Curiosity about Plutonium in Spacecraft

"You may leave here for four days in space

But when you return, it's the same old place"

Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction

 The landing of the NASA Mars rover, Curiosity, was big news on August 6, 2012, but in the media fanfare there was scant discussion of the implications of it being powered by 4.8 kilograms of plutonium-238. When it was launched last November, NASA was not keen to inform the public about the risks involved, what the nation needs to do to maintain the supply, or the disturbing history of failed launches of and crash landings of other rockets and satellites loaded with nuclear materials.

In fact, NASA is in a public relations bind right now because the continued exploration of deep space requires nuclear-fueled probes, but supplies of plutonium-238 are soon to be depleted, as reported by NPR last year when the Mars rover was launched. The only way to get more is to lobby for a new program of plutonium production, but NASA knows the American public has little appetite for the expense, nor for revisiting the dark times of the Cold War when plutonium production left a legacy of damaged health of nuclear workers and environmental pollution at numerous sites. Furthermore, the public is conscious of the odds of launch failures and disasters, and so it is not a good thing to remind them that the rocket on the launch pad has a payload of plutonium that could melt and fall back to earth if the launch fails. Thus NASA’s strategy is to mention the plutonium shortage as little as possible, and not lobby for funding too loudly. Instead, NASA, and other space agencies, play up the romance of boldly going to new frontiers and the importance of new endeavors. It is unthinkable that the space program could be halted just because of the public’s reluctance to produce the required plutonium.

One can suggest at this point the unthinkable, that the space program is just not worth it if it involves the costs and dangers of making and handling plutonium. Space will always be there. What’s the hurry? Let’s wait until we figure out a safe way to do it, or not do it at all. The physicist Michio Kaku has said NASA's renewed interest in not only nuclear powered probes, but the more dangerous nuclear propulsion "… is not only dangerous but politically unwise. The only thing that can kill the U.S. space program is a nuclear disaster. The American people will not tolerate a Chernobyl in the sky."

The drawback to arguing against space exploration is that whoever makes it is immediately on the defensive, accused of being against progress, or the type who would shoot down a child’s dream to be an astronaut. Here in Japan, my children are exposed to a steady stream of news features and documentaries about JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and Japanese astronauts on NASA missions. The JAXA headquarters in nearby Tsukuba holds tours and events for children every summer. There is a popular manga and anime series called Space Brothers (Uchuu Kyoudai) about two young men living their childhood dream of joining a NASA mission. My children are all hooked. This is how space agencies, and the associated military, chemical and nuclear industries behind them, cynically play the public relations game. It is all packaged as benevolent scientific progress for mankind, and it takes advantage of the child’s desire to transcend the ordinary and engage in imaginative play. Through these education programs and works of fiction, children all know the amusing factoids about food in tubes and what happens to farts on the space shuttle, but no one teaches them about the Radioisotope Heater Unit and what is required to make one.

One can stand up to this onslaught and suggest that progress might lie in learning how to clean up our planet and live on it within its ability to sustain us, but the brilliance of this propaganda system is that whoever does so will be seen as a cynic who just wants to deprive children of their dreams. It’s less cynical than building those dreams on concealed truths, but this point will also go unmentioned along with some facts about what is needed to produce a few kilograms of plutonium-238 for a single space mission.

Plutonium can exist in several isotopes, all of which vary in the length of their half-lives, the intensity of the life-damaging radiation they emit, and in their applications. The number of protons in an atom’s nucleus defines the atom, but the number of neutrons can vary to make different isotopes of the same atom. Plutonium-244 (the number being the total number of neutrons and protons in the nucleus of the isotope) is found in trace amounts in nature, but almost all plutonium now on earth was created by human activity over the last seventy years. In this sense, it is said to be something that no life form has evolved with. Since it damages chromosomes, there is a good argument to be made that it should never be created or used, no matter how well we imagine that its contact with living things can be managed safely.

Various isotopes of plutonium can be created by bombarding other radioisotopes with neutrons. For example, the fissile isotope plutonium-239 used in nuclear weapons is made by bombarding uranium-238. In this way, plutonium for weapons is inextricably linked to the “peaceful” uses of the atom because nuclear fuel in in light water reactors (enriched uranium) used for generating electricity is bombarded with neutrons, leaving behind nuclear waste containing plutonium that can be used to make bombs. The isotope required for space missions is plutonium-238, which emits higher radioactive energy and has a shorter half-life than plutonium-239.  Nuclear waste contains only small amounts of plutonium-238, so it can’t be obtained directly from this source. However, spent nuclear fuel contains neptunium-237, and this can be separated from the spent fuel and irradiated to create plutonium-238. A 100-kg sample of spent fuel can yield 700 grams of neptunium-237.

Once you understand what is involved in obtaining a small quantity of plutonium-238, you understand why space agencies are so reluctant to talk about it, even though they need to play politics to get more funding. Production involves numerous problems such as cost, safety, security, and the ongoing problem of cleaning up contaminated environments and storing the plutonium waste already in existence. Space Daily reported in 2003, “Historically DoE has a bad track record when it comes to protecting workers and local water systems from radioactive contaminants… During the Cassini RTG fabrication process at Los Alamos 244 cases of worker contamination were reported to the DoE.”

A nation that wants to send a probe deep into space where the sun don’t shine on solar panels (i.e. Jupiter, Uranus and beyond) needs the entire infrastructure of a large nuclear industry. Spacecraft require a small amount of plutonium-238, which requires the production of enriched uranium, which requires a fleet of civilian nuclear reactors that will provide the nuclear waste from which to make the plutonium-238. The nuclear waste has to be moved around to various facilities, with tight security and all the associated risks. And of course, only a few self-anointed countries are allowed to engage in this production process. The Soviets used polonium 210 (the same isotope that was used to murder the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006) on many satellites and the Lunokhod series of moon rovers, one of which exploded on the launch pad in 1969. A country needs to be a major nuclear power to be in the space exploration business, so if you’re a child in Iran, which the major nuclear powers won’t allow to produce enriched uranium, or just a country without the resources for (or the wisdom not to spend resources on) space exploration, the dream of being an astronaut has been denied to you.

So what are the risks?

There is a lot of controversy over the risks involved in sending payloads of plutonium into space. NASA says that the fuel is packed into ceramic and graphite-coated pellets that have been tested to resist impact and melting in the event of an explosion on launch or a fall from orbit. Critics point out that the risk is not easily understood because the small amount of plutonium-238 involved is very radioactive compared to other isotopes of plutonium.

Not all radioisotopes release, by mass, equal amounts of radiation. Plutonium-239 has a long half-life of 24,110 years, but 277 times less energy that plutonium-238, which has a half-life of 87.7 years. Wired Magazine, that consistent cheerleader of all technological progress, commented about this isotope being aboard rockets:

The plutonium (which is, not to worry, non-weapons-grade Pu-238) undergoes nuclear decay, providing heat to warm MSL’s electronics and keep it churning out data even at night.

It may not be weapons-grade, but the writer is gullible to NASA PR saying that it is safe, and he fails to notice the glaring omission in this quote:

They [NASA] point out that NASA has reliably used nuclear generators for 26 missions over the last 50 years.

Yes, reliably in 26, but unreliably in the two mishaps mentioned below that NASA neglected to point out to the Wired journalist. This would amount to 28 missions, with a record of 1 failure for every 14 successes. NASA’s recent estimates of failure probability give much more favorable odds than the actual record, especially if you include the Challenger and Columbia disasters which, fortunately, did not carry radioactive payloads (as far as we know).  

If you think of a rocket exploding high in the atmosphere and scattering 4.8 kilograms of material throughout the vast expanse of the earth’s atmosphere, that may seem insignificant. But, in fact, it is a massive release of radioactive energy, and some experts say the impact has been significant.

Not all radioisotopes are created equal.

Plutonium-238 is 277 times as radioactive as plutonium-239, so…

plutonium-238 on the Mars rover Curiosity	4.8 kilograms
plutonium-239 used in the bombing of Nagasaki	6.4 kilograms
amount of plutonium-238 that has the same radioactive energy as the plutonium-239 used in the Nagasaki bomb	6.4 ÷ 277 = 0.0231 kilograms
energy equivalence of 4.8 kilograms of plutonium-238	4.8 x 277 = 1,329 kilograms of plutonium-239
Curiosity radioactivity payload equals how many Nagasaki bombs?	1,329 ÷ 6.4 = 208

In spite of the invention of ways to contain plutonium within ceramic pellets and graphite, NASA’s own Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission finds there is still a chance of environmental release of plutonium in various accident scenarios. It might be foolish to spend much time on a discussion of the probabilities of various scenarios because the methodologies and assumptions involved render the undertaking an absurd game. Nonetheless, NASA concludes “… there is an overall probability of 4 in 1,000 that the MSL mission would result in an accident with a release of PuO₂ [plutonium dioxide] into the environment.” About a less likely scenario it states, “The risk assessment also indicates that in at least one very unlikely ground impact configuration, FSII with a total probability of release of 9.2 x 10^-5 (or 1 in 11,000), a mean area of 86 km² could be contaminated above 0.2 microcuries/m²… Land areas contaminated at levels above 0.2 microcuries/m² (or 7,440 becquerels/m² ) would potentially need further action, such as monitoring and cleanup.” For mixed use urban areas, this cost is estimated to be $562 million per km². These estimates include no guess about how far above 0.2 the levels could go. But note that when a radiological disaster does occur, this level of 0.2, or 7,440 becquerels/m² is suddenly deemed too low to require action. By the standards set for Chernobyl, places with less than 37,000 becquerels/m² were considered weakly contaminated. Recommended evacuation (that included permission to leave in the old system of Soviet restrictions on movement) began at 555,000 becquerels/m². Compulsory, compensated evacuation began at 1,480,000 becquerels/m². The Japanese authorities have been similarly complacent since the Fukushima disaster.

In addition, the NASA report mentions, but finds incalculable, the costs of relocation, loss of employment, damage to fishing and agriculture, and health care. Finally, the report concludes with an interesting rationalization for the risks imposed on the public. “The individual risk estimates are small compared to other risks… in [the year] 2000 the average individual risk of accidental death was about 1 in 3,000 per year, while the average individual risk of death due to any disease, including cancer, was about 1 in 130.”

Consider how this logic appears when a drug dealer in your neighborhood turns his house into a methamphetamine lab and contaminates the area. He is likely to rationalize the imposition of risk, which you were not able to have a say in, as only a negligible increase in the risks you already face in your life. It would be better if official agencies of government did not sink to this level of reasoning.

As mentioned above, earlier NASA missions loaded with plutonium failed. The worst one occurred in 1964 with the SNAP-9A Radioisotopic Thermo Generator (RTG). 950 grams of plutonium-238 was widely dispersed over the earth when the satellite containing the RTG fell back to earth. Comparative data on this event can be found in the FEIS of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission.

Table compiled from data provided by NASA’s FEIS for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission and Isotopic evidence of plutonium release into the environment from the Fukushima DNPP accident

	Global releases of plutonium (Curies)
	Pu 239	Pu -238
weapons tests	444,000	9,000
SNAP-9A accident*	*	17,000 (25% fell on Northern Hemisphere, 75% on Southern)
Chernobyl accident**	Plutonium-239, 241: 2,351	400
	Plutonium-240:     194,594
plutonium reprocessing (1952-1992) discharged into oceans	100,000	3,400
TOTAL	740,945	29,800
Total fallout from all isotopes	740,945 + 29,800 = 770,745
Percentage of total fallout from SNAP-9A accident	770,745 ÷ 29,800 = 4%

NASA states the following equivalence:

Plutonium-238 is 17.12 Curies/gram, Plutonium-239 is 0.0620 Curies/gram

* NASA considered the inventory of plutonium-239 on SNAP-9A too small to include.

** NASA did not consider the releases of plutonium-239, 240 and 241 from Chernobyl to be worth mentioning or looking up, but the author calculated them from the data in becquerels given in Zhang et. al. According to this source, the plutonium releases from the Fukushima disaster are estimated to be five orders of magnitude less than the Chernobyl disaster, making them too small to include here. The conversion factor is 1 Curie = 3.7 x 10¹⁰ becquerels.

Plutonium released from Chernobyl (converted to Curies in the table above):

plutonium 239 and 240	8.7 x 1013 becquerels
plutonium 241	7.2 x 1015 becquerels

         

This single mishap of the SNAP-9A unit, involving less than a kilogram of plutonium, accounts for 4% of the plutonium-derived radioactivity released into the environment since the start of the nuclear age. Another part of NASA’s website, not the FEIS, explains these failures with great understatement and typical omission of inconvenient facts. The failure of the satellite in 1964, involving the SNAP-9A Radioisotope Thermal Generator (RTG) is described this way:

Status: Mission was aborted because of launch vehicle failure. RTG burned up on re-entry as designed.

On the other hand, the loss of the Apollo 13 lunar module in 1970 was described differently. People familiar with the story of this failed mission know that the astronauts survived by staying in the lunar module as long as possible, but it was discarded from the main capsule just before re-entry. The lunar module crashed into the South Pacific along with its payload of plutonium-238 in the SNAP-27 RTG. In this case, NASA describes the loss this way:

Status: Mission aborted on the way to the moon. RTG re-entered earth's atmosphere and landed in South Pacific Ocean. No radiation was released.

In the latter case, NASA specifies that no radiation was released, but in the former case there is no mention of whether radiation was released. In fact, the failure of the SNAP-9A was one of many “lessons learned” in the history of nuclear technology. NASA admitted that a large volume of plutonium was released into the earth’s atmosphere, and they subsequently developed solar energy technology, as well as the ceramic and graphite casings for plutonium pellets which, presumably, meant that the plutonium aboard the Apollo 13 lunar module went to the bottom of the sea encased in its protective shells to safely decay through several half-lives of 87.7 years. The same presumption of safety holds for numerous other payloads of plutonium that have been launched into space since 1970. The Cassini space probe, for example, launched in 1997, carries 36.2 kilograms of plutonium-238.

The health effects of the 1964 accident, and the potential effects of future accidents, have  become controversial. According to a study titled Emergency Preparedness for Nuclear-Powered Satellites, the 2.1 pounds [950 grams] of Plutonium-238 in the SNAP-9A dispersed widely over the Earth. “A worldwide soil sampling program carried out in 1970 showed SNAP-9A debris present at all continents and at all latitudes.” (cited in Grossman, K.)

Dr. John Gofman, a scientist on the Manhattan Project who later broke ranks with the nuclear establishment, claimed the 1964 accident, on its own and added to the effects of fallout from weapons testing, contributed to a rise in global lung cancer cases. Yet his findings were contested by Snipes et. al. Gofman claimed that most of the lung cancer cases would occur in smokers because they clear particles from their lungs much more slowly than non-smokers. These critics claimed that an assessment of the risk of plutonium would have to be based on healthy individuals. Nonetheless, Gofman still found there is a substantial risk for non-smokers, well-known because of American government studies of non-smoking dogs and rats sacrificed for research (Bair & Thompson). The risk is more acute for the “plutonium workers” who have to handle and transport the nuclear material produced for the civilian and military nuclear complex. When it comes to the general population, proponents on either side of the controversy could never agree on how much plutonium people have ingested and what the effects could be. Regardless, one can make a value judgment and question the wisdom of introducing into the world a known toxic primordial nuclide that has not been present during the evolution of life.

Other great moments in space exploration

The 1978 crash of the Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 spread uranium-235 debris over 77,000 square miles of Northern Canada. There was a media uproar at the time (like there never was about the American SNAP-9A accident), and debates in parliament about the assault on Canadian sovereignty, but the incident was quickly resolved and brushed out of public awareness. There was a joint Canadian and American cleanup, Operation Morning Light, that lasted one year, and the discovery of some highly radioactive debris, but also official assurances that the accident would have no health effects, that all the dangerous material had “harmlessly” disintegrated, melted, vaporized, neutralized or dispersed in such dilute amounts as to not be a concern. During the cleanup, only an estimated 0.1% of the radioactive fuel was recovered, and the fragments of the satellite that were found gave off a deadly 1.1 sieverts per hour. The rest of the radioactive fragments are still out there over the Great White North, at the bottom of Great Slave Lake, or the remainder of the uranium dispersed high in the atmosphere to have its controversial and unknown effects on human health. This is how it was described six years later in the journal Health Physics:

It was estimated that about one-quarter of the reactor core descended over Canada's Northwest Territories in the form of sub-millimeter particles. The other three-quarters apparently remained as fine dust in the upper atmosphere. Each particle contained megabecquerel quantities of the fission products 95Zr, 95Nb, 103Ru, 106Ru, 141Ce and 144Ce, as well as traces of other fission and activation products. Laboratory tests indicated that these radionuclides would not dissolve significantly in drinking water supplies or in dilute acids. Contamination of air, drinking water, soil and food supplies was not detected. The dose equivalent to the GI tract for an individual who might have inhaled or ingested a particle could have been as high as 140 mSv.

Gary Bennett, an American expert on nuclear power and propulsion, described how the Cosmos accident disrupted the consensus on nuclear power in space that existed in the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS). In a paper tellingly entitled Reaching the Outer Planets – with or without the UN, he states that the agreement at the time “...represented not only a consensus of international technical experts but also a succinct statement of the US position.” But then for the Canadian delegation, and other concerned countries, the Cosmos accident had changed everything. If such a crash had occurred over a populated area, the effects could have been horrendous. By 1981, Bennett says, “…several delegations, led by the Canadian contingent, had introduced working papers proposing new or different technical principles.” Bennett laments, “To a number of people on the US side, it appeared almost as if the Canadian delegation had decided to punish the US rather than the Soviet Union for the accidental reentry of the Soviet Cosmos 954 reactor.”

Bennett notes that differences within different US departments and agencies led to the State department signing on to principles that banned nuclear power in space. They essentially prohibited the nuclear devices now in use on Curiosity and Cassini. He blames this sorry state on the lack of technical expertise on UN committees and the lack of resolve of US negotiators. The result occurred because “… beliefs and wishes and ideology seem to count for more than technical reality.” This is the blind spot of career scientists in institutions such as NASA. Whenever the outcome is unsatisfactory, it is the other side that has been emotional and ideological, while their own self-interests and emotions are not acknowledged - they are believed to be a neutral “technical reality.” There is no acknowledgement here that the UN principles were a value judgment that simply said no to the risks involved in putting nuclear materials in space.

 However, we know that the US went ahead with its program and continued to launch nuclear devices into space. Bennett is disappointed that the US chose a passive aggressive approach by voting for the UN principles while intending to ignore them because they were deemed to be non-binding. “In short, the US may have voted for the principles, but it does not intend to abide by them.” He quotes from a Clinton administration memorandum (not cited):

… the proposed position does not confer US approval of any specific provisions of the Principles, but only declares that US policy and practice is consistent with their overall objective and intent, which is the safe use of NPS in outer space.

Nuclear Propulsion Rockets

It is risky enough that we launch small amounts of plutonium into space in order to give a little heat and electricity to long-lasting probes and Mars rovers, but a truly awesome risk is posed by the temptation of using nuclear reactors to launch the rocket itself, or propel a spacecraft to Mars at high speed. This was seriously attempted in the 1960s in Project Orion (for more detail see the BBC documentary To Mars by A-Bomb: The Secret History of Project Orion), but it was scrapped because of the hazards and the frightening radiological accidents that happened beyond public awareness, and the because it would accelerate the arms race with the Soviets. However, the fact that this dream was abandoned once is no guarantee that it won’t be taken up again. In fact, the renewal of nuclear propulsion was behind George Bush’s attempt to dream big, aping Kennedy’s initiative to put Americans on the moon, in announcing that he wanted a manned mission to Mars. Furthermore, nuclear devices in space have not only peaceful purposes. They would be an essential part of any space-based defense system, and this is further reason why other states are suspicious of American plans and why the United Nations, through COPUOS, has tried to downplay the dangers of a space-based arms race.

The history of nuclear propulsion research is still not fully known because many of the files are still classified. In the book Area 51, journalist Annie Jacobsen focuses less on the speculation about freaky aliens at the secret Nevada Test Site and more on what is known about the real events that happened there. These are frightening enough without having any UFOs in the picture. The Kiwi test, which actually occurred in Area 25, was a test to see how badly the environment would be affected by a failure of a nuclear propelled rocket. Engineers designed a small-scale deliberate failure, then watched what happened when they blew up the small reactor core in the rocket. Here is how it is described in Jacobsen’s book (pages 309-310):

On January 12, 1965, a nuclear rocket engine, code-named Kiwi, was allowed to overheat. High-speed cameras recorded the event. The temperature rose to "over 4,000 degrees C until it burst, sending fuel hurtling skyward, glowing every color of the rainbow," Dewar wrote. Deadly radioactive fuel chunks as large as 148 pounds shot up into the sky. One ninety-eight-pound piece of radioactive fuel landed more than a quarter mile away.
Once the explosion subsided, a radioactive cloud rose up from the desert floor and "stabilized at 2,600 feet" where it was met by an EG&G aircraft "equipped with samplers mounted on its wings." The cloud hung in the sky and began to drift east then west. "IT blew over Los Angeles and out to sea," Dewar explained. The full data on the EG&G radiation measurement remains classified.
The test, made public as a "safety-test," caused an international incident. The Soviet Union said it violated the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which of course it did.

The one other occasion when witnesses to a nuclear explosion described fuel going skyward in “every color of the rainbow” is the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor (see The True Battle of Chernobyl, 0:01:20-0:02:10). The Kiwi test, like the unplanned Rocketdyne meltdown near Los Angeles in 1959, suggests that Three Mile Island is on record as the most serious American nuclear accident only because it is the accident that the public has information about.

The controversy of nuclear power in space is not something that can be resolved by pursuing the correct data on risk assessment, or looking for a way to quantify the harm done by the global population’s inhalation of plutonium particles. These numbers are unknowable. What is clear is that further space exploration will not happen by known methods without the continued processing of plutonium and launching of it into space. For those whose careers are invested in space exploration, and the millions of dreamers and enthusiasts of space travel, it is unthinkable that space exploration could just stop because we are afraid to live with the risks of plutonium processing.

I suspect, however, that most of the 7 billion people on earth don’t even think about space exploration, and wouldn’t care much about it if they did. For others who are informed and primarily concerned about taking care of the planet we inhabit, space exploration has little to offer, especially if it worsens ecological problems. I haven't discussed here the additional harm done by CO2 emissions of rocket launches and rocket fuel chemicals. Certainly, we obtain valuable data from satellites about the minute details of what we are doing to the ecosystem, but they really only confirm simple truths that we already know.

Supporters of space exploration tell us constantly of the necessity of breaking new frontiers, of constantly going beyond, but most of the talk is vague and the logic is circular. We need to keep going farther to develop STEM (education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics), and we need STEM in order to keep going boldly to the next frontier.

People like Peter Diamandis typify the views of what has come to be called the techno-optimists – wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs who get juiced up annually on mutual self-adoration and wonderment at the TED conference. He effuses, with the redundant adjective in the title, Curiosity’s Successful, Glorious Triumph on Mars:

What the success of Curiosity highlights is the importance of our being bold and audacious. It takes big risks to drive breakthroughs. Financial risks, technical risks, and when it comes to funding billion dollar programs - political risks….

He fails to mention the risks taken by the low-level workers who actually handle the plutonium and get contaminated in the process. When you are at the lofty heights of the technological elite who get to stare off into the distance of humanity’s glorious future, the gritty details of how humanity gets there are of no import. The techno-optimists are the conquistadors of the modern age. They are optimists in the same way the Hernan Cortes had a positive view about the conquest of Mexico. It goes without mentioning that most of humanity will be used, abused or ignored in the great march of progress. Yet at least the Spanish conquistadors had the sense to covet places that could sustain life, something which we can’t say about people who want to go to lifeless planets.
 Diamandis goes on to say:

I spend much of my time as Executive Chairman of Singularity University and as CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation.  At SU we teach attending graduate students and executives about exponentially growing technology. More importantly, we speak about the importance of taking risk to truly create breakthroughs and the importance of failing early and failing often - the Silicon Valley formulation for innovation.

What is not mentioned here is that humanity actually has not been afraid to take risks, and we seem to be adept at failing spectacularly. In truth, we are quite reckless. While the ecosystem we depend on collapses, Diamandis and his kind have their heads in the clouds envisioning a melding of human minds with robots. Our energy problem is not that fossil fuel supplies will soon be depleted but that catastrophic climate change will occur first. There is nothing more urgent than facing the escalating disasters caused by climate change and the unresolved problem of nuclear waste storage. Outer space can wait. If it seems too sad to tell our children to put this dream on hold, that’s unfortunate, but the unavoidably mature thing for adults to do. Instead of asking our children if they want to be astronauts when they grow up, it is time for the human race to ask itself what it wants to be when it grows up.

References and Other Resources

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Sykes, Christopher (Dir.). To Mars by A-Bomb: The Secret History of Project Orion. BBC. 2003.

Tracy BL, Prantl FA, Quinn JM. “Health impact of radioactive debris from the satellite Cosmos.” 954. Health Physics. 1984 Aug;47(2):225-33. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6480350

Zheng et. al. “Isotopic evidence of plutonium release into the environment from the Fukushima DNPP accident.” Scientific Reports 2, Article number: 304 doi:10.1038/srep00304. March 8, 2012. http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120308/srep00304/fig_tab/srep00304_T2.html

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare I

The future always seems to happen in Japan first. It was the first, and hopefully last, country to be struck with nuclear weapons. It was the first to be attacked with karaoke music. Japan has given the world otaku culture – video games, manga, maid cafes, 48-member female pop bands – the cultural products of and for a newly evolved, more autistic, infantilized kind of human being, a new species more object-oriented than people-oriented, more detached from reality, incapable of emotional response to outrages unfolding in their environment.

The latest item on this list of firsts is the fact that Japan is now the first industrialized country to hit the wall in terms of its energy supply. With no native resources, it decided to go nuclear fifty years ago, and for a while it worked. The nuclear buildup was an economic boon as it created jobs within its own sector and supplied the energy needed by industry. Economic growth took off. Nuclear fuel was believed to be carbon free, and relatively cheap, so it helped the national balance of payments. But building 54 nuclear reactors on a land of earthquakes and tsunamis was never a good idea, and now the dream has died. Nuclear is no longer a viable option. Even if Japan continues running a few plants, other earthquakes are sure to bring further problems, so the whole industry is in inevitable decline. Meanwhile, importing fossil fuels will just continue to run up a trade deficit that adds to the vicious cycle of industrial decline and contributes to global warming. Alternative energy supplies might be a solution, but for now they are over the horizon.

Public discourse on this dilemma is reaching new levels of alarm. The problem is no longer a remote disaster that might start in a few decades. It is happening all around us, but in a slow motion fashion that makes it difficult for some people to feel the sense of crisis. Paul Gilding sees it as a coming war, but a different kind of war than what we have ever known:

We can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society's evolution -- like, what do we want to be when we grow up, when we move past this bumbling adolescence where we think there are no limits and suffer delusions of immortality? Well it's time to grow up, to be wiser, to be calmer, to be more considered. Like generations before us, we'll be growing up in war -- not a war between civilizations, but a war for civilization, for the extraordinary opportunity to build a society which is stronger and happier and plans on staying around into middle age.

- Paul Gilding, 2012 The Earth is Full

While contemplating such things a few weeks ago on a hot summer day (35 degrees centigrade and 70% humidity at my home in Narita, Japan), the phrase “the air-conditioned nightmare” came to mind. It is the fitting description for what this country faces every day now. We need the cool air to maintain our lifestyles and do the jobs that put food in our bellies. Junior high school students, already on the education treadmill on which they mindlessly join the chase of “good” jobs in air-conditioned factories and offices, need the cool air in the summer cram schools they attend. Air conditioning enabled places like Japan, Southern China, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and the American South to catch up to the industrialized North. And we are all stuck here, unable to see any way to climb down out of the air-conditioned nightmare.

But where did this phrase come from? I knew I had heard it before, but had no idea who coined it. It turned out that it was the title of a 1945 travelogue by Henry Miller. I must have come across it when I read Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring and Tropic of Capricorn in the early 80s, or it may just be a phrase used elsewhere as it became an effective way to allude to our alienation from nature.

Henry Miller lived as an expatriate American writer in Paris in the 1930s, and returned to his native New York in 1939. With war breaking out in Europe, he had returned only reluctantly, and did not have a nice re-acquaintance with his homeland. Nonetheless, on a trip that must have inspired Jack Kerouac a few years later, he set out on an automobile trip across the country, writing of the grim American landscape he found in Depression-era America on the eve of world war. He found only some hopeful signs for the future of humanity in a few exceptional individuals whom he encountered.

There is no trace here of “the greatest generation” that defeated fascist enemies on two fronts in Europe and Asia, except some sympathy for the young people who would be called on to do the fighting. Instead, Miller saw dictators and tyrants on all sides, saying “We have our own dictator, only he is hydra-headed.” (p. 18) What is striking for the modern reader is to see how many passages of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare resemble writing from The Occupy Movement and the environmental movement. The seeds of discontent were really born in the post-WWI era, when capitalism accelerated in the new age of the automobile, the airplane and the atom. Lately, it all seems to have been discovered anew by a generation that had no awareness of the disasters that befall capitalist economies from time to time.

Of course, Miller wasn’t the first to be discontented with modernity, but he seems to have had a keen sense of the arrival of a new kind of global dread that would follow the next war. He seems to have been scientifically illiterate – he was clueless even about what was under the hood of his car – and he couldn’t have known about the Manhattan Project and the coming atomic age as he drove through the New Mexico desert, but he knew something awful was in store:

A great change had come over America, no doubt about that. There were greater ones coming, I felt certain. We were only witnessing the prelude to something unimaginable. Everything was cock-eyed, and getting more and more so. Maybe we would end up on all fours, gibbering like baboons. Something disastrous was in store - everybody felt it. Yes, America had changed. The lack of resilience, the feeling of hopelessness, the resignation, the skepticism, the defeatism - I could scarcely believe my ears at first. And over it all that same veneer of fatuous optimism - only now decidedly cracked. (p.13)

    Seventy years before Gilding produced the quote above about ecological catastrophe, Miller preferred to talk not about war between dictators and democrats, but man’s coming war with his own nature – the need to invent a better form of social organization than the materialism offered by both communism and capitalism:

A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable. There is nothing brave, chivalrous, heroic or magnanimous about our attitude. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky. (p. 17)

We are accustomed to think of ourselves as an emancipated people; we say that we are democratic, liberty-loving, free of prejudices and hatred. This is the melting-pot, the seat of a great human experiment. Beautiful words, full of noble, idealistic sentiment. Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment? The land of opportunity has become the land of senseless sweat and struggle. The goal of all our striving has long been forgotten. We no longer wish to succor the oppressed and homeless; there is no room in this great, empty land for those who, like our forefathers before us, now seek a place of refuge. Millions of men and women are, or were until very recently, on relief, condemned like guinea pigs to a life of forced idleness. The world meanwhile looks to us with a desperation such as it has never known before. Where is the democratic spirit? Where are the leaders?

As Democrats, Republicans, Fascists, Communists, we are all on one level. That is one of the reasons why we wage war so beautifully. We defend with our lives the petty principles that divide us. The common principle, which is the establishment of the empire of man on earth, we never lift a finger to defend. We are frightened of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fight only for the status quo, our particular status quo. We battle with heads down and eyes closed. Actually, there never is a status quo, except in the minds of political imbeciles. All is flux. Those who are on the defensive are fighting phantoms.... What is the greatest treason? To question what it is one may be fighting for. (p. 21)

Man in revolt against his own cloying nature - that is real war. And that is a bloodless war which goes on forever, under the peaceful name of evolution. (p. 22)

There are experiments which are made with cunning and precision, because the outcome is divined beforehand. The scientist, for example, always sets himself soluble problems. But man’s experiment is not of this order. The answer to the grand experiment is in the heart. We inhabit a mental world, a labyrinth in whose dark recesses a monster waits to devour us. Thus far we have been moving in mythological dream sequence, finding no solutions because we are posing the wrong questions. We find only what we look for, and we are looking in the wrong place. (p. 22)

… the toiling masses of humanity look with watery eyes to this Paradise where the worker rides to work in his own car… they want the lethal comforts, conveniences, luxuries. And they follow in our footsteps – blindly, heedlessly, recklessly. (p. 33)

The worst is in the process of becoming. It is inside us now. Only we haven’t brought it forth. (p. 42)

We tell the story as though man were an innocent victim, a helpless participant in the erratic and unpredictable revolutions of Nature. Perhaps in the past he was. But not any longer. Whatever happens to this earth today is of man’s doing. Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything – except his own nature. If yesterday he was a child of nature, today he is a responsible creature. He has reached a point of consciousness which permits him to lie to himself no longer. Destruction now is deliberate, voluntary, self-induced. We are at the node: we can go forward or relapse. We still have the power of choice. Tomorrow we may not. It is because we refuse to make that choice that we are ridden with guilt, all of us, those who are making war and those who are not. We are all filled with murder. We loathe one another. We hate what we look like when we look into one another’s eyes. (p. 175)

Why is it that in America the great works of art are all Nature’s doing? There were skyscrapers, to be sure, and dams and bridges and concrete highways. All utilitarian. Nowhere in America was there anything comparable to the cathedrals of Europe, the temples of Asia and Egypt - enduring monuments carved out of faith and love and passion. No exaltation, no fervor, no zeal - except to increase business, facilitate transportation, enlarge the domain of ruthless exploitation. The result? A swiftly decaying people, almost a third of them pauperized, the more intelligent and affluent ones practicing race suicide, the underdogs becoming more and more unruly, more criminal-minded, more degenerate and degraded in every way.

The men of the future will look upon the relics of this age as we now look upon the artifacts of the Stone Age. We are mental dinosaurs. We lumber along heavy-footed, dull-witted, unimaginative amidst miracles to which we are impervious. All our inventions and discoveries lead to annihilation. (p. 228)

Other passages from The Air-Conditioned Nightmare resonate for millions of expatriates and migrants who have experienced being uprooted and feeling alienated wherever they find themselves. We want to speak about the world as citizens of it, not as representatives of governments or stale cultural molds and stereotypes. We who live in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster want to speak about it, and want Japanese to speak about it, as a problem of humanity.

Though I became what is called an expatriate, I look upon the world not as a partisan of this country or that but as an inhabitant of the globe. That I happened to be born here is no reason why the American way of life should seem the best. That I chose to live in Paris is no reason why I should pay with my life for the errors of the French politicians. To be a victim of one's own mistakes is bad enough, but to be a victim of the other fellow's mistakes as well is too much. (p. 17)

The only artists who were not leading a dog's life were the commercial artists; they had the beautiful homes, beautiful brushes, beautiful models. The others were living like ex-convicts. The impression was confirmed and deepened as I travelled along. America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. (p. 16)

I was frequently reminded of the fact that I was an expatriate, often in an unpleasant way. The expatriate had come to be looked upon as an escapist.... Nobody thought of calling a man an escapist in the old days; it was the natural, proper, fitting thing to do, go to Europe, I mean. (p. 16)

I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans - the poets and the seers. Some other breed of man has won out. The world which is in the making fills me with dread.... It is a... false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal. (p. 24)

If it takes a calamity such as war to awaken and transform us, well and good, so be it. Let us see now if the unemployed will be put to work and the poor properly clothed, housed and fed; let us see if the rich will be stripped of their booty and made to endure the privations and sufferings of the ordinary citizen; let us see if all the workers of America, regardless of class, ability or usefulness, can be persuaded to accept a common wage; let us see if the people can voice their wishes in direct fashion, without the intercession, the distortion, and the bungling of politicians; let us see if we can create a real democracy in place of the fake one we have been finally roused to defend; let us see if we can be fair and just to our own kind, to say nothing of the enemy whom we shall doubtless conquer over. (p. 25)

To end, some comments from an itinerant man at the Grand Canyon whom Miller affectionately described as a “desert rat.” This voice from seventy years ago is priceless because it sheds light on a loss that modern people are no longer aware of, and it speaks volumes about the beginnings of our reckless endangerment of the planet that sustains us.

The automobile had done one good thing, he admitted, and that was to break up people’s clannishness. But on the other hand, it made people rootless. Everything was too easy - nobody wanted to fight and struggle anymore. Men were getting soft. Nothing could satisfy them anymore. Looking for thrills all the time. Something he couldn’t fathom - how they could be soft and cowardly yet not frightened of death. Long as it gave them a thrill, didn’t care what happened... He had seen lots of cars turn over in the desert, racing at... a hundred and ten miles an hour. (p. 222)

All passages from

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

by

Henry Miller

New Directions Publishing 1945

See also Part II of this article.

Someone Still Wants to Embrace the Atom

Sixteen months after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster there is still occasional media commentary that claims that the meltdowns, explosions and exposed spent fuel pools are of no consequence. As information trickled out over the first year, and the dreadful lies of TEPCO and government agencies were exposed, these editorials decreased in frequency, and almost disappeared altogether. It seemed as if the public relations strategy of the nuclear lobby changed as it realized it was fruitless to go on downplaying the severity of disaster. By late in 2011, everyone, both pro and anti-nuclear lobbies, were sufficiently terrified by the situation. The majority of nuclear engineers and health physicists, no matter how pro-nuclear they were, had to admit that there was nothing to gain in appearing to be blasé about the consequences of Fukushima.

But this week the trend was back with a vengeance in a guest editorial in The Japan Times. Michael Radcliffe, a lecturer at Yokohama City University, seems to have not got the memo that the pronuclear PR machine has moved on. I suspect that he will feel very lonely as rebuttals pour in because the pro-nuclear lobby will be content to let him twist in the wind with the ideas he has put forward. The Japanese government, the IAEA, and the American NRC have recently shown a lot more contrition and seriousness about the Fukushima disaster. Nonetheless, the downplayers and minimizers keep coming back once in a while like the undead. I’m not sure this zombie is even worth the effort of responding to, but I’ll take out my pitchfork and do battle with the advancing beast one more time.

The first problem is that Radcliffe chooses as his title How I learned to stop worrying and embrace the atom which is, of course, an allusion to the film Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. This is a badly chosen title because readers who are familiar with this film know that the title is ironic. The film is a satire of the nuclear arms race and it did much to inspire the anti-nuclear movement. Thus, adapting the same phrase for the title of an essay about nuclear power sets up the reader to expect an argument against it. Instead, we get a long list of spurious arguments in favor of nuclear power:

1. No one died because of the Fukushima Disaster

This is not exactly true because several hospital patients died in Futaba City due to the chaotic conditions of the evacuation. And there are more deaths if you count the suicides of evacuees.

But still, OK, casualties were very low. Let’s grant that. However, this is like saying it’s alright that your house burned down because everyone got out alive. People who make this oft-repeated point that “no one died” make no mention of the devastating impact of the loss of agricultural land, destruction of business enterprises, the evacuation of 100,000 people, and the psychological and physical toll on them. The callousness of this argument is no different than telling a rape victim that all is well if she didn’t catch a disease or get pregnant.

As part of this argument, Radcliffe compares the situation with the casualties from the Bhopal chemical spill. OK, but the point is irrelevant. It was a chemical accident, involving not even a competing form of energy production. If Bhopal had never happened, the discussion of nuclear safety would be no different.

2. Mainstream Science

Radcliffe suggests that we should pay attention only to reliable “mainstream science” such as the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), or listen only to select pro-nuclear health physicists like Wade Allison. Unfortunately, it is not possible to define the limits of “mainstream science” or find a consensus even among the most established experts in health physics. There are large non-governmental organizations such as Physicians for Global Survival and Physicians for Social Responsibility, and there is the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR)  which all come to widely different conclusions than the UN bodies that are staffed by and subservient to the global nuclear industry. Putting one’s faith in the optimistic “mainstream” science is as sensible as it was to listen, before 2008, to mainstream economists and financial regulators who failed to see the crash of the US housing market. This is an age to be very skeptical of mainstream wisdom in any field where large financial stakes are in play.

3. Previous nuclear disasters

Radcliffe goes along with the “mainstream” view of the effects of the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters. In the case of TMI he says, “there were no reported health effects from radiation at all, regardless of what you may have heard.” In other words, if you heard otherwise, you should ignore this information simply because it disagrees with sanctioned government research.

In the case of Chernobyl, he cites the UNSCEAR report that said impact was minimal. Yet the research by scientists at the ECRR finds the UNSCEAR results to be serious underestimations of the effects of the disaster.

All that can be reasonably said about this issue is that no one knows the full extent of the effects of low level radiation and internal radiation. Officially sanctioned research is doubtful because it disagrees with mountains of anecdotal evidence given by the victims (in books like Chernobyl: Crime without Punishment, by a Ukrainian journalist and politician who lived through the disaster and its aftermath). Their stories can never be verified by “mainstream” science because official bodies don’t want to fund research that might give undesirable results.

4. Internal and External Exposure

The danger of internal exposure to radionuclides has been known since the dawn of the atomic age, but it is astounding to note how often the topic is ignored by mainstream health physicists and radiation experts. Those who downplay the hazards consistently talk about only external exposure. They constantly assure the public that background levels are only slightly elevated in the disaster area, and they trot out the familiar tropes of their argument: If you’re worried about radiation, don’t eat bananas. Ramsar, Iran has been inhabited for centuries with higher background radiation than any place in post-disaster Fukushima. Your dental x-rays are more dangerous. Radon gas in your basement is more of a worry than Fukushima, and so on.

The fact is that the anti-nuke people are not concerned too much about external radiation. 100 mSv per year may not cause any harm, but what they are really worried about is internal exposure to fission products such as muscle-seeking Cesium 134 and 137, bone seeking Strontium 90, various isotopes of plutonium, and several other exotic radionuclides and chemicals from the Fukushima explosions that rarely get mentioned (Telerium 129, Manganese 54, Silver 110, Cobalt 60, Americium 241, Neptunium 237, Rhodium 102, Iodine 131, Krypton-85, 86, Xenon133, 134, 135, 136, stable and unstable uranium, tritium…). Some of these decayed away quickly after doing their damage, while there are others remaining in uncertain amounts around Fukushima and nearby regions. No one knows how much got and will get into people’s bodies, and what the effects will be. No one can claim any certainty about these dangers, and so no one can discount the anxieties of people who have to live with them.

I have read commentary by people who work in the nuclear industry, such as the US NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko, who still think nuclear is a necessary part of the solution to the energy crisis, but they are humbled by the Fukushima disaster, mindful of the harm it has caused, and respectful of the lives that have been damaged by it. This is sharp contrast to the strident, shameless voices that say “So what? No one died.” They ignore the dangers, blame the media for hyping bad news “because it sells,” and label victims and opponents as hysterical naysayers. One can respect people who have differing views about the future role of nuclear power, but it is hard to comprehend the heartlessness that has appeared in some of the commentary of the last year, especially when it comes from medical doctors.

5. Why evacuate or decontaminate if there is no risk?

A curious thing about the minimizers is that they avoid saying too loudly that the government was wrong to declare an exclusion zone and attempt decontamination. The official line is that these are necessary public safety measures, but if radiation were as safe as they claim it is, these measures would be unnecessary. Radcliffe says, “In fact, a resident living anywhere in the prefecture, even within the evacuation zone, is likely to have received less radiation in 2011 than people living in areas of high natural background radiation around the world, such as parts of Iran and India.” Radcliffe is suggesting here that the government was over-cautious and should have done nothing at all in the aftermath of the disaster. All efforts at decontamination and evacuation were a colossal waste of money done only for show and political compromise, according to this view. Radcliffe can say it, but those in official positions cannot: all measures to mitigate a nuclear disaster – evacuation, decontamination, food monitoring – serve no practical purpose but are necessary for political expediency. They appease the public, save the industry’s image, and allow it to carry on after the situation gets “remediated.”

6. Food monitoring

Just as Radcliffe suggests that decontamination and the exclusion zone were unnecessary, he says the public obsession with food monitoring has been a needless concern. He states about the contaminated beef “scare” that a soothing authority on NHK news assured the nation that “you would have to eat a kilo of that beef a day in order for the radiation to have any measurable effect upon your health.” Radcliffe suggests that this fact is reason to say that the public reaction to the beef “scare” was unwarranted. However, he fails to see the justifiable reason for the public outrage. People were not worried that they were going to die from this one case of exposure. They were correct to be hyper-vigilant of the government’s food inspection program. The best way to pressure the government into setting up an effective, systemic approach to food monitoring was to be outraged at every lapse, whether or not it had real consequences.

7. “Massive amounts of CO2 released unnecessarily”

Finally, Radcliffe states that the sudden shutdown of nuclear power plants created an unnecessary reliance on fossil fuels that set back Japan’s trade balance and greenhouse gas emission targets. By saying this, he implies that there was an alternative, that nuclear power plants could have been kept open. However, everyone except Radcliffe, even the nation’s pro-nuclear lobby, seems to have understood that there was no alternative. Several nuclear power plants had been shut down before March 2011 because of scandals, earthquake damage, and breakdowns. Others were down for scheduled maintenance, or scheduled to go down later during 2011 and 2012. The remainder had to be shut down for rigorous safety inspections because Japan could not risk suffering another blow like Fukushima Daiichi. All of the seismic risks had to be reassessed, and power plants had to be put through more rigorous stress tests. Another meltdown would be a fatal blow to the country.

8. Not mentioned

At the end of the essay Radcliffe declares that the media and the anti-nuclear lobby were not sufficiently relieved when cold shutdown was declared. Instead, they were almost angry, as if asking, “How dare the crisis be over?” Media elements are “absurdly and tragically invested in the continuation of the crisis.” It is odd that Radcliffe does not discuss the actual content of the media reports where one can find the reasons for disagreeing that the crisis has been resolved. The destroyed reactors are still spilling massive amounts of radiation, no one knows where the melted cores are, or how they will be removed or sealed off from the environment. The damaged spent fuel pools in reactor buildings 3 and 4 contain massive amounts of radionuclides which cannot be removed to safe confinements. If they collapse in another earthquake, the whole site will be too radioactive for any human to work at. At best, the crisis will take 40 years to resolve and, like Chernobyl, be a contaminated no-man’s land for centuries. These are the facts of the situation which are uncontroversial at this point. It is difficult to comprehend why essays such as this one appear now when the frightening extent of the disaster is well understood.

9. Fossil fuels

Radcliffe laments that Japan has gone into a trade deficit because of the need to import fossil fuels. It is not at all clear why we should risk destruction of the country by another nuclear disaster just to pursue an economic goal, but the trade deficit argument may be spurious for other reasons. Some of the trade deficit was from firms moving sourcing and production overseas in the wake of the tsunami. Some of it might have happened anyway. In any case, nuclear energy is not cheaper just because uranium is less costly than fossil fuel per unit of energy produced. All of nuclear energy’s costs need to be accounted for. These include decommissioning of dozens of aging reactors, building future reactors, buying insurance for the associated risks, finding a long-term storage solution for spent fuel, as well as the aforementioned forty-year cleanup of Fukushima Daiichi. Finally, we cannot forget the opportunity costs of alternative energies not adequately developed and conservation programs not pursued.

10. Fossil fuel health effects

The only thing that Radcliffe gets right is in the point made about the anti-nuclear movement’s tendency to ignore the damage caused by fossil fuels, but he is wrong to suggest that the solution for solving one evil is to go with something that appears to be a lesser evil. An addict who switches from heroin to crystal meth really hasn’t solved his underlying problem. Anti-nuclear activists and global warming activists need to merge into a wider engagement with the energy crisis. These issues are part of the bigger problem which is the end of the global system based on economic growth and consumption. It is senseless to keep bickering about whether cesium or particulate smog is worse for us. As George Carlin said, we don’t have to save the planet. The planet is fine. It is indifferent to our existence and is not obliged to provide us with a solution to our perceived energy needs.

I end on this point by tipping off readers to the brilliant speech by Paul Gilding at the 2012 TED Conference. His talk called The Earth is Full left the crowd of wealthy techno-optimists speechless and twisting uncomfortably in their chairs. Give him seventeen minutes of your time.

Further reading: 
The Japan Times - Letters published in response to the editorial

The Very Young and the Reckless

I started this blog almost a year ago, motivated just to plant in the world the idea that it would be a good achievement for the human race to be rid of nuclear bombs and power plants by the time the centennial of the nuclear age rolls around. But I’ve come to see that it is impossible to advocate for such an idea without talking about related environmental problems and the dysfunction of so many political and business institutions.

It makes no sense to be pro-nuclear just because coal mining kills people and global warming threatens us all. In the opposite way, how can one be anti-nuclear while ignoring, for example, the horrors of mountain-top-removal coal mining in West Virginia? Elementary schools in the poorest and most polluted parts of this state have not one asthma inhaler in the nurse’s office, but rows of asthma inhalers. One has to be anti-everything that destroys innocent lives for the idea that some people are necessary sacrifices for others’ comfort.

From these diverse environmental and social problems, the one common theme that emerges is that knowledge of the non-life sciences (physics, chemistry, engineering) is always ahead of knowledge of the life sciences. We knew how to split atoms before we could splice genes.

US Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover (1900-1986) is credited with the development of the American nuclear submarine fleet, but he didn’t feel particularly proud of his achievement in his later years. He viewed his work as something that was inevitably necessary in the Cold War era, but in retirement he wished that he could trade in his career success for a world in which atomic energy were not known. In an address to the US Congress he said:

Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet… reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin... Now … we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible... Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years…  it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it.

At the dawn of the nuclear age, no one realized that cellular reproduction was impossible on a radioactive planet because no one knew much at all about the molecular code of life.

A review of a few other important developments in the history of science reveals the same pattern: the understanding of non-life sciences is constantly outpacing the knowledge of life sciences.

A Few Milestones in the Industrial Contamination of Life

1556 to 1783:

Silver ore processing at Cerro Rico, Potosi, Bolivia. The Spanish Galleon Trade established the global economy linking all the continents, and it rocked the world currency system with an unprecedented infusion of silver from a single mountain in South America. Indian slaves died in short rotation, not simply from exposure and brutal labor, but by mercury poisoning. Ore was cold-mixed with mercury (“fortuitously” found in large amounts on a nearby mountain) and trodden by the native workers with their bare feet. The mercury vapors were deadly. When the local supply of slaves was exhausted, African slaves were imported.

1917-1928:

Radium Girls – A term given to thousands of factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning while painting radioluminescent watch dials. Even though the dangers were understood by the higher-ups, workers were sent to the factory floor without adequate protection. The “girls” (and some boys) fought a ten-year legal battle and established precedents for worker protection from poisoning on the job.

1934:

Marie Curie dies of aplastic anemia, brought on by years of radiation exposure.

1942-45:

Manhattan Project. Managers knew the history of the Radium Girls and set about their work with deep trepidation. They feared that the large number of workers needed would lead to health consequences that couldn’t be concealed. They worried about the ethical issues and that the secrecy of the Project would be blown if large numbers of workers got sick. Robert Stone, a medical officer on the Project, wrote in 1943, “The clinical study of the personnel is one vast experiment. Never before has so large a collection of individuals been exposed to so much radiation.”

1945:

Human populations were exposed to bomb blasts in acts of war in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and nuclear fallout in a bomb test in New Mexico. Some scientists thought the atmosphere might catch on fire, but others thought, naaah, probably not.

1953:

Discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. Like most discoveries, this was more of an incremental step achieved on the shoulders of previous researchers. For several years biologists had been slowly figuring out the genetic code and the structure of DNA, but it is striking to realize that at the time of the Manhattan Project, scientists knew only that radiation makes people sick but they didn’t know why.

1954-76:

Atmospheric testing of massive hydrogen bombs - the 15 megaton Castle Bravo test in the Bikini Atoll (1954, USA), the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba test in Novaya Zemlya, Arctic Ocean (1961, USSR), and other atmospheric tests by France, the United Kingdom and China until 1976. Gradually, the understanding of genetic effects was sinking in. Leaders everywhere paused, scratched their heads and said, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.”

1971:

Evidence is published showing that the artificial hormone DES, prescribed over previous decades to pregnant women, could cause deformities and future cancers in their children. Subsequently, other endocrine disruptors (dioxin, pesticides, flame retardants, uranium – for its chemical properties, not just a radioisotope - PCBs, bisphenol A, mercury, selenium…) were found to have the same cross-generational effects. Even when the case couldn’t be nailed shut, there has been a growing consensus of people opting for the precautionary principle, saying, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.”

More recently, there has been a study showing that the effects of endocrine disruptors can be passed on to the third generation.

1997 to present:

Fetal origins or “thrifty phenotype” hypothesis, increasing understanding of effects between environment and genes (epigenetics), and the prenatal origins of cancer and other diseases.

The “thrifty phenotype” hypothesis refers to what happens when a fetus is exposed to deprivation or chemical stress. This seems to set up a person’s metabolism in a particular and permanent way. The person is born ready for an environment of scarce resources. He will have a system of appetite control that is set to consume whenever food is available because its default setting is an expectation of shortages. Ergo, an obesity epidemic.

2010:

Research is published showing the effects of weapons test fallout on people who were exposed in utero in the 1960s. Compared to men born at the same time in the same city, and who are still alive, men who died of cancer in middle age had double the amount of strontium 90 in their baby teeth. Someone had the foresight to collect baby teeth from thousands of people!

2012:

Dying from the cure. Health physicists like to play down worries about radiation by repeating the comforting news that radiation is our friend because it cures cancer and helps doctors diagnose diseases. We will have to revise this view as medical science confronts its success and now meets the new dilemma of large numbers of cancer survivors succumbing to totally new cancers caused by previous radiation therapy and chemotherapy (famous case: the type of cancer suffered by writer Nora Ephron). There needs to be a revision of the public misunderstanding that these are harmless therapeutic or diagnostic exposures. This implies also that one cannot suggest that exposure from nuclear disasters is comparable to the “negligible” radiation we get from medical scans and radiotherapy.

  

This list of milestones shows that there has been a constant gap between knowledge of the non-life sciences and knowledge of the life sciences. For example, when we discuss one of the most serious contemporary health problems, the level of popular and professional ignorance is astounding. Most of the discussion about obesity is senseless moralizing about personal food and lifestyle choices, or discussion of which fad diet might work. Or perhaps large soft drinks should be illegal. It is said to be a disease of the poor because they aren't educated enough to make good food choices, but the poor also live in the most contaminated environments! Decades after the damage has been done, we are starting to figure out that obesity starts in the womb and that the solution lies in environmental decontamination and improvements in pre-natal health.

Listen to Dr. Jules Hirsch, emeritus professor and emeritus physician in chief at Rockefeller University, who has been researching obesity for nearly 60 years. He was interviewed by a reporter and had this simple, blunt advice about losing weight:

What your body does is to sense the amount of energy it has available for emergencies and for daily use. The stored energy is the total amount of adipose tissue in your body. We now know that there are jillions of hormones that are always measuring the amount of fat you have. Your body guides you to eat more or less because of this sensing mechanism.

This wonderful sensing mechanism involves genetics and environmental factors, and it gets set early in life. It is not clear how much of the setting is done before birth and how much is done by food or other influences early in life. There are many possibilities, but we just don’t know.

So for many people, something happened early in life to set their sensing mechanism to demand more fat on their bodies?

Yes.

What would you tell someone who wanted to lose weight?

I would have them eat a lower-calorie diet. They should eat whatever they normally eat, but eat less. You must carefully measure this. Eat as little as you can get away with, and try to exercise more.

There is no magic diet, or even a moderately preferred diet?

No…

Sixty years of professional wisdom is reduced to eat less, exercise more! But the really important conclusion for public health policy is what Dr. Hirsch alludes to only cryptically. He says “something happened,” but he does not explain what it was. Whatever the “something” is, it is clear that there is a human tendency that needs to be corrected. The general rule is that ignorant and reckless risks are taken in the present while the effects are left to be understood only in the future. This is what has to change.