It only struck to me today, while watching a documentary about the Soviet nuclear disaster at Kyshtym, that I was born five days after what was at the time the world's worst-ever nuclear disaster - and six days before what was at the time the second-worst-ever nuclear disaster - the fire at the British nuclear plant at Windscale.
Framed by these two nuclear disasters, my birth on 4 October 1957 actually coincided with the dawn of the Space Age. This was a fact made known to me in earliest childhood, that I was born with the launch of Sputnik I, the world's first satellite to be sent into earth's orbit.
The Kyshtym disaster happened at a nuclear-weapons production plant near Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, on 29 September 1957. It was followed just 11 days later by radioactive fire at the Windscale nuclear site in Cumbria, north-west England, on 10 October 1957, also engaged in the production of fissile material for making atomic bombs.
Over time, Kyshtym and Windscale have been relegated to third and fourth place respectively after Chernobyl in April 1986 and Fukushima in March 2011 - list of top ten nuclear disasters here.
The USSR suppressed all news of the Kyshtym disaster; the truth only leaked out in 1976 to finally be declassified in 1989. Although the Windscale reactor fire did make it into the British media at the time, the news was censored before publication, and the full official report about the disaster was not made public for 30 years.
Momentous times, fraught with danger and anxiety. As a child, my mother would tell me about her worries for my health, how she avoided drinking milk while wet-nursing me, and how we'd stay indoors whenever the wind was blowing from the north-west.
Yet for Soviet citizens living downwind of Kyshtym, unaware of the hard rain that's gonna fall, prospects were far worse. Localised clusters of leukaemia and lung cancers and birth defects were not connected to the incident for decades - simply because it never officially happened - even though up to 10,000 people had to be hurriedly evacuated from the immediate vicinity of the plant with no reason given for their sudden resettlement.
In the 77 years since the first A-bomb was tested in Trinity, New Mexico, mankind has got used to living with the threat of nuclear war and nuclear disaster. We tend to get blasé about it, until someone (currently Putin, earlier Khrushchev and Kennedy) remind us of the sword of Damocles dangling over our heads.
Just last week, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its iconic Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight - the nearest it's ever come to the witching hour. First created in 1947 when midnight was seven minutes away, the Doomsday Clock has fluctuated to and fro (the furthest from midnight being in 1991 at the end of the Cold War when the Soviet Union collapsed - then it stood at 17 minutes to midnight). It had been 100 seconds away last January...
Our nuclear energy comes exclusively from the fission of heavy atoms such as uranium. We are still - as we were back in the early 1950s and ever since then - still 30 years away from practical nuclear fusion as a source of energy.
Rather than tearing apart of the nucleus of a heavy atom and converting its mass into energy (E=mc2 - energy being equal to mass times the speed of light), fusion is about combining two hydrogen nuclei to create energy. And with inert helium, rather than radioactive fissile material, as the by-product. Totally clean and green. This is the same reaction that's taking place within the Sun, where the star's gravity creates the force that squeezes the hydrogen atoms so tightly together that they fuse. But here on earth, temperatures in the order of 200,000,000C are needed to achieve this, and the dream of 'cold fusion' (fusing hydrogen nuclei at room temperature and pressure) remains just that.
Mankind needs energy to live. Here in midwinter on my solar-powered działka, I am more aware of this basic fact than ever before in my life. I'm regularly checking my room temperature (19.7C), the temperature outside (1.8C), the energy meter in the garage which tells me how many kilowatt-hours my heating has consumed - and how many my solar panels have generated. This new awareness has had a profound effect on my habits and thinking; energy is so precious, we shouldn't squander it on fripperies.
Our old consumerist way of life can only truly return to the glory days of guilt-free travel and consumption if we can access energy from sources other than burning fossil fuels. For all its dangers, atomic fission is still far greener than coal, oil or gas. It's not a nice thing to have to do, but adding up all deaths from radiation sickness, cancers and birth defects from all the nuclear accidents that have happened since 1945, it's clear that they are less in number than the coal miners that die in accidents underground every year.
We must be mindful of where we get our energy from if subsequent generations are to enjoy life on a habitable planet.
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The way I see it is that, yes, each time we push the boundaries we gain overall and statistically we are better off but, once we go arse over tit, the statistics look grim: flying – safer than driving, but you rarely come out alive if you crash. Walking safest of all! Having said that, as I look back over my life, I’m having to accept that my best companion in life, if unwavering constancy be the criterion, is insecurity.
ReplyDelete@ Jacek
ReplyDeleteHere, I'll get all weird and posit my notion of 'quantum luck' - of forestalling or precluding misfortune by consciously considering it as a possibility. Not a testable hypothesis, but I'd hold that all aircraft that crash are full of people NONE of whom have contemplated the possibility of it crashing.