A
few months ago, I wrote about Henry Miller’s travelogue The Air Conditioned Nightmare (written 1939-42, published 1945), and
noted how striking it was that he had a prophetic sense of the ominous changes
about to happen to the world. It was not just a matter of him being aware, like
everyone at the time, that the world was hurtling toward a massive war for the
second time in twenty-five years. He had been living in France during the years
of the Great Depression, and when he returned to America and traveled across
it by automobile, he actually didn’t pay much attention to the material
poverty. Instead, he saw new machines and material comforts everywhere.
Alongside the desperate joblessness he also saw people mad to acquire cars just
so that they could commute to work and sit in air-conditioned offices all day.
He was most aghast at the spiritual change in people:
"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)
Henry Miller couldn’t have known about the
top-secret Manhattan Project underway at the time, but he must have been aware of headlines of the early 40's reporting on the splitting of the uranium atom. These headlines appeared in The New York Times before the Manhattan Project got underway:
· Vast Energy Freed by Uranium Atom; Split, It Produces 2
'Cannonballs,' Each of 100,000,000 Electron Volts Hailed as Epoch Making, New
Process, Announced at Columbia, Uses Only 1-30 Volt to Liberate Big Force.
Jan. 31, 1939.
· The Week in Science; When Uranium Splits Doubtful Source of Power
Cancer and X-Rays Neutron Possibilities News Notes. March 5, 1939.
· Vision Earth Rocked by Isotope Blast; Scientists Say Bit of
Uranium Could Wreck New York. April 30, 1939.
· Release Largest Store Known on Earth A ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ When
Separated in Pure Form It Can Yield 235 Billion Volts Per Atom of Its Own.
May 5, 1939.
· New Key is Found to Atomic Energy; Actino-Uranium Is Credited With
Power to A Mixture of Physics and Fantasy. March 17, 1940.
· Vast Power Source in Atomic Energy Opened by
Science; Report on New Source of Power. May 5, 1940.
· Third Way to Split Atom Is Found By Halving Uranium and Thorium;
Scientists at University of California Say Cleavage Creates Much Energy --
Tokyo Men Also Report Uranium Fission. March 3, 1941.
· Scientist Reaches London; Dr. N.H.D. Bohr,
Dane, Has a New Atomic Blast Invention. October 9, 1943.
· Research Institute is Seized in Denmark;
Germans Are Expected to Work on New Secret Weapon. December 12, 1943.
|
This quote is from an article in Scientific American in 1939:
“The latter problem brings up an interesting
and rather disturbing aspect of the case. These secondary neutrons constitute a
fresh supply of ‘bullets’ to produce new fissions. Thus we are faced with a
vicious circle, with one explosion setting off another, and energy being
continuously and cumulatively released. It is probable that a sufficiently
large mass of uranium would be explosive if its atoms once got well started
dividing. As a matter of fact, the scientists are pretty nervous over the
dangerous forces they are unleashing, and are hurriedly devising means to
control them.
It may or may not be significant that, since
early spring, no accounts of research on nuclear fission have been heard from
Germany — not even from discoverer Hahn. It is not unlikely that the German
government, spotting a potentially powerful weapon of war, has imposed military
secrecy on all recent German investigations. A large concentration of isotope
235, subjected to neutron bombardment, might conceivably blow up all London or
Paris.”
In hindsight we can see
that the nuclear age and the permanently militarized economy was Miller's premonition of “something unimaginable” that was being born. His insight might have been less prophetic and more just wise observation of changes happening in the world. However, in choosing
his title, he couldn't have consciously known that the new technology of air
conditioning would play such a crucial role in building atomic weapons. For how
many people even today know that coolant technology has been essential to every
nation that has enriched uranium for nuclear fuel and weapons?
Since the UN and nations of the world applauded
themselves for signing the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone
Layer, they have all done a good job of not mentioning that
uranium enrichment processes were exempted from the agreement. If you do
internet searches for exemptions to the protocol, you’ll find some for asthma
inhalers and other uses that account for trivial amounts, but you won’t find
mention of the large consumption of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) used in uranium
enrichment since 1987. It seems to have been tactfully left unmentioned in UN
documents that were meant to tout the victory and not allow the public to
question the judgment that nuclear was clean and green enough to be given a
pass on its ozone depleting emissions. Although no one wanted to draw attention
to the exemptions, CFC pollution by the nuclear industry has long been an open secret,
and it is not denied by the polluters themselves.
 |
|
have built an atomic bomb while under Allied Forces bombardment. Essential facilities like this would have been impossible to hide.
|
The
additional problem with CFCs is that, as well as being ozone depleters, they
are said to trap heat 10,000 to 20,000 times more effectively than CO2. Thus
the carbon footprint of nuclear energy (mining, processing, construction of plants, cooling of
fuel, decommissioning of plants, decontamination, transport of waste, storage
of waste) takes a
huge increase when you consider the energy used to run the cooling systems and
the impact of leaks of coolant. A 2004 report from
the Institute for
Energy and Environmental Research
described the recent history of American enrichment facilities this way:
"In
addition to requiring a large amount of electricity during operation, the
compressors in the gas diffusion facilities also generate a great deal of heat
that requires dissipation. In U.S. plants this heat is dissipated through the
use of ozone depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) such as the coolant CFC-114 (often referred to simply as Freon or Freon-114). The manufacture, import, and
use of CFCs were substantially restricted by the 1987 Montreal Protocol on
Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, which the U.S. is implementing through
the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act. As a result of these
commitments, the manufacture of Freon in the U.S. ended in 1995 and its
emissions to the air in the United States from large users fell by nearly 60%
between 1991 and 2002. The emissions from the Paducah gaseous diffusion
plant, however, have remained virtually constant over this time, falling just
over 7% between 1989 and 2002. In 2002, the Paducah enrichment plant
emitted more than 197.3 metric tons of Freon into the air through leaking pipes
and other equipment. This single facility accounted for more than 55% of all
airborne releases of this ozone depleting CFC from all large users in the
entire United States in 2002. Due to the lack of additional manufacturing
of Freon since 1995, the U.S. Enrichment Corporation [USEC] is currently
looking for a non-CFC coolant to use. Likely candidates would still have
heat trapping potential, and thus even if they were not as dangerous to
the ozone layer, they would still remain a potential concern in relation to
global warming and climate change."
"Project sponsor
USEC Inc. intends the American Centrifuge Plant to replace its existing
energy-intensive, Cold-War era production facility. This transition will reduce
greenhouse-gas emissions related to USEC’s existing enrichment technology by
millions of tons annually."
The downside of this new, less energy-intensive
technology is that once it is no longer exclusively possessed by one country, nuclear
fuel enrichment becomes more small-scale and concealable. The US government and
USEC have responded to public pressure to reduce the environmental impact of
uranium enrichment, but they have very strong incentives to not share this
technology. The benefit of the old technology is that it is so energy intensive
and hot that facilities are difficult to hide from IAEA inspections. If the new
technology were used by anyone other than its self-appointed guardians, uranium
enrichment could become accessible to “rogue” states and non-state entities. If
the new technology really does mitigate an old problem, it just creates a new
one with equally unsettling implications.
"In
1994, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 16 September the
International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer, commemorating the
date of the signing, in 1987, of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that
Deplete the Ozone Layer (resolution 49/114). Implementation
of the Montreal Protocol progressed well in developed and developing countries.
All phase-out schedules were adhered to in most cases, some even ahead of
schedule. In view of the steady progress made under the Protocol, already in
2003, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated, ‘Perhaps the
single most successful international agreement to date has been the Montreal
Protocol’. His views are shared widely in the international community."
By the standards of all other
international agreements, perhaps the Montreal Protocol is the most successful,
but in light of what we know about the exemptions granted for uranium
enrichment, it is clear that such agreements are made behind closed doors in an
undemocratic process that leaves electorates and citizens uninformed about the
issues in question. No one asked you if you thought the nuclear industry should
be exempt from restrictions on CFC use, and the UN made no effort after the
fact to inform you of its decision.
The decision to grant these exemptions
must have been based on the “realism” that holds that nuclear disarmament is
not going to happen and that the global investments made in nuclear power
plants cannot just be written off in order to quickly halt destruction of the
ozone layer.
No doubt, the UN must have turned to
its own promoter of nuclear energy, the IAEA, to quantify the overall carbon
and ozone impact of nuclear energy. Unsurprisingly, the IAEA would conclude
that in spite of the negative effects of nuclear energy, the overall harm would
be greater if the world had to produce electricity by other means.
Of course, opponents of nuclear do
their own calculations and argue that nuclear energy has a much greater carbon
footprint and ozone effect than the nuclear industry cares to admit. The
negatives accumulate if one also considers the costs passed on to future
generations for decommissioning, waste storage, decontamination and liability for
accidents. The nuclear industry claims that money has been put aside for
decommissioning and waste storage, but it is likely that the costs are going to
be much higher than what has been put aside.
The public wasn't involved in this
discussion at all when the Montreal Protocol was signed, although it is an
interesting question to wonder what large environmental NGOs consented to and
agreed not to discuss when compromises were worked out.
We can see in hindsight that the
Montreal Protocol could have gone a lot further. It could have disallowed the
exemptions for uranium enrichment and turned the world away from nuclear
energy. It was, after all, just one year after the Chernobyl catastrophe. Now,
twenty-five years later, when alternative energy sources are finally being
developed on a large scale, it is clear that action should have been taken
sooner. As much as the Montreal Protocol was a success in mitigating the worst
damage to the ozone layer, it was a failure for continuing to support nuclear
energy while missing an opportunity to promote alternatives.
We know about the exemptions for
uranium enrichment only because of the relatively open nature of the United
States government and the culture of citizen activism there. Argentina,
Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan,
Russia, and the United
Kingdom are the other
known operators of enrichment facilities, but nothing seems to be published about their
impact on global warming and the ozone layer, or what these countries are
planning to do to limit the environmental damage.
UPDATE MAY, 2013: For an update on USEC, see Ecowatch's Countdown to Nuclear Ruin at Paducah. The federal government privatized the enrichment plant many years ago, and now that USEC has made as much money as it can, it is abandoning the toxic legacy for tax payers to deal with.
Further reading and notes:
- "The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Paducah, Kentucky, is the only
U.S.-owned uranium enrichment facility in the United States. Owned by the U.S.
Department of Energy, it is leased and operated by the United States Enrichment
Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of USEC Inc. The plant employs
about 1,200 people and produces low-enriched uranium fuel for commercial
nuclear power plants in the United States and around the world."
- A good analysis of the claims made on both sides of the
issue about of CFC
use in uranium enrichment:
- A response to anti-nuclear activist
Helen Caldicott's “distortions,”
apparently written by a loyal employee of USEC.
- Understanding the Cleanup Process at
Paducah’s Gaseous Diffusion Plant
- A likely
justification for allowing enrichment facilities to continue operations was so
that they could afford to carry out downblending – the process of turning highly
enriched uranium from decommissioned weapons into less enriched uranium for
nuclear power plants. The existence of weapons grade uranium does not,
however, mean that it must be used up
in nuclear power plants if a nation has good reasons to produce its electricity
by other means. Nuclear waste, regardless of its level of enrichment, can be
disposed of in the same way that spent nuclear fuel is disposed of.
- In the
list above of other
known operators of enrichment facilities, South Korea is not listed, even though it has
adopted an energy policy of strong reliance on nuclear energy. It is curious
that it would choose this policy while being utterly dependent on a foreign
country continuing to operate enrichment facilities. This underlines the
falsity of claims by some nations that they can achieve “energy independence”
while becoming reliant on a form of energy that requires massive infrastructure
investments, raw material imports, and other forms of energy for cooling and backup
in case of accidents.
- John Warrick. "Paducah Plant Spewed Plutonium." The Washington Post. October 1, 2000. "The unsigned maps, bearing a handwritten date of Aug. 26, 1999, show a plant ringed with contamination that extends in some cases for well over a mile. The diagrams also show elevated levels of plutonium in the Ohio River, about two miles north of the plant."
- Jean Harrington. "Splitting the Atom." Scientific American. October 1939.
- Pavel Podvig. "The Fallacy of the Megatons to Megawatts Program." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. July 23, 2008.
- Geoffrey Sea, "Countdown to Nuclear Ruin at Paducah," Ecowatch, May 22, 2013.
