Disturbing

 
The finale of "Dr. Strangelove" -- Vera Lynn singing, nuclear weapons exploding

We spent the day in town yesterday, starting at a New Mexico PBS Science Cafe at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, a place we've been meaning to visit for years but never have.

The topic was the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi some two years ago, and the speaker was Dr. Ronald Knief, Nuclear Engineer and Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories (pdf link) and Associate Professor of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering at the University of New Mexico.

Yes, well.

He's been at most of the major meltdowns in the last few decades, including Three Mile Island -- where he said he spent ten years -- as well as Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Just lucky, I guess.

He explained the process of nuclear power generation very well, though I suspect that most of those in attendance knew how a reactor worked as well as he did as there are a lot of attendees at these things from the nuclear labs and facilities that dot the area. You can't truly escape Nuclear Science culture here in New Mexico, any more than you can escape the Spanish,  Indians and the artists, and the truth is, we don't try.

Having lived many years in California in the shadow of a nuclear power plant which was the twin of Three Mile Island -- and which ran into so many malfunctions and shutdowns and whatnot that eventually voters decided to shut it down permanently and decommission it, much to the relief of residents, and (perhaps surprisingly) much to the relief of their pocketbooks in the end  -- I was fairly familiar with operations of a Three Mile Island kind of reactor, but Fukushima Daiishi was not designed like the reactors at Three Mile Island.

Instead, the Japanese plants were like the Oyster Creek reactor in New Jersey. It appears from the schematics that these are much more complicated plants than those at Three Mile Island (or Rancho Seco), and the Oyster Creek model appears to be more obviously -- I mean really obviously -- dangerous. Many more things can go wrong, and once they go wrong, whoopsy!

Yet our speaker yesterday, while not making light at all of what happened at Fukushima, didn't seem to see it that way. With all the redundant safety precautions built into the plant, and with the unexpected severity of the earthquake and tsunami, the plant had performed very well under the circumstances, the explosions that occurred were "just as designed", and the release of toxic nuclear material was minor. The only plant workers who died, he said, died as a result of the tsunami, not from release of radiation or toxic nuclear material. More people, he said, were at risk in the evacuation than from the plant itself, and up to a thousand actually died in the evacuation, he said. Given the 25,000 dead and missing from the natural disaster, the losses due to the nuclear accident were minor. Perspective, people!

He showed charts and graphs that demonstrated just how minor the release of nuclear radiation and toxic material was and is, and how workers at the plant have never really been exposed to high levels of radiation, as they were, for example, at Chernobyl.  The Chernobyl meltdown was orders of magnitude worse, he said.

Most of those in attendance seemed to accept his assessment -- he is a world-renown nuclear expert after all -- but some were quite disturbed by it. Or rather, by the implications of it. I asked at one point whether -- since according to him there are no health risks from the destruction of the plant -- whether the residents of Fukushima Town and the rest of the evacuation area had been allowed to return. He danced around an answer, saying he thought maybe people had been allowed to return to their homes in the outer evacuation area, but he wasn't sure, and that in Fukushima and closer in, he thought people were allowed day trips in -- to get their things and whatnot -- but he didn't think they were allowed to stay. I asked if he could estimate how close to the plant people are allowed to live; he said he couldn't. One other attendee said she thought it was 20 kilometers (12 miles). He didn't dispute it. In other words, the evacuation zone is still in effect, despite the lack of ill-effects from radiation and contamination -- according to Knief -- due to the Fukushima disaster.

He said it would easily take 40 years or more to complete the clean up of the plant, while clean up at Three Mile Island "only" took ten years. This is rather striking. Of course we were told there was no significant radiation or toxic leak from Three Mile Island, either, yet it took ten years to clean it up. We are now being told that there have been no significant radiation or toxic leaks from Fukushima Daiichi, and it will take a minimum of 40 years to clean it up.

Great.

Another attendee said (all quotes in this post are paraphrases), "You've pointed out that 'nobody could have anticipated' the severity of the earthquake or the height of the tsunami, yet any graduate student could easily have done so given the fault lines near the site and the history of tsunamis in Japan, some of which have been a good deal higher than the one that overwhelmed Fukushima. Any graduate student could have predicted what happened. Yet the government of Japan and the experts at TEPCO couldn't?"

Knief said, "They might have, I suppose, but they didn't. They designed for the worst they thought would happen, and they were wrong. But their design worked very well until the plant lost power, and there was nothing they could do about that..."

According to what we were told, the plant lost power because the reactors themselves shut down automatically when the earthquake hit. The transmission lines for power from other sources were knocked out by the earthquake as well. The diesel generators at the Fukushima site kicked in as they were supposed to when the power went off, but within half an hour, the unexpectedly high tsunami hit, swamping the generators and knocking them out of commission. The final back up was a series of storage batteries that only had a few hours' charge, and there was no way to recharge them. Once the batteries were exhausted, there was no power at the plant. A "station blackout." TEPCO attempted to get new generators to the plant but was unable to due to traffic and destroyed roads. The tsunami had also washed away the fuel storage tanks for the generators on site. So even if they had been able to get the generators to Fukushima, there was no fuel for them and they would have been useless.

So things followed their natural course. Three of the reactor containment buildings exploded -- as they were designed to do we were told -- due to the build up of hydrogen vented into the containments from the reactors as they heated up from lack of cooling water. One of the reactors' cooling water toruses was breached and contaminated water was released into a holding tank below. There was a fire in a few of the spent fuel rod tanks, but the fire was contained, and there were few/no toxic releases. On and on.

The plant is in cold shutdown now and clean up is proceeding. Nothing to see here, please carry on for the next 40 years or so...

All the other nuclear plants in Japan have been shut down as well, and alternative fuels are proving to be very expensive, so he thinks that the undamaged nuclear plants should be returned to service; there may be a slight risk, but there is a trade-off in that the cost of running electric plants on natural gas or oil is so high that the risk may be worth it.

One attendee questioned the validity of Knief's charts and graphs showing no health risk at all from radiation and toxic materials released from Fukushima. "Has the media been hyping the situation over there?"  He said, "Yes, it has." "How?" she asked. The response was essentially that there have been no adverse affects to the health of individuals near the plant, and that experience from other instances of radiation exposure (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he said are really the driving psychological events behind the hype and the fear of the Fukushima event) indicates that a certain level of low dosage radiation could be healthful.

By this point, some people were getting pretty annoyed, so the open discussion was shut down, but Knief stuck around for private consultation.

We took the opportunity to tour the museum, which we found to be in its own way quite as annoying as the Science Cafe speaker. Well, "annoying," is that the right word?

Perhaps not. Evocative. Aggravating. Propagandistic. Stomach churning.

Anyone who grew up under the threat of instant incineration from nuclear annihilation like we did is going to be... moved, and quite possibly sickened, by the accumulations and displays of bombs (at least their casings) and missiles and planes and all the other panoply and mechanisms of nuclear war housed at the museum.

Worse, at least in my view, was the justification of it.

"We did these things and had these weapons because of the threat from the Soviet Union, and anyone who questioned that threat (such as J. Robert Oppenheimer) deserved what they got. Shut up."

I'd seen many B-52s in flight and on the ground in my time (you couldn't escape them living near an Air Force base, especially during the Vietnam War) but I'd never been that close to one. The one on display is set up as if it were being loaded with nuclear tipped guided missiles, and when you think about it, you can't help shuddering.

In the background by the fence it looked like there was a bomb casing such as the one Slim Pickens rode down in "Dr. Strangelove."

There were all kinds of missiles on display including put-together and dismantled ICBMs, which again, I'd never seen close up. There were random parts of a B-47 stacked up on the ground, and the conning tower of a nuclear submarine which they are raising money to restore and put on display. There was the obligatory nuclear cannon. There was a B-29 next to the B-52, looking quite diminutive and modest by comparison.

Every size and type of nuclear device, from The Gadget of 1945 and the Trinity test, to the tiniest hand-carried bomb (57 pounds, launchable from a bazooka-like apparatus), to the most hideous looking hydrogen device, to a couple of the "broken arrows" -- nuclear weapons, whoops!, lost from planes or otherwise gone astray... was on display, and in a corner was an old teevee playing a loop of Civil Defense films from the 1950's, in a mock up of a fallout shelter from the era, stocked with barrels of "Drinking Water", and cans of "Food". Only one cot, though.

Yes, well.

Propaganda posters, nuclear cars, trains, planes, and nuclear medicine were all highlighted. In the "lounge" -- decorated with Mid-Century furniture and other items -- was playing one of the Frontline videos of the Fukushima disaster. How about that.

I noted that young adults wanted to have their pictures taken with the bombs, especially the Fat Man and Little Boy mockups. Older people were... either quiet or trying to laugh off what they were seeing.

Was it real? Did we really go through this?

Trinity Site functions as a memorial. There isn't even a hint of celebration there. When people approach the site in a celebratory or expectant mood, they leave in solemnity bordering on depression. As they think about what began there, there is no escape from the psychological horror of it.

Despite his obvious enthusiasm for nuclear power Knief did seem to recognize the severe psychological effects of the various disasters that have accompanied the development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and to his credit, he didn't try to dismiss them.

Then we went to yet another literary event...

[I'll try to provide some links later... right now, we're getting ready for another literary afternoon...]

The Future of Nuclear Power -- Too Cheap To Meter Returns

Boy, this takes me back: Thorium

If you were a boy in the 1950's -- or in some cases a girl -- dreaming of the Future, a Future of Abundance and Peace and Technological Marvels, then nuclear power was where it was at, and according to all the news, nukes would eventually be powerful and small and common enough to power airplanes and refrigerators and maybe even bicycles, who knows.

Thorium in the '50's was marketed as the nuclear fuel of the Future, and the small scale, efficient reactors that would run on thorium were considered The Latest Thing. At the time, the notion that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter" was still in vogue, and the idea of truly inexpensive and universally available electricity was still considered both exotic and desirable.

We've come a long way since then.

Nuclear power turned out to be neither cheap nor easy to obtain; the reactors themselves are simple enough to be sure. The complexity is in their safe operation which has proved to be elusive no matter what safeguards are installed. (To say that every reactor that has melted down or exploded was designed and built wrong is a tautology. Of course they were. That's not the issue. The issue is that these kinds of design and construction errors are, for some reason, endemic to the field.) And of course there's the storage and disposal of nuclear waste issue, something that wasn't even on the radar 50 or 60 years ago when Our Nuclear Future was being planned for us.

For whatever reason, the nuclear power industry has been plagued with an inability to think through the basics of what it is they are trying to do and what the consequences of doing it on the one hand and failure to do it safely and responsibly on the other are likely to be. This problem is not unique to the nuclear power industry, but the consequences of fault and failure in the nuclear field are much greater for all of us than is the case in most other major industries.

The nuclear industry (both for war and peace) is a product of World War II, and that, I believe, is where the intrinsic problem lies. There was a certain way of doing things during wartime back then that is frankly appalling in a contemporary context. It was not an era where safety was emphasized. It was, after all, war. And there are casualties in war, many casualties, whole peoples and nations turned into casualties, and that's just the way it was. Producing for war was a matter of scale and speed, not worker safety -- or warfighter safety for that matter. "Git 'er done," was not invented in the Bushevik era. It was the way that wartime economies and societies were organized.

Both of my parents were in the military during WWII, and both regarded it as a natural thing. "Git 'er done." They had their jobs to do and they did them rather unthinkingly. I've apparently misplaced it, but I've read a copy of my father's military record, much of which consists of reports he wrote for his superiors, and I'm struck by a number of things: he was apparently fully into his assignments, so much so that he wrote detailed, specific narratives of his findings that are filled with objectivity and extraordinary energy. He was looking into everything he was assigned and more and reporting to the War Reconversion Board his recommendations for proceeding with contract termination and so forth, pretty cut and dried you would think. But it was clearly an adventure for him given what wrote.

That sense of adventure fills practically everything I've come across about WWII that was produced during the war. And adventure as well as stealth was very much a part of the nuclear weapons saga of World War II.

There's an address in Santa Fe just down the street from the Governor's Palace. It's old and has gone from decrepitude to renovation and back again several times. It was the site of J. Robert Oppenheimer's Santa Fe office and served as the staff entrance for the engineers and physicists assembling to take part in the Manhattan Project some distance away in Los Alamos.

It was an adventure which Oppenheimer and others have written about with great eloquence and not a little dread.

I've been by the site and have of course been to the Trinity Site to pay my respects... but those aspects were just the beginning of the Nuclear Future as determined by Victory in World War II.

Transformation of nuclear energy from use as a weapon of war and annihilation to use as a power source for the benefit of mankind was the Futurist marketing plan, but just what happened is still somewhat mystifying.

There was an arms race, for example, between the United States and the Soviet Union to produce an abundance of nuclear weapons so as to be able to assure one another of mutual annihilation. This was the threat Americans and Soviet children lived under practically every day of their lives from the end of WWII until... when? Has that existential threat ever gone away?

At the same time, the nuclear sword was being beaten into plowshares in both the United States and the Soviet Union, with the advent of nuclear power generation in the mid-fifties. There were nuclear reactors popping up everywhere, from nearby riverbanks to submarines and ships at sea. The N. S. Savannah was the first commercial nuclear powered ship, started in 1959, launched in 1961 as a showcase. But there are dozens of nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers plying the seas today. The technology is well understood. It's simply too expensive for civilian use.

It was assumed, however, that nuclear energy generation would be far cheaper than traditional coal or oil or natural gas fired plants, and that it would be 'clean energy' having practically no negative environmental consequences.

Well, that didn't work out so well, either.

Comes now Thorium.

Or Here It Comes Again.

Thorium has always been more abundant and easier to work with than uranium as a nuclear fuel; that's never been the issue. The issue is the same no matter what the nuclear fuel is: what will you do with the waste, and what if something goes wrong?  And if something goes wrong, what are the consequences? Be honest now.

Things go wrong; the problems of nuclear power have never been thought through, and no matter how much we hear "we can figure it out," the inherent problems haven't been figured out in more than 60 years of trying. Oh, maybe it's not quite as bad as it once was, but that's not saying much.

Nuclear energy has become almost a cargo cult, a realm of dreamers and enthusiasts. Maybe it was always like that, I don't know. But I know I was happy as could be when the local nuclear power plant, which was draining the public utility of resources and money, was finally decommissioned. Of course the fuel rods and waste are still stored at the site in pools; and they say that it will have to stay there until a permanent waste disposal site is found. Which is not likely to happen. Ever. Because there is no place to store this shit that is actually, permanently, safe. That's just the way it is.