Our Friend The Atom Turns On Us

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Whether it was guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki or greed on the part of companies in on the ground floor at the dawn of the nuclear age, America’s rush to turn a horrible reality into a wonderful opportunity is now slapping us in the face. 

Our reckless embrace of the friendly atom and the export of it abroad via the “Atoms for Peace” program has always been divorced from the dangerous reality of what we are really dealing with. But since 1945 there has been an amazing and concerted propaganda campaign to deny the dangers and pursue the promise of nuclear power.

The pioneers of the nuclear age, Einstein and Bohr understood from the beginning that the sudden release of nuclear energy, the bomb, was a scientific obscenity, but they had no illusions about the difficulties associated with a controlled fission reaction, nuclear power. 

Controlled, it the operative word.  And the father of the nuclear submarine, whose reactor was scaled up to make the first civilian nuclear power reactor, Admiral Rickover, never wanted nuclear power in the hands of civilians who he considered lacked the military discipline to handle the monster. To this day nuclear powered naval vessels do not enter the ports of large American cities.

With thousands of Japanese sealed inside their homes as clouds of radiation drift outside, we have little knowledge of what is actually going on at the site of the unfolding nuclear disaster at the Fukushima I reactor, then 3, then 2 and now 4.  Given the radiation levels, are workers still in control of what is left of the controls? 

What we have learned so far is not reassuring.  Fallout from number 2 reactor, the latest to explode, was caused by a rapid drop in water levels that exposed the core and led to a massive leak of radiation.  The plant’s owners, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) admitted the nuclear fuel rods were partially exposed because an engine-powered pump ran out of fuel.  This suggests either confusion or a lack of manpower on site, which, due to the levels of radiation exposure, might explain the unbelievable.

Yesterday I spoke with a leading researcher into the environmental and security impacts of nuclear technologies, Gordon Thompson.  He laid most of the blame at the utilities companies for cutting corners in the design and construction of these costly plants.  Apparently they could be built with containment that prevents meltdowns and a lesser example, the Europeans have filters on their venting pipes that would prevent the release of radioactive steam during emergencies. 

He also said that this disaster shows how vulnerable these plants are to malevolent intent, meaning terrorist attacks.  It turns out that Fukushima reactor 4; that was shut down for maintenance, had a fire in the pool storing spent fuel rods because it had dried up for reasons that are hard to understand.  Spent fuel rods are very nasty in terms of the concentration of radioactive nuclei and the rods take a long time to cool. 

Spent fuel rods sit in adjacent swimming pools for years, behind thin concrete walls with pumped water continuing to circulate around them.  There are reports that the swimming pool wall at reactor 4 was breached, perhaps by earthquake damage, and that led to the fire and the cloud of deadly radioactive smoke. 

This latest accident in the compounding and cascading disaster in Japan is the scenario that has often been cited as a potentially deliberate plan on the part of terrorists.  Anyone better trained than the Times Square terrorist or the jockstrap bomber could easily punch a hole in the pool by the 405 Freeway at the San Onofre nuclear plant south of here.  As it happens, our plants are protected by rent-a-cop security and they routinely fail “Red Team” mock attacks.  And as demonstrated in japan, if a natural disaster can shut down the back-up systems, it would not take a genius to cut power and sabotage generators and batteries.

But this does not stop our pathetic mainstream Press from parroting happy talk upbeat reports on the ongoing meltdown of our nuclear dreams.  The radiation the Japanese are getting is less than a chest X-ray we are breathlessly told.  The ratio of nuclear industry-owned talking heads to critics is about five to one, and if you were to make that “informed” critics, as opposed to ranting activists, it’s about ten to one. 

Meanwhile the apologists in the Press are digging their own grave, along with the nuclear industry.  Facts are tenacious and reality, no matter how inconvenient, eventually prevails.  By then we can only hope the planet has not been poisoned too much and we can turn the lights on without turning off our future.