About sixty years ago the first atomic test brought to fruition Roosevelt's nuclear program. Posthaste, a group of Manhattan Project scientists urged policies of non-proliferation. The scientists must have been jubilant about their technological success, so the turnaround to hand-waving caution, was remarkable. It was almost as thought they had thought ahead of time about the dangers of the science but were driven to do the experiments anyway. Needless to say, once unleashed, the nuclear technology thrived. Weapons and civilian applications of nuclear energy proliferated despite the scientists' caution.
Then came Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Twenty years ago an explosion and fire at the Chernobyl power plant in the Soviet Union unnerved a world that had grown accustomed to relying on nuclear energy. Through the Cold War, people got used to living with the alarms of air raids, but the ultimate containment of nuclear weapons. The accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania had given ample warning of the type of accident that could happen, but Chernobyl truly frightened the world. In May 19, 1986, Time magazine reported on the wide repercussions of the accident:
- In Italy livestock that arrived from Eastern Europe were returned because radiation levels in the animals tested too high.
- In Japan milk and water were found to be contaminated.
- In Ottawa rain was found to have six time the amount of radiation than is safe for drinking water
In the US traces of radiation were found in ther Pacific Northwest and New York. People were concerned about drinking water. Donald Macdonald, Acting Assistant Secretary of health said, in what appears to be a more candid era: "I would drink it, and that's what the guidelines say, but I would prefer not to drink it."
A Financial Times reporter last week took a "holiday" in Chernobyl, where the tour business now apparently thrives. The author choice of vacation was paradoxical, perhaps a flurry of "publish and perish". He sallied forth:
"I paid $280 for a day with one personal guide and a second, official guide in the exclusion zone, which gave us freedom to roam pretty much where we wanted..." [and] "another $20 on what is locally known as "honey" - bottles of spirits and boxes of chocolates to ease the way through the several checkpoints on the way to the site."
The scene he describes is hardly inviting (and I am an adventurous traveler): "radioactive scrap yards where hundreds of vehicles [trucks, helicopters] that were used in the clean-up were parked in neat rows then abandoned". "Rust and corrosion [seeps]", from the hulking Reactor Four's "cracked and unstable" sarcophagus. Hundreds of workers still worker there for "two hours at a time", although the hundreds of so-called "bio-robots" who were hired to clean up after the initial disaster, have come and gone. Tour guides carry Geiger counters.
Nuclear energy has a wide array of supporters from business and science sectors. It's promoted as clean, cheap energy. The public is growing less wary of nuclear alternatives; with today's oil shortages, yesterday's nuclear catastrophes are easily forgotten.
In the decades since the last nuclear incident, the public has forgotten the terror of the accident. People are increasingly swayed by businesses that see opportunity in softening public opinion. To aid the perceptions of safety, some papers are reporting an abundance of wildlife inhabiting areas close to Chernobyl, as if the arrival of stray dogs and flower's in a radiation zone should stay our concerns about the renewed enthusiasm for all things nuclear.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a report last autumn, which said that deaths from Chernobyl would number about 4,000. However, Greenpeace writes in a recent report that that number is highly underestimated. The Greenpeace data places the actual numbers at 270,000 cancers and 93,000 fatal cancer cases directly caused by Chernobyl. On April 18, 2006: Greenpeace published "Chernobyl Catastrophe Consequences on Human Health". The report refutes the IAEA, and accuses it of "whitewashing" the data to promote nuclear energy. Among other things, Greenpeace faults the IAEA with deriving data from limited subsets of effected populations. One criticism is that IAEA notes that 212 of 72,000 clean-up personel died, but Greenpeace says that the more accurate number of "liquidators" or "bio-robots", was 600,000. Accurate data sets are essential for making public policy and if Greenpeace' contention is true, such data manipulation is unconscionable.
Nuclear technology continues to be propagated for political aims. The U.S. recently agreed with India to supply that country with enriched uranium for their domestic energy program. Congess has yet to debat the deal, but commentators expect it to go through. As nuclear energy is considered, so is nuclear war. Alarmingly, the U.S. is rumored to be eying Iran as a potential nuclear target, a report that the administration fervidly denies.Iran announced with fanfare yesterday that they produced enriched uranium which worries members or the U.S. Congress because India and Iran are embarking joint naval exercises in India.
Nuclear technology has the potential to be useful as well as lethal. Although scientists like those on the Manhattan Project, as well as politicians are rarely chastised when they only remember to criticize the repercussions of their experiments after the fact, we should remember the lessons we all learned - us and them. We understand very clearly dangers inherent with this technology and we have time now, before the clean-up, to consider the best ways to employ our power.
