SCIENCE
Generating fear
STEPHEN WALKER gives a nervous welcome to a history of nuclear power, which focuses on the accidents and the disasters that have plagued the sector
Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima
by Serhii Plokhy
Allen Lane, 368 pages, £25
Unless most life as we know it has been wiped off the face of the planet by the time this review comes out, I’d urge you to pick up this book – and, as its author warns in his stark preface, be terrified. Serhii Plokhy is one of those historians whose finger seems to be unerringly on the pulse of current events. Just a year ago, he gave us Nuclear Folly, a dramatic retelling of when the world came close to nuclear Armageddon during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Now in Atoms and Ashes, he takes a truly chilling look at nuclear weaponry’s twin – nuclear power.
In a series of shocking, hour-by-hour snapshots, he details exactly what happens when nuclear power plants, ostensibly designed for peace and plenty, abruptly decide to go off the rails and melt down, blow up and spew enormous quantities of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The only story missing here is the one in which the Russians fire high-explosive shells directly at a Ukrainian nuclear power station, and that’s because, by the time Plokhy wrote his last sentence, it hadn’t happened yet.
But the message is there, loud and clear. When humans mess with the guts of creation things will sometimes go wrong – and occasionally catastrophically. This is, explicitly, a book about accidents, from the lesser-known 1957 Kyshtym meltdown in the USSR to the 2011 explosions at Fukushima’s Daiichi nuclear station in Japan – an accident that proved it wasn’t only antique, badly built and poorly managed Soviet power stations that went haywire, while also giving the Japanese their third grim experience of nuclear fallout.
Of course the star performer on Plokhy’s “list of the world’s worst nuclear disasters” is Chernobyl, and as somebody who has written a book about that too his chapter is especially gripping, not least with his unsparing eye for irony. So we learn that it was, quite literally, the “graveyard shift” that first witnessed a massive explosion in the number four reactor during the early hours of 26 April 1986, setting off a chain of events that would lead over time to perhaps 50,000 dead.
“Windscale was Britain’s attempt to lead the nuclear fuel field. Then a fire in one of its piles in 1957 hurled radioactive dust across a chunk of the country”
And the theme continues with the 1979 meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, which led to the evacuation of 144,000 people in what the veteran CBS reporter Walter Cronkite at the time called “a nuclear nightmare”. Here Plokhy doesn’t waste an opportunity to point out that it happened just 12 days after The China Syndrome, an Oscar-nominated movie about a near-nuclear meltdown, hit America’s big screens.
Nor does Plokhy omit our very own homegrown accident at Windscale in Cumbria, whose showpiece power station was Britain’s attempt to lead the nuclear field until a fire in one of its piles in 1957 hurled radioactive dust across a chunk of the country, irradiating food supplies and almost certainly causing cancers for decades. “Oh dear,” said one of the engineers when he first spotted the fire raging away inside the reactor, “now we are in a pickle.” It was a sentence worthy of the best Ealing comedies, except this was no comedy.
With 440 reactors still active around the world supplying 10 per cent of our electricity, the darker realities of playing Prometheus, as Plokhy writes, are still very much with us. All of which makes the case for solar and wind farms more compelling than ever. At least they don’t blow up.
Stephen Walker is the author of Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima (HarperCollins, new edition, 2020) and Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human in Space (William Collins, 2022)
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