A Nuclear Legacy

Things keep getting worse at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. The latest at the moment is that the last of the workers there--struggling to stay ahead of catastrophe at four separate reactors, and maybe six--have been evacuated because of radiation. That suggests that even worse is to come.

American TV reporters are in Japan now, and many are complaining that they aren't getting good information, and that the government is being vague at best. Slow or incorrect information also characterized the Three Mile Island accident (this one has already displaced it as the second worst in history.) A lot of the suspicion of government and scientists can be traced back to the beginning of the nuclear age, when officials and their pet scientists were evasive and misleading about the effects of nuclear radiation, and they also blatantly lied.

One of the ace liars was that guy up there, General Leslie Grove, who ran herd over the U.S. nuclear weapons program. As it happens, his worst lies were about the Japanese. When accounts of radiation effects in Hiroshima first surfaced, and for a long time afterwards, Grove led the U.S. effort to deny any such effects, even to calling them Japanese propaganda, and questioning the patriotism of anyone who took them seriously. Then when fallout from a secret U.S. hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific sickened some Japanese fishermen, the U.S. angrily denied this as well.

This legacy became part of things nuclear, and a source of general mistrust. So even now, when experts are assuring the U.S. West Coast that people here are in no conceivable danger from anything that might happen to the power plants in Japan, there may be skepticism at least. Still, those of us who have been around awhile have already taken in more radiation from numerous atomic bomb tests in the 50s and early 60s than we're likely to get here now. Our government fought knowledge of that, and of the thousands of cancers and other diseases (especially in Nevada where the tests were, and downwind in Utah) that resulted.

In terms of information, apart from checking various sources and seeing where they agree and where they differ, I've found a prime source. CNN calls itself the most trusted name in news, and while they spend a lot of time on this, it's uneven. In terms of credibility and clarity on this story, for me the most trusted name in news is Rachel Maddow.

One reason I suspect that the nuclear industry now likes to keep quiet is that actual information reveals (or reminds us) the scary and dangerous combination of mind-boggling complexity and high degree of danger involved. So when something goes wrong, and cascades into multiple failures, the consequences can be extreme. If people understood this, I wonder if they'd think that a nuclear power plant with six reactors on one site was worth the risk.

Consider just the matter of spent fuel rods, which some suspect is a big problem now at that plant. They must be cooled by a continous flow of water--for eight to ten years. All that's necessary for a huge release of radiation is if the water gets turned off. And this is apart from the instant catastrophe of a live nuclear reactor accident, or the slower but much longer danger of radioactive waste, which is dangerous for centuries.

Of course, people often don't want to know too much--they just want their electricity as cheaply as possible. They don't want to think too much about what goes into any of this--the consequences of mining and burning coal, of drilling and burning oil--and least of all, the monster of the 20th century called nuclear.

This is a brutal moment. It seems inconceivable that once again the Japanese people may be the primary victims of nuclear radiation. Especially after the tsunami made that part of Japan look like Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. Now there are more people at risk, and a more interconnected world and global economy. That means on the plus side that the Japanese won't face this alone. But it also means that everyone is going to share in some aspect of this catastrophe. Here in the 21st century, when our most potent threat is Climate Crisis, we may first knowingly feel the effects of that scourge of the 20th century, atomic fission.