Monsignore Luc Gillon was a jolly friar, a jovial and highly intelligent chain-smoker with rosy cheeks and a thinning crown of hair. Gillon also possessed a coolly analytical mind, graduating at the top of his class from Princeton with a degree in nuclear physics. In the 1950s he went to Congo, which was then still a Belgian colony, as a missionary and was soon able to realize two of his lifelong dreams. In 1954, he presided over the birth of the Lovanium, the first university in central Africa. Today, Gillon is considered the spiritual father to a whole generation of Congolese intellectuals who graduated from the institution. Gillon also tirelessly lobbied for another major project: the construction of a nuclear reactor for research in the heart of Léopoldville, today’s Kinshasa. History may ultimately remember Gillon as the creator of the world’s most insecure nuclear reactor.
In the early 1950s, Gillon started his petitions to the Belgian government, and he also advised top officials as to how to proceed with the project. The government, he suggested, should demand American nuclear technology as “free-issue equipment.” His argument was that since the uranium ore used in the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima came from Belgian Congo, the Americans owed the colony a favor. Astonishingly, this reasoning was accepted, and in 1957, as part of the Atoms for Peace program, Washington had the components for a TRIGA Mark 1 reactor delivered to Congo. This compact facility was made by a company called General Atomic and was installed by on-site Belgian technicians. It went operational in 1959. One year later, Gillon posed for a Life magazine photo in front of the reactor’s heavy-water pool. The West hailed the reactor as a symbol of progress in Africa. But Washington’s gift was hardly as selfless as it seemed. The United States hoped that the TRIGA Mark 1 would curry favor among the elites of the colony, which possessed vast natural resources. Indeed, the reactor was a point of pride for Congo, which achieved independence from Belgium in 1960. But instead of becoming a beacon of peace and freedom, the young nation quickly descended into civil war and chaos.
A decade later, the charismatic and ruthless Mobutu Sese Seko emerged victorious from the fighting and appointed himself president. The research reactor in the middle of the capital was a useful vehicle for the dictator to use to boost the prestige of his corrupt regime, and in 1972 the aging facility was replaced with the much more powerful TRIGA Mark 2. Scientists didn’t do anything particularly spectacular with this prestigious reactor, using it to produce radioactive isotopes for medical equipment and to irradiate seeds. The institute where the reactor was kept was also anything but state of the art. The reactor building had neither telephones nor reliable electricity. Calculations were made on blackboards. Then at some point during the 1970s, Mobutu lost interest in the reactor, and no one got especially upset when two seventy-centimeter-long backup fuel rods disappeared from a storage pool. The later director for the department of nuclear physics at the university, Professor Félix Malo Wa Kalenga, surmised that his predecessor had simply lent a visitor a ring of keys without noticing that one of them was to the reactor. When journalist Michela Wrong interviewed Kalenga about lax security standards at the facility, he pretended to be deaf and unable to understand her questions.
Twenty years later, one of the fuel rods suddenly turned up in Italy. Smugglers offered the uranium, which was at least 20-percent enriched, to what they thought were buyers from the Middle East—in reality agents of the Italian police’s Central Investigating Service, SCICO. As a result of “Operation Gamma,” authorities apprehended twelve people, all of them members of the mafia, but none provided any information concerning the whereabouts of the other fuel rod. An IAEA expert has said that it’s probably somewhere in the Congolese forests. More pessimistic observers think that it has likely already fallen into the wrong hands. Reassuringly, the uranium contained by the rod is nowhere near sufficient enough to generate enough fissible material for a bomb, which would require far greater amounts of enriched material.
The National Nuclear Security Agency, which is part of the Department of Energy, says that by 2013 all of the “most sensitive” nuclear material around the world will have been secured. At the top of the list is the highly enriched uranium used in civilian research reactors. In contrast to military installations, such facilities represent soft targets. And while it’s difficult to convert the sort of material used in research reactors into fuel for bombs, it’s not impossible.
Those interested in what happened to the Congolese research reactor after Mobutu’s downfall and death in 1997 can see for themselves by visiting the decrepit building complex in the Southern Kinshasa neighborhood of Lema. Security is relaxed. A few padlocks are the only things restricting access to the buildings. There’s no need to find a hole in the fence to crawl through. Usually there’s no guard in the gatekeeper’s house.
Since 1997, more fuel rods have apparently gone missing. In March 2007, one of the nuclear center’s directors was arrested in Kinshasa. He was accused of selling an “important quantity” of uranium material over the years on the black market. But it’s nearly impossible to determine what is true and what is malicious rumor.
But it’s time, and not thieves, that is gnawing away most at the TRIGA Mark 2. In 2001, a reporter dared to make his way into the interior of the reactor. Neon tubes crackled above the sunken pool, the walls of the decrepit building were covered in mold, and garbage was floating atop the brackish water. The visibly nervous technical director of the facility, armed with a Geiger counter, hastened to tell the reporter that they probably shouldn’t spend too much time there.
If not all of the radioactive material in the Congo reactor has been stolen, then nine million residents of Kinshasa are sitting on a time bomb. The building housing the reactor was built on a hill with an acute potential for landslides, and, while administrators claim the facility is safe, an entire wall suddenly collapsed in 2000. What’s more, the complex was once hit by a small explosive, probably a wayward rocket-launched grenade. If radioactive emissions got into the city’s water supply, the resulting catastrophe would be beyond repair. After the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the commissioner of the Kinshasa Regional Center for Nuclear Studies, Vincent Lukanda Muamba, assured the world that the reactor was “idle but safe,” adding that operations had been shut down for seven years due to a lack of spare parts. Unlike Fukushima, he told reporters at a press conference on March 17, 2011, Kinshasa was located neither in an earthquake region nor near the sea.
Such blasé statements are not merely a problem. The West, too, has realized atomic dreams that are every bit as misguided as Luc Gillon’s nuclear research facility. Westerners have taken nuclear reactors and batteries with them wherever they went, be it to the bottom of the sea or to the peaks of the highest mountains. The United States built a nuclear power plant on Antarctica to supply the McMurdo Research Station with electricity and schlepped a plutonium-based battery up a mountain in the Himalayas to power a weather station. (If we believe an article written by Rolling Stone journalist Howard Kohn, the true purpose of the installation was to spy on the Chinese nuclear program on the other side of the mountain.) The ball-shaped battery and its half-kilogram of plutonium were buried in an avalanche. Today, the radioactive battery is probably somewhere on the southern slope of Nanda Devi near the source of the River Ganges. Indian officials deny the story, calling it a cleverly placed media ruse to discredit the United States. In the Cold War, it was seldom possible to separate truth from fiction.
What is beyond doubt is that there is complacency and irresponsibility everywhere, including in Europe, Japan, and the United States. Indeed, in the west, the scale of the nuclear facilities is so much greater that the possiblity of catastrophes is also hugely increased.
The irony is that the early atomic age seemed so full of promise. The new technology was viewed as a potential savior that would solve a host of the world’s problems. Initially, nuclear technology seemed to offer a way to defeat Hitler’s Germany. Then it became an inexhaustible energy source that would guarantee the prosperity of coming generations. When the first nuclear reactor became operational, humanity took a step into the unknown. The inventors were well attuned to the solemnity of the occasion and the dangers the new age entailed. The first reactor had been conceived within the framework of the Manhattan Project and built according to a design by the brilliant physicist Enrico Fermi. It was kept in a gymnasium at the University of Chicago, a somewhat banal location for a piece of technology that would define a historical period. The reactor’s nickname was likewise unpretentious: the Chicago Pile, or CP1 for short. It represented a massive achievement for its constructors. America’s entry into the Atomic Age was truly revolutionary. In terms of physics, this was completely uncharted territory. Never before had human beings been able to create tremendous amounts of energy from what seemed like thin air. But the atomic pioneers created a host of ethical problems whose scope no one could have anticipated in 1942. It was a hopeful if uncanny start, and America’s nuclear scientists were commensurately nervous at 3:00 p.m. on December 2, 1942, as they commenced the greatest experiment in human history. Fermi had prepared every minute detail before the big day. He and his assistants had pondered security measures for months. This was not only the birth of nuclear power, but nuclear safety. Mechanical systems were in place to automatically shut down the reactor if it started overheating. In addition, an assistant with an axe was stationed next to the pile. In an emergency, he would chop through a rope to lower a master rod into the core of the reactor. As soon as it made contact, nuclear fission would cease. The assistant was nicknamed the “Safety Cut Rope Axe Man,” or SCRAM. Today, the word is still used to describe a rapid emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor.
In the eventuality that these safety precautions failed, Fermi had posted three further assistants around the pile who were to flood it with a cadmium-saline solution if given the signal. Thankfully, none of the measures was needed. The reactor was booted up at 3:20 p.m.; after about half an hour, Fermi interrupted the chain reaction in controlled fashion. The experiment was a success.
The test in Chicago was very much the child of World War II and was aimed at producing plutonium for a bomb. After Germany and Japan had been defeated, researchers pressed forward with the construction of civilian nuclear power plants in the United States. Nonetheless, military utility always played an important if covert role in the planning of power plants. Nuclear plants inevitably produce plutonium uranium that can be used to make bombs. That is why national programs like the one recently announced by Saudi Arabia to build reactors should always be greeted with skepticism. Civilian and military nuclear programs are Siamese twins.
Historically, the United States was quickest to turn theory into reality. By December 20, 1951, a research reactor in Idaho was already generating electricity. Five years later, the Pentagon unveiled the first atomic submarine. In 1954, the first nuclear power plant went online in the Soviet Union, although it actually consumed more energy than it produced. In 1956, the first truly efficient plant, Calder Hall, began operations in Britain. The Golden Age of nuclear energy appeared to be at hand. An effusive President Eisenhower declared that humanity was standing on the threshold of creating a “new and better earth,” and the recently crowned Queen Elizabeth II also spoke of a new world that had opened up thanks to nuclear power.
For a brief moment in history, people truly believed that the planet’s energy problems had been solved once and for all. The head of the Atomic Energy Commission boasted that electricity would become so cheap that there would be no need for meters any more. But none of these high hopes was realized. Scientists never found a way to generate electricity using fusion, the process that takes place within the sun, nor did they succeed in developing economical nuclear-fission power plants. Construction costs for such facilities proved disproportionately high compared with other systems for generating power. But there was no going back. The world had invested far too much, in both a monetary and an emotional sense, in the new technology. Politicians felt bound to keep the promises that had raised the public’s expectations, and in the background, the military was eager to get its hands on plutonium. Energy companies were forced to swallow horrendous developmental costs.
Firms like General Electric and Westinghouse advised that nuclear plants would have to be built in gigantic formats if nuclear power was to make economic sense. This view was based on drawing analogies between the pressure-water principle of small reactors on submarines and energy factories capable of producing 600, 800, or even 1,000 megawatts. But the concept of lowering costs with greater volume was a dead end. Reactors only got more complex, not more economical. While the reactors used to propel submarines and icebreakers were relatively compact and easy to control, technicians in big power plants had to deal with highly complicated, kilometer-long cooling systems. In a study of the situation nuclear engineers face in the control room, author Stephanie Cooke contrasts them with plumbers. Whereas plumbers can easily check the flame of a gas boiler, she writes, nuclear technicians can’t physically get to the source of potential danger, the reactor’s core: that means that nuclear technicians, as well trained or experienced as they may be, often feel as though they’re being forced to read tea leaves, instead of being the masters of the latest technology.
By the mid-1960s, as construction on a number of colossal plants was well underway, experts began to suspect that a core meltdown in such gigantic facilities would be absolutely catastrophic. Scientists’ minds were haunted by the specter of the China Syndrome—the idea that an ultra-hot reactor core could melt the ground on which it stood all the way down to the center of the planet. In 1992, BBC journalist Adam Curtis made an investigative documentary film about the reactions of industrial and political leaders to this nightmare scenario. A safety committee within the AEC recommended modifying reactors to isolate them more effectively from their environs. The industry agreed to some minor concessions but refused for cost reasons to significantly reinforce the containment shells surrounding reactors’ cores. Instead, engineers concentrated on modifying cooling systems that were supposed to prevent nuclear meltdown. David Okrent, a leading AEC official who was responsible for licensing the plants, later admitted that his agency had been forced to compromise by General Electric and Westinghouse. According to him, when asked about the safety features of their design, General Electric representatives indicated that “they didn’t want to continue selling nuclear reactors if they were going to have to deal with the core-melt problem.” Westinghouse put forward something called a “core catcher,” but it never provided any evidence that it worked. Okrent recalled: “Neither company was anxious to deal with the problem, obviously … It was a kind of threat, I think.”
Thus, significant sums were spent to build untested systems that were supposed to prevent reactors from overheating. No further measures were instituted for the eventuality that a reactor, despite all the safety precautions, melted down. That avoided costly investments, but the strategy backfired when large-scale nuclear power plants began operating in the 1970s. On March 28, 1979, there was a major reactor accident at the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A defective valve accidentally shut down the plant’s cooling system. The engineers responsible for the reactor were caught completely off-guard. No one had any idea what to do in this situation. Neither the makers of the plant nor the company that ran it had devoted sufficient attention to the meltdown scenario. Technicians could only look on helplessly as a giant hydrogen bubble formed within the plant’s interior. A gas explosion almost ripped through the plant’s containment shell, but the plant workers averted the worst by releasing some of the hydrogen. The shell remained intact. Improvisation and luck prevented large amounts of radioactivity from escaping into the surrounding area.
But soon there was another, likewise unpredictable chain of events, after which it was no longer possible to avert a catastrophe. The name Chernobyl has become a synonym for the dark side of atomic energy. The constellation that led to disaster there bore some similarities to Three Mile Island. Energy policy in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union focused on building gigantic nuclear power plants, and to keep the exorbitant costs somewhat under control, corners were cut in safety. Just like their colleagues in the West, Soviet nuclear scientists believed that they had a handle on their technology and that a core meltdown was impossible. This proved to be a fatal mistake. One conservative estimate puts the number of deaths caused by the Chernobyl disaster at 4,000. Others sources say as many 30,000 people died.
The problem, both in the West and behind the Iron Curtain, was a lack of imagination. No one was able to picture the worst-case scenario. Indeed, no one wanted to—a pattern that has repeated itself over the years. The proprietors and constructors of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, as well as many Japanese politicians, also had blinders on. The reactors at Fukushima were built according to plans made by General Electric in the 1960s. Safety specifications had taken account of possible earthquakes and tsunamis, but not the fact that severe earthquakes and tsunamis could occur together. The economic viability of the facility took precedence. Thus everyone was caught off-guard. A natural disaster of the sort that was visited on coastal Japan in 2011 may only happen once in a century, but in a region so seismically active, people should have been prepared for anything. Far more minor phenomena than a giant tsunami have been known to cause accidents in nuclear power plants. In 1975, for example, there was a disruption in an American reactor after a technician accidentally set a piece of foam on fire with a candle.
In the wake of Fukushima, people once again began asking: How safe is safe? The latest generation of nuclear power plants is supposedly more reliable than gigantic electricity factories of the 1960s and ’70s, but while progress may have been made in averting accidents caused by mechanical defects and human error, serious, new, and hard-to-anticipate risks have arisen in the meantime. In 2010, the Iranian nuclear reactor in Busher was reportedly infected with the Stuxnet computer virus. The Iranian interior minister denied that this had taken place, but Russian scientists warned that viruses could cause a Chernobyl-like disaster there. If the reports are true, nuclear power has become the focus of cyber-warfare—with unknown consequences.
Germany, a country heavily reliant on nuclear power, could become an interesting case study for nations seeking an exit strategy. After decades of political fights, anti-nuclear demonstrations, and squabbles, the country has decided to wind down its production of nuclear power. The last reactor will be taken off the grid in 2022. Today, more than 20 percent of the energy generated by Germany is produced by renewable sources, and this figure is expected to double within the next eight years. While this sends a strong message to other industrialized nations relying on nuclear power and fossil fuels, it doesn’t mean that the problems will just disappear. In an age of free international trade in power, Germans of course still call upon nuclear-produced energy from abroad. Many neighboring countries still depend on outmoded nuclear facilities constructed in the 1960s and ’70s. And yet even if every country in the world were to shut down its plants, this would leave the problem of how to deal with tons and tons of nuclear waste heaped up in the past. Unfortunately, in our energy-hungry world, easy answers are hard to come by.