The Age of Radiance (66 page)

Like most of the world,
“Americans have never met a hydrocarbon they didn’t like,” journalist Elizabeth Kolbert said. “Oil, natural gas, liquefied natural gas, tar-sands oil, coal-bed methane, and coal, which is, mostly, carbon—the country loves them all, not wisely, but too well. To the extent that
the United States has an energy policy, it is perhaps best summed up as: if you’ve got it, burn it.” For of all the ways we have right now of producing electricity, nuclear is in many ways the least of our worries, so much so that perhaps antinuclear activists should refocus on the far greater menace of coal. Thanks to coal, the skies of China are annually filled with 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, and 26 million tons of sulfur dioxide. Political commentator William Saletan:
“The sole fatal nuclear power accident of the last forty years, Chernobyl, directly killed thirty-one people. By comparison, Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute calculates that from 1969 to 2000, more than twenty thousand people died in severe accidents in the oil supply chain. More than fifteen thousand people died in severe accidents in the coal supply chain—eleven thousand in China alone. The rate of direct fatalities per unit of energy production is eighteen times worse for oil than it is for nuclear power. Even if you count all the deaths plausibly related to Chernobyl—nine thousand to thirty-three thousand over a seventy-year period—that number is dwarfed by the death rate from burning fossil fuels. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2008
Environmental Outlook
calculates that fine-particle outdoor air pollution caused nearly 1 million premature deaths in the year 2000, and 30 percent of this was energy-related. You’d need five hundred Chernobyls to match that level of annual carnage.”

So while France’s fifty-eight reactors generate over 80 percent of its electrical power, India plans to build at least five more burners, Vietnam wants at least eight, and China will build fifty. By 2025, Southeast Asia is expected to go from zero to twenty-nine atomic plants. Of the sixty nuclear power plants being built around the world now, fifteen are engineered and constructed by Russia’s state-owned nuclear company, the most of any nation.

Would these governments—notably top-down operations such as China and Vietnam—be so enthusiastic about nuclear power if they knew Mikhail Gorbachev’s opinion of Chernobyl? That it was, in his words,
“perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union . . . [a] turning point [that] opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue.”

Journalist Mark Joseph Stern: “By 1987, the year following Chernobyl, glasnost had taken hold of Soviet society, with sudden openness dominating the press and the public forum. Outrage over the catastrophe began to spread among even loyal citizens who had never questioned the infallibility of their government. This opened the door to comparison with the West, a toxic line of thought in this famously closed society. Soviets had been told
for decades they were the best in the world—at everything. Through the mid-1980s, they still believed they were a major superpower, facing only the United States as serious competition. When information about Chernobyl and the public health crisis leaked, though, Soviet citizens realized that their government and industries were startlingly incompetent. Before the explosion, most Soviets were not discontented dissidents; they believed in the Soviet system, forgave its flaws, and hoped for a better future within its confines. But after Chernobyl, the system seemed potentially unredeemable—and actively dangerous. In the early days of glasnost, stories of Stalin’s mass murders decades earlier slowly bubbled to the fore, but those generally receded, so far removed were they from everyday life. After Chernobyl, though, every citizen’s safety was at stake.”

There is one solution: engineers creating technological breakthroughs to end the ever-present threat of atomic and political meltdown. China is testing a “pebble bed” reactor design, where reactor fuel comes not in big rods but as four hundred thousand billiard ball “pebbles,” coated in graphite and cooled by helium. If a pebble bed reactor is SCRAMed, the graphite shell quiets the fission without threat of infinite afterheat and meltdown, while the helium is inert, so if it has to be vented, it won’t be radioactive.

Another breakthrough may come with the thorium breeder reactor, which through an ingenious weaving of half-lives creates its own fuel. The pile’s uranium-233 fissions throw neutrons into the surrounding layer of thorium, which becomes thorium-233. The 233 decays, becoming protactinium-233. The protactinium decays, becoming uranium-233, and the cycle repeats. Unfortunately, the history of breeder reactors is not good; all four of the AEC’s test breeders of the 1960s were failures. But a number of physicists and engineers insist that the thorium design will solve all of those problems, with less maintenance, and less waste. Microsoft billionaires Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold are, meanwhile, investing in a “traveling wave reactor” process, a type of breeder reactor fueled by ordinary uranium instead of enriched, which, if it works, won’t require massive Oak Ridge–like industrial plants isolating near-weapons-grade isotopes.

Breeder reactors are so interesting that Eagle Scout David Hahn decided that, for his 1994 Atomic Energy merit badge, he should build one in his parents’ suburban Detroit potting shed.
“His dream in life was to collect a sample of every element on the periodic table,” Hahn’s high school physics teacher remembered. “I don’t know about you, but my dream at that age was to buy a car.” On August 31 at 2:40 a.m., Clinton Township police were looking for a boy seen stealing tires from cars when they came across David
in his Pontiac, acting suspicious. In his trunk they found acids, fireworks, antique clockfaces, rocks, lantern mantles, a box of dismantled smoke detectors, assorted chemicals, fifty cubes of white powder wrapped in foil, and a toolbox sealed with duct tape and a padlock. To build his test reactor, David had amassed americium-241 from smoke detectors, radium-226 from glow-in-the-dark clocks, thorium-232 from the mantles of kerosene lamps, and uraniums-238 and -235 from pitchblende ore. The cops called in the State Police Bomb Squad and radiologists from the Department of Public Health, who found so much radioactivity coming from the Pontiac’s trunk that they had to invoke the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, bringing a coterie of agents from the DOE, EPA, FBI, and NRC to Golf Manor.

On June 26, 1995, the Hahn backyard was declared so toxic it required an EPA Superfund cleanup squad. David’s story made him a legend and led to a book,
The Radioactive Boy Scout
. One of that book’s biggest fans was eleven-year-old Taylor Wilson, who read the entire thing to himself out loud.
“Know what?” Taylor told his parents. “The things that kid was trying to do, I’m pretty sure I can actually do them.” Taylor then spent much of his allowance that year on a radioactive collectible—a Fiesta dinnerware set too hot to eat from—and began experimenting. The family worried they might be facing a suburban Chernobyl, like the Hahns. “The explosions in the backyard were getting to be a bit much,” Taylor’s half sister Ashlee remembered.

Taylor then decided to try for the ultimate nuclear dream: Starlight on Earth. If Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace helped transform the Hiroshima fission bomb into nuclear power, what would happen if you tried doing the same with the Teller-Ulam fusion of Mike?

A sun lies inside the sun, the core 10 percent where all solar power originates. Every second, that core, with a force equal to 96 million thermonuclear bombs, transmutes 4 million tons of matter into 385 million million million million watts—the light and the heat that sustains life. In 1967, Hans Bethe won his Nobel for working this out mathematically with “Energy Production in Stars,” and for over fifty years, scientists have been trying to create starlight on earth, to engineer a controlled fusion nuclear reactor.

The teenaged Taylor Wilson was struck by the byzantine problem of radioactive oncology. Medical isotopes used for both diagnosing and treating various cancers have to be short-lived, to kill the bad cells without inflicting too much damage on the good, but this makes their distribution time-sensitive and tremendously costly. Instead of shipping isotopes to patients by private jet, Taylor thought, what if a reactor could be made small enough and safe enough to produce isotopes right in the hospital?
With the help of others legally old enough to drink beer, Taylor at the age of fourteen built a reactor bombarding atoms into each other in a shimmering 500-million-degree plasma (not solid, not liquid, and not gas, but a gaslike state that can be magnetically charged into filaments and beams, best known as the inner glow of neon bulbs). The commercial versions cost less than $100,000 and can be rolled right into the patient’s room.

But this is one of the few happy endings in a science that has been promising results since 1955 and achieving as much as Ed Teller’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Since 1993, Lawrence Livermore has spent over $5 billion on the National Ignition Facility, a stadium-size laser designed to generate power from fusion. As this book was going to press, the NIF announced a breakthrough: it had finally created a fusion reaction that generated more power than it took to initiate. But it is still a long road from that step to the reaction creating enough energy to sustain itself into a source of fusion power. Scientists in this business like to joke that “fusion is always twenty years away,” since that’s what they’ve been saying for the industry’s entire lifetime. Before trying to ignite fusion with lasers, physicists all over the world tried goliath magnets. At their 1985 Geneva summit, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to merge their fusion energy R&D programs with France’s and Japan’s to create the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which, thirty years later, is expected to take another $30 billion and twenty years to work. If it ever does.

W
hen we hear that a nuclear plant has collapsed in catastrophic meltdown, we can’t help but imagine a
China Syndrome
, with a whole population infested with tumors, a vast territory rendered into nuclear desert, and offspring afflicted with never-before-seen birth defects. Beyond the heroic martyrdoms of power plant and emergency response workers, though, what actually happens after a nuclear plant disaster is so minor compared to our mythic fantasies that it is almost impossible to understand.

Created after the bombing of Nagasaki to study radiation’s long-term biological effects, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) worked for twenty-five years with the Chernobyl Forum (a joint effort of such UN agencies as the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia) to catalog the Lenin Station’s aftereffects. They concluded that fifty-seven people died during the accident itself, including twenty-eight emergency workers, and that from
1986 to 2002, about 6,848 neighboring children were diagnosed with thyroid cancer from drinking the radioactive-iodine milk of tainted cows. This latter tragedy could easily have been prevented with a working public health service in a normal functioning state—Chernobyl fallout has been detected in dairy products as far away as Oak Ridge, Tennessee—but when it was discovered, the USSR was collapsing. Eighteen of those children have died.

Beyond that, there is no clear medical evidence of Chernobyl’s adverse impact on human beings, either in cancer rates or mortality rates or nonmalignant disorders . . . and Chernobyl was an accident far worse than nearly anything that could happen anywhere else in the world, as the Soviets did not use a significant containment dome, and their atomic fire, raging for two weeks, covered almost the whole of Europe in a radioactive cloud equivalent to four hundred Hiroshimas. The worst nuclear disaster in human history, then, turned out to be far less catastrophic than such other industrial horrors as the August 8, 1975, Banqiao Dam failure in China, which killed 171,000, or the December 2, 1984, Union Carbide pesticide plant leak outside Bhopal, India, which killed 3,787 and injured 558,125. UNSCEAR’s report concluded, “There has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure,” and anyone living there now “need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident.”

A number of people who have closely studied this tragedy are convinced that UNSCEAR and the Chernobyl Forum have grossly underestimated the effects of the disaster, but they have nowhere near the underlying research data to prove it, and considering the social chaos brought by the fall of the Soviet Union, it may be impossible to ever get it. In one example, physicist Bernard Cohen estimated,
“The sum of exposures [from Chernobyl] to people all over the world will eventually, after about fifty years, reach 60 billion millirems, enough to cause about sixteen thousand deaths.” Even if this were true, every year in the United States, around sixteen thousand people die just from the air pollution of coal-burning power plants.