrupulously by Rhodes.
Nelson points out that the Manhattan Project, for all the havoc it caused in Japan, did
wonders for American innovation: By creating a safe haven for rejected genius, America
transformed herself from an R&D Appalachia to the center of everything nuclear. In his
estimation, though, the Atomic Age includes intentions mostly bellicose. Not enough is
made here of the Atoms for Peace ethos of the postwar years, when Atomic Energy
Commission head Lewis L. Strauss boasted of nuclear energy too cheap to meter. Nelson
writes well, but adds little.
Nor is the Manhattan Project quite as removed from the present as Nelson suggests. Back
in 1939, the physicist Niels Bohr argued that it was impossible to build a nuclear arsenal
unless you turn the United States into one huge factory." That factory, though quiescent
now, remains surprisingly intact. The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently pointed
out that a sort of radioactive archipelago still exists across the land, a network of
warehouses and factories marshaled for the sake of the Manhattan Project and the Cold
War, only to be later turned to more benign purposes.
While some of the complexes, like the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state or
Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, have become tourist attractions, less
significant nuclear nodes have had their history occluded, sometimes to the possible
detriment of public health. Residue, left by the routine processing as well as the occasional
mishandling of nuclear material, the Journal reported, exists in sites in almost three
dozen states. Some remain in public parks, some near schools, and some in the walls, floors
and ceilings of commercial buildings. Contamination has been detected on hiking trails in
residential neighborhoods, in vacant city lots and in groundwater.
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One of the sites used in the wartime nuclear effort is the Baker & Williams Warehouses in
the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Today, it houses offices and an art gallery, in a
once-grim section of town rejuvenated by the High Line park a half-block away. Next door,
yoga and coffee. Seventy years ago, this was pretty much On the Waterfront. And, as it
happens, Dr. Strangelove. According to A Guide to the Manhattan Project in Manhattan,
these red-brick buildings were used by the Manhattan Engineer District in the early
1940s for the short-term storage of uranium concentrates that had been shipped in secret
to the nearby Hudson River docks.
No indication of this transuranic taint is apparent at the Baker & Williams Warehouses
today, at least not to anyone without a dosimeter in tow. When I went there on a bright
spring day, a fashionable middle-aged man was standing outside the building, in which he
worked. He had not heard that the warehouse complex was involved in the Manhattan
Project and once housed nuclear matriel.
Thats cool, he said when I told him. Then he took a satisfying drag of his cigarette.
That nonchalant dismissal does imply that Rhodes is right and that the Manhattan Project
is taking on the benign glow of myth. That may not be a bad thing, either. The widespread
efforts to keep rogue states like Iran and North Korea from developing nukes, and to
keep long-standing belligerents like India and Pakistan from ever using them on each
other, suggest that nobody is eager to repeat the twin detonations of August 1945.
Nuclear power, on the other hand, remains a more vexing issue, the one that may deserve
more attention today than nuclear weaponry. At the end of his book, Nelson arrives at
more or less the same conclusion, writing, After all the trouble nuclear has given us over
the past seven decades, its about time for the cheek to be turned and the benefits to be
clearly manifest. Greens dismayed by coal and impatient with wind and solar have come
to share this favorable opinion of nuclear energy. Many of these pro-nuclear liberals are
featured in the recent documentary Pandoras Promise, which is slick but hopelessly dull
in its argument for nuclear power.
Also bullish on nuclear energy is James Mahaffey, even if his new book has the harrowing
title Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters From the Ozark
Mountains to Fukushima. Its weird and fun, a rather technical compendium of nuclear
mishaps that appears to have been tweaked by Ziggy Stardust for maximum weirdness:
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clueless hunters wandering into caves teeming with radon-222, fervid dreams of nuclear
jets, reactors bucking like steeds unused to human contact. Thirty-five years ago, The
China Syndrome depicted work inside a nuclear power plant as pressing buttons, watching
meters and, sometimes, shouting furiously at nervous underlings. Mahaffey, a nuclear
engineer, keeps things appropriately dramatic, though his onslaught of scientific detail can
intimidate anyone not already familiar with the shortcomings of graphite-moderated
reactors or the difference between water and heavy water.
And while Mahaffey does cover the Big Three commercial nuclear accidents, Atomic
Accidents is truly valuable for pulling many lesser debacles out of obscurity, from the
aforementioned hunters who wandered into a radioactive cave in the Ozark Mountains in
1879 to the Kyshtym Disaster of September 29, 1957, an explosion of nuclear waste in
central Russia that Mahaffey calls possibly the worst, most senseless catastrophe in the
history of nuclear power. Ever adept at propaganda, the Soviets deemed the surrounding
area the East-Ural Nature Reserve.
Not that the United Statess record has been impeccable. Most everyone knows Three Mile
Island, but the outsized cultural import of that not-all-that-disastrous disaster obscures
many smaller but still serious catastrophes in the American nuclear industry. In one of our
earliest accidents, the SL-1 reactor in Idaho Falls was allowed to go prompt critical on the
evening of January 3, 1961, fatally blasting three workers with the explosive shock of two
billion billion fissions (no, that redundancy is not an editing error). The culpable party may
have been senior reactor operator Jack Byrnes, of whom Mahaffey writes, [He] was going
through a marriage crisis, he wasnt making enough money, and he had problems being
managed. This book is a testament to the astounding varieties of human error. Having
finished it, I am surprised that anything at all remains of our misbegotten species.
Mahaffey, though, is a nuclear optimist, despite the century or so of horrors his book
chronicles, from radium jaw (please dont Google-Image that) to the acute radiation
sickness of the valiant and doomed firemen of Chernobyl. The spectacular events that
make a compelling narrative may be behind us by now, he writes, reasoning elsewhere
that nuclear energy may be one of the key things that will allow life on Earth to keep
progressing, presumably by curbing our carbon dioxide emissions. Especially promising to
many nuclear proponents is fusion, which brings nuclei together instead of splitting them
apart (i.e., fission).
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But fusion is a dream, and fission is what we have, sometimes conducted in creaking old
plants like Indian Point, just 38 miles north of New York City and sitting astride a fault line.
If there were a Fukushima-style explosion at Indian Point, an estimated 20 million people
would have to evacuate the Greater New York area. Even the remote possibility of that
narrative is too compelling for some.
Unbelievably Phobic
The collective confusion over what, exactly, to make of our flirtation with the nucleus is on
full display at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque, N.M.,
just a couple of hours south of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nukes were
invented. Tucked next to Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia National Laboratories, the
museum is a miscellany of military history, nuclear science, jingoism and nuclear-energy
self-promotion. There are many, many warheads, a Packard sedan used to transport
Manhattan Project scientists and a jug of radium water, which promised to cure eczema
and gastric troubles. Behind the museum is a dusty parking lot of warplanes and long-
range missiles, suggesting an airfield in pre-battle repose. Near an exhibit about Hiroshima
is a journal where visitors can leave their reflections. One of these says, Iris OMG I am
going to make the next bom[b]! I fear this person may have missed the point. Then again,
maybe we all have.
The moral complexity has disappeared from our understanding of nuclear weapons,
Richard Rhodes lamented when I reached him by phone at his home in Northern
California. He was at least as eager to talk about the naturalist John James Audubon, of
whom he has written a biography, as he was of nuclear weapons. I cant blame him. Of the
latter, he says we are deliberately ignoring our responsibilities by keeping around some
7,700 nuclear warheads, tempting saboteurs, thieves and fate.
Rhodes is more sanguine about nuclear energy, recalling how he started out as a knee-
jerk anti-nuclear journalist back when he was researching The Making of the Atom Bomb
in the late 1970s. He says that while we can continue to mess around with boutique
energy sources like wind and solar, nuclear energy provides the surest cure to our carbon
jones. Rhodes laments that nuclear weaponry has made Americans unbelievably phobic
about radiation, so that the notion of a peaceful atom can no longer be countenanced
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without cynicism. Both Mahaffey and Nelson are of the same mind about nuclear power,
with the latter pleading with his readers to not turn away from it in fear, superstition, and
ignorance.
But superstition and ignorance are traits deeply cherished in America. Scientists and
historians are, I suspect, in a lonely camp of rational conviction; the average American may
never be weaned off the unfair image of a nuclear plant owned by the unfeeling, rapacious
Montgomery Burns and run by an army of blithe incompetents la Homer Simpson.
Burning fossil fuels somehow seems natural, elemental. Splitting a nucleus, conversely,
simply feels like an act of phenomenal hubris, and no amount of persuasive rhetoric will
change that. The most awesome force unleashed by the nucleus thus far has been what the
novelist Don DeLillo once called the theology of fear.
Of the many things written about nuclear science, then, the one that echoes loudest and
longest may be a single sentence in Mahaffeys book. It consists of one terrifying word:
Bang.
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