The Age of Radiance (69 page)

Nuclear as a concept may have an aura as sinister as cancer, but it includes a number of other inarguably benevolent qualities for humankind—beginning with the radiant isotope. Following in the medical legacies of Marie and Irène Curie, Frédéric Joliot, and tracer creator George de Hevesy, Oak Ridge sent its first radioisotopes to St. Louis’s Barnard Free Skin and
Cancer Hospital in 1946. Today we have an enormous array of artificially created elements used for diagnosis and treatment, from yttrium-90 for prostate cancer, to calcium-47 for bones, carbon-11 for positron-emission tomography (PET) scans, actinium-225 for leukemia, iron-59 for spleens, rhenium-188 for arteries, erbium-169 for arthritis, and various radioactive iodines, which can both image problems in the thyroid gland and kill its tumors. In the United States, around 17 million people annually are diagnosed or treated with nuclear medicine. Ninety percent of the field is imaging, such as the CT or CAT scan, a form of X-ray; the PET scan, which uses tracers of radioactive sugar; myocardial perfusion, which uses two different radioisotopes for test and stress to analyze artery disease; and specialized scans for bones, livers, lungs, brains, gallbladders, thyroids, and pulmonary embolisms. While X-rays, CTs, and PETs reveal various aspects of human anatomy, nuclear tracer imaging unveils the actual physiological workings of the body. When radioactive iodine concentrates in the thyroid, or phosphorus in the bones, or cobalt in the liver, they reveal processes. Thirty-one radiopharmaceuticals are based on just one isotope engineered by Glenn Seaborg and Emilio Segrè, technetium-99, used against tumors and for imaging the brain, lungs, liver, skeleton, and blood. The technetium variations are especially appealing as it is a product of nuclear power plant waste and has a half-life of six hours, briskly turning wholly inert and harmless. Over 20 million people a year are treated with it in some way.

Tracers can follow the metabolism of everything from fats in people to fertilizers in plants and are even used in the petroleum industry to know which crude belongs to which company in a shared pipe. Americium-241 detects the early stages of a fire and is the essential ingredient in modern smoke detectors, while the gamma rays of cobalt-60 are used to kill bacterial and fungal pests (such as trichina and salmonella) in pork, chicken, dried vegetables, herbs, and spices. When an organism dies, it stops consuming carbon, either through digestion or photosynthesis. Some of that carbon, known as carbon-14, is radioactive, with a half-life that can be measured, the famous carbon dating of archaeologists and crime scene investigators. Nickel-63 is so long lasting it made its way into pacemaker batteries, while for over fifty years NASA has used the hot decay of plutonium-238 to generate electricity for its satellites.

Unfortunately our two-faced god is manifest here—patient overdose from X-rays, CT scans, and everything else in the radiant medical arsenal poses a far greater health peril than any atomic plant meltdown. The research of David Brenner, the director of Columbia University’s Center
for Radiological Research, shows that radioactive procedures, their technicians, and their equipment are not as monitored as the public believes, and that children getting CT scans have increased cancer rates. Brenner told Congress that Homeland Security’s overuse of whole-body X-ray security scanners will result in a hundred more Americans getting cancer every year; his and other protests forced the federal government to replace its imaging machines powered by X-rays with ones served by electromagnetics.

Conversely, even in the wake of the rabid Cold War bomb tests that poisoned the bodies of everyone born between 1951 and 1958, there’s some Janus good news. For decades, doctors thought that the cells of the adult heart were different from all other cells in that they lasted a lifetime and never died and regenerated. Swedish scientist Jonas Frisén then realized that a significant percentage of the world’s population, contaminated by the Cold War’s nuclear tests, had been stamped by carbon-14, and this stamp could reveal the age of heart cells. From his research Frisén determined that in each of us “the heart muscle cells will be a mosaic: some that have been with that person from birth, and there will be new cells that have replaced others that have been lost”—which sounds to me like a resonant fable about the emotional toil of a human heart. The same nuclear-test stamp is starting to be used to save elephants, for it can separate legal African ivory from poached.

Finally, natural radioactivity is what keeps us warm. Around half of the earth’s inner heat of forty-four terawatts comes from the decay of uranium, thorium, and their ilk, with the rest either having been trapped in the planet’s molten lava core since its birth, or caused by something yet unknown . . . something to be discovered by future geologists. Since it takes millions of years for these elements to half-live their way to nonradiant stability, we’ll keep having a warm planet for a bit—the earth cools at a rate of 100°F every half a billion years. From that subterranean nuclear heat a future engineer might devise a source for electrical power more promising than fusion. Our planet’s all-natural nuclear force, after all, is so massive that it powers the migration of the continents, and the quakes of the crust.

The Age of Radiance
’s beginnings showcased an idea of Marie Curie’s, “Now is the time to understand more, so that we fear less.” Clearly the world has moved past the Cold War’s duck-and-cover apocalyptic terrors, but we still fall into bouts of hysteria when an atomic utility fails, while devoutly maintaining a plethora of myths about nuclear science. The future of radiance must be understanding more to fear less.

Can we ever learn to believe that atomic bombs are just another kind of
weapon, and that nuclear plants are just another form of utility, instead of imbuing each with mythic powers? Can we learn to accept as common sense that the same radiation that kills diseased cancer cells also kills healthy cells, producing the side effects of nausea and baldness? Or that a meltdown every decade or so is the price paid to save three hundred thousand lives every year from infection by petrochemical effluvia? Or that the same process that produces this clean energy can also be turned by a rogue state into weaponry?

Enrico Fermi late in life said that the
“history of science and technology has consistently taught us that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or later led to technical and industrial applications that have revolutionized our way of life. It seems to me improbable that this effort to get at the structure of matter should be an exception to this rule. What is less certain, and what we all fervently hope, is that man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers that he acquires over nature.”

After seven decades, it is humankind’s responsibility to use the two-faced miracle discovered by Curie, Meitner, Fermi, Szilard, Teller, and Ulam correctly, not turn away from it in fear, superstition, and ignorance. It is time to enter a post–Atomic Age, an era where the fearful products of nuclear science are minimized, and its beneficence maximized.

It is time to learn to live with blessed curses.