Open Writing

The other night I watched a documentary about the conditions in Chernobyl, Ukraine, 20 years after the melt-down of a nuclear reactor there. It was more than just casual interest. Over the course of my career I have worked in conventional and nuclear powered generating stations, and have read many reports about the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, and have watched on TV the subsequent Congressional inquiry into that incident.

In contrast, the Chernobyl accident was shrouded in Cold War obfuscation and denial, so I was learning about the real story for the first time. Not least, I was curious about the place my wife’s family left to come to the USA in the 1920’s. The documentary was extremely well done, filmed in black and white with minimal interjection by the maker. The lack of color and the sparse dialog served to emphasize the stark, silent desolation of a ghost town in a winter setting. Regrettably, the typeface of the film credits was so miniscule and moved so fast that I’m unable to include any attributes.

The film shocked me on several different levels. I already knew the incident was a major disaster with far reaching consequences, but what I was seeing was no Hiroshima with a destroyed city and thousands dead. Here there was no landscape of rubble with the stark skeleton of the domed Industrial Promotion Hall standing as a symbol. The immediate death toll at Chernobyl was in the dozens. Since then of course, untold others have died of the after effects of irradiation. Other than natural decay and nature’s incursions, the town stands as it was 20 years ago.

Yet, as I learned, the intensity of the radiation during the explosion at Chernobyl, and the high radiation levels obtaining today, were and are far more severe than Hiroshima. Sixteen hundred vehicles and a number of helicopters used in the sealing of the reactor are still too radioactive to remove from the compound where they are stored. The Pripyat river, which flows into the Dnieper, and thence into the Black Sea, is still giving up its radio active silt, and the fish in the river are inedible. Hiroshima is rebuilt, but the prevailing feeling is that it will never be safe to re-inhabit Chernobyl.

The other impact on my sensibilities was to discover how the Ukrainian government has more or less turned its back on the survivors. After the initial evacuation and resettling, the people have been left to fend for themselves. Some 19 families, mostly old and often sick, have returned to the 30KM diameter forbidden “Zone.” There they live at subsistence levels, growing their own food, carrying their water from the polluted and often frozen-over river. Without electricity, telephones or fuel, they live within a few kilometers of another, functioning reactor.

One of the reasons why the old Soviet Republic was so opposed to disclosing the Chernobyl incident, or to seek outside help, was that they desperately needed the power that the reactors produced. They knew that the reactor designs were flawed and that accidents were likely to happen, but they could not deal with the consequences of closing them.

It’s ironic that the twentieth anniversary of this terrible accident coincides with the onset of a world crisis in the availability of conventional fuels. The noise that this is making almost drowned out Chernobyl’s anniversary. I came to America in the middle of the last fuel crisis in the mid-seventies. According to many Americans, that shortage was contrived as a means to jack up the price of petroleum, and there is some talk of this in today’s crisis. Contrived or not, it spawned a whole industry for the research and development of fuel-saving processes, and alternative means of generating electricity.

Government departments were created, and billions of dollars were spent on scores of experimental projects. These included the underground gasification of coal, sugar cane alcohol additives for gasoline, solar power, co-generation, smaller cars, the de-sulfurisation of high sulfur coal for use in generating stations, safer nuclear power, tidal generators, and on and on and on. I worked with many of these projects, and, other than smaller cars, which the US auto industry has never been any good at, any of the others could have been technologically feasible. But once the ready supply of oil resumed, the development financing disappeared, government departments were disbanded and most of the technology was discarded.

We’re about to jump on the same whirligig once more, except that this time the flow of affordable oil will not be restored. Anyone with an ounce of sense knows that the supply of oil is not limitless, and that it will always be a pawn in world politics. Acknowledging those facts makes a search for alternative sources of energy imperative. Many of the current proposals still depend on some oil – hybrid cars, additives to increase the efficiency of gasoline, more efficient internal combustion engines etc., so there is a real need to break new ground.

I personally believe that some version of nuclear power is a logical step in dealing with the diminishment of conventional fuels. My view is that incidents like Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl, and other, less tragic, nuclear plant failures, stem from the gulf that exists between the scientists and technologists who propose the principles involved, and the industries and government bodies that implement them.

It takes five years to build a power generating station of any kind. With such contingencies as environmentalist intervention, local authority objections and the like, it can take longer. Yet in the past, there has been no provision to allow the design to be modified in the light of new technology, which can be significant over a 5 year period. One of the factors contributing to the Three Mile Island accident, according to the findings of the Congressional inquiry, was that the instrumentation and controls were already outdated at the outset of the construction.

The “stop/go” history of nuclear power generation also contributes its own risk factors. Companies are formed and disbanded. Key designers and technologists find alternative employment, design data is abandoned and invaluable expertise is lost. If there is ever any likelihood of returning to some form of nuclear power generation, these pitfalls must be avoided, and I’m sure they can be.

The legacy of Chernobyl is its sick and displaced people; a desolate, uninhabitable ghost town, and an untenable landscape. A terrible price to pay for inadequate engineering and poorly trained operators. The message is that it didn’t have to be that way, and that the fault lies not in the use of nuclear fusion for power generation, but in the way we go about it. Simply put, it’s just another technological mountain to climb, like landing on the Moon, or sending robots to Mars. If we want to we can do it; safely, and for the good of mankind.

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