Serhii Plokhy
W.W. Norton & Company
What do the six most significant nuclear accidents since the dawn of the age of atomic energy have in common? Ukrainian and American scholar Serhii Plokhy is his riveting and at times terrifying new book, “Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters,” makes a compelling case that from the 1950s and American weapons testing in the Pacific to 2011 and the Fukushima explosions in Japan, the characteristic they all share is initial official reaction to deny, cover up, play down, and misdirect the lessons to be learned. In his words, the pattern was “to hide information and, later, to spin or distort it”
I write this as my own background colors my reading of this splendid and, in my view, balanced view of the world’s history of nuclear power accidents, both military and civilian. Plokhy in 2007 was named the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard. Since 2013, he has served as the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, where he leads a group of scholars working on MAPA: The Digital Atlas of Ukraine, an online, GIS-based project.
Plokhy has written extensively about Ukraine and Russia, eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union won the 2015 Lionel Gelber Prize for the world’s best non-fiction book in English on global issues, and the 2015 Pushkin House (London, UK) Russian Book Prize. Chernobyl won the 2018 Baillie Gifford Prize (formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize).
I covered TMI from Washington and Harrisburg and nothing Plokhy writes strikes me as false or misinterpreted. I covered Chernobyl entirely from Washington (and was the first to report, based on a Department of Energy on-the-record source who had traveled to Russia and toured the Leningrad RBMK plant, that the design had a positive void coefficient of reactivity and was subject to xenon instability). Again, he was spot on (and wrote an earlier book entirely about the multiunit plant in his original homeland).
The book deals, in chronological order, first with military accidents: the 1954 Castle Bravo test of the first hydrogen fusion bomb in the Marshall Islands, where miscalculations about yield, weather, and fallout forced evacuations, radiation-induced illness, and damaged the U.S. relationship with Japan over exposure to a fishing boat the Navy failed to discover in the downwind ocean; Britain’s 1957 Windscale fiasco as the government, pushing to produce weapons-grade plutonium in order to protect its major-power delusion and ignored warnings about what can happen to graphite moderator, causing a major fire and evacuations; the Soviet Union’s catastrophic 1957 Kyshtym explosion.
And on the atoms for peace side, the 1979 Three Mile Island unit 2 meltdown; the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe; and the 2011 Fukushima multiple explosions.
The book’s final judgment is neither favorable to the nuclear industry nor to the technology, including as a climate change panacea. “Many of the political, economic, social, and cultural factors that led to the accidents of the past are still with us today, making the nuclear industry vulnerable to repeating the old mistakes and new and unexpected ways. And any new accidents are certain to create new antinuclear mobilization. While major accidents are always local and occur within particular national jurisdictions, their consequences are invariably international.”
But he does not advocate shutting down operation plants, but increased “security and safety of rapidly aging nuclear power plants….We cannot afford to lose the more than 10 percent of world electricity produced with little or no carbon emission and fill the gap with fossil fuels that will create more greenhouse gases. Nor can we abandon the industry to its current state of economic hardship, because that would mean inviting the next accident sooner rather than later.”
–Kennedy Maize
Twitter (kennedymaize)