9

Opportunizing on Chernobyl

MAY 3, 1986

 

It took the Soviet Union four days to advise the world (five days to advise its own citizens) that there was a meltdown, and it took somewhere between four and five hours for the U.S. ideologues to seize on Chernobyl as an answer to their prayers. One can only suppose that Jane Fonda looked up at the celestial clouds and thought fleetingly that maybe there is a God there after all. If you pray long and persistently enough, God will give you the China Syndrome. To be sure, he gave it to us in the Soviet Union, but so what? We can rally the troops and have it out for good and all, and rid America of nuclear power.

The assembly mobilized to welcome Chernobyl calls itself the Coalition of Environmental/Safe Energy Organizations. It includes, obviously, the Union of Concerned Scientists, whose concern over the possible success of our space shield, which concerns them most of the time, gave room for concern over our nuclear electrical plants. They seize on Chernobyl as a reason once and for all to phase out all the atomic fuel plants in the United States. They are joined in this by some of the conservationist groups, who if they had their way would rip up all transcontinental highways to protect the peripatetic rights of meandering buffalo. One expects the Sierra Club nowadays and, alas, the National Audubon Society to prefer the preservation of the lousewort over the preservation of free people enjoying an industrialized leverage on life.

But it is the first time some of us were made aware of the Christic Institute, and so help me, the very first time one came across something called Blacks Against Nukes. One would think that there are enough issues around to divide us without having to worry about why it is that blacks should have more or less to worry about in the matter of nukes than whites or reds or, for that matter, mulattoes.

When one thinks back on Three Mile Island and how it succeeded in intimidating an entire post-industrial demarche, one is grateful that the trepidations that now stop us dead in our tracks didn’t arrest our forefathers. If so, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria would have turned around and headed back to Spain if one bo’sun had become seasick. The relevant facts distinguishing Chernobyl from nearly all A-plants in America are visible even to extreme non-scientists. The Soviets used a graphite moderator, and were without the protective dome we have been insisting upon since well before Three Mile Island. By common standards, this is primitive stuff; in the words of one observer, Soviet safety measures were at the “Bhopal level.”

It is instructive that on the very day the Soviet nuclear accident was revealed, the presidential commission on the space shuttle explosion reported that its searches into the causes of the tragedy of last January are now positively concluded. The Challenger was destroyed because of a design failure in the shuttle seal and because of the temperature of the weather. Four months, and we have the answer. The technicians can go back and redesign the seal, and it should be possible to launch again before the end of the year. By contrast, no new nuclear energy plants have even been spudded since Three Mile Island, never mind the progress in that industry in Europe.

It will be interesting to see how Europe reacts to Chernobyl. Clearly no plant will any longer be tolerated that duplicates the flimsy protective devices of Chernobyl. But the Europeans are not going to stop nuclear energy. They have their mad scientists over there, too, but Europeans tend to have an eye out for commercial progress, and ideology tends to be gently but firmly shoved aside when there is a threat to it.

We should reflect seriously on the figures. The Soviet Union already relies on nuclear fuel for 10 percent of its electricity, and has in mind greatly increasing this figure, not so much because it is running out of oil, but because it likes to sell its oil for hard currency. Japan, which has to import all its sources of energy, derives 25 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. The truly impressive figure is France’s: 65 percent of French electricity comes from nuclear sources, and even now France is selling electricity to Great Britain, an island of coal in the North Atlantic.

It is calculated that every American expends per day the same amount of energy as would be expended if each one of us had ninety-nine slaves working for us full-time. Oil and gas, for all that they appear ubiquitous at this moment, are diminishing universal assets. Nuclear power is going to give our grandchildren mechanical leverage in an intractable universe—or else it is going to emancipate those slaves, leaving us all the joys of caveman existence.