Nuclear renaissance blows (up the spot)

Those of you who recall the 1980s will no doubt remember not just the horrible day glow fashion and hideous hair but also the international specter of radiation that overshadowed daily life. Ionizing radiation, from a theorized nuclear holocaust or nuclear power reactor accidents, was at the top of media reports and at the top of public fears.

However, radiation, in and of itself, was neither a new nor unnatural phenomenon. Also, the life cycle of radioactive elements is not confined to the narrow sphere of weapons or energy and they continue to pervade our everyday lives – in manufacturing processes, in health care and even in your living room smoke detector.

In these ways, radiation is far from just an inconvenient environmental and social liability, it is part of our convenient modernity in which we seek to eradicate human suffering through a domination of nature, including the nature of the atom. Along the path from uranium ore to industrially, medically or militarily useful materials to radioactive waste, there is a dynamic mix of benefits, liabilities and economic opportunities.

The common perception is that if we avoid nuclear power facilities and research and testing sites that we’re generally safe from exposure to radiation. The reality is that we are all exposed to ration on an ongoing basis. Just by being on Earth, we come into contact with a certain level of ionizing radiation. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has even put together a system of radiation risk assessment that breaks conveniently allows people 360 millirems per year, or about one a day.

Twenty-six of those come naturally from cosmic sources and another 23 to 90, again without human cause, from the ground you walk on. You are also expected to ingest about 40 millirems of radiation from your food and water and calculated to breathe in an astounding 200 millirems from the alpha particles from radon gas. If you get medical x-rays you can expect to absorb about another 70 millirems annually. There are also a whole range of lifestyle factors that you may not expect to affect your millirem exposure, like porcelain crowns or false teeth, the mantels of gas lanterns and living in a stone, brick or concrete building.

The one that we all fear and had 80’s nightmares about – reactor meltdowns and fallout from the more than 500 above ground nuclear explosions between 1945 and 1990 – gives us only one millirem a year. That is about the same as the LCD display wrist watch that you wear.

This is not to say that certain locations and events, such as the 26 April 1986 accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine or the attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively, have not resulted in irrevocable and incomprehensible death, suffering and disfigurement. However, the environmental and social fallout from these events has not precluded the continuation, and even proliferation of nuclear and radiation technologies.

In many ways the first decade of this century is a renaissance for nuclear development, both as rumors of the United States’ efforts to develop small scale “bunker buster” nuclear weapons and as North Korea seems to have brushed the United States off its back with its combination of long range missiles and a demonstrated nuclear weapon test in October 2006. Also, Russia is helping Iran build a nuclear reactor as it continues with the development of its nuclear capabilities, whether those be aimed at electricity or weapons production and last August the United States signed a bilateral agreement with India regarding India’s “civilian” nuclear technology. And in the United States 17 companies are laying the groundwork to build 33 new nuclear reactors – possibly just the right solution for energy in a market in which oil will probably not see the low side of $100 a barrel ever again and biofuels continue to conflict with food markets.

If the question is “How do we ensure our military capabilities and our energy needs?” then the answer, for many, seems to be the same as last century – go nuclear.

In the shadow of this answer, we may also renew our nightmare scenarios, though they will now be lined with advanced radiation technologies like praseodymium-147 to measure the thickness of our textiles, americium-241 to detect smoke in our homes, californium-252 to measure moisture content in the fields where our food grows and iodine-131 for radiation therapy.

Further down the half life of these military, industrial, political and medical innovations, there are results both more curious and more sinister.

In Washington state, in the US, courts have ruled in favor of those exposed to radiation as a result of working at or living near the Hanford Nuclear Site, which produced plutonium for much of the US arsenal. Such a ruling opens the way for further “downwinder” cases related to nuclear weapons production and testing in the United States.

Radioactive waste dumps and tailings from uranium mining and processing are also a huge issue related to our dependence on radiation. The waste is often a fiscal liability and this translates into an environmental liability as well, as it has been dumped and abandoned around the world, from South Africa to Central Asia and the Sea of Japan.

Abandoned uranium mines, in Boulder and Basin, Montana, US and Bad Gastein Austria, have actually capitalized on the excess of radon gas and converted the liability to a part of their tourist economies as people come there for natural radiation treatments that are claimed to cure arthritis and other ailments.

However, the renewed proliferation of fission and fissile materials as solutions for political, energy, industrial and military predicaments will outstretch their useful lifespan. We’ll still be stuck with the deadly half-lives of these “advancements,” as more nuclear activity moves deeper into our communities, farmland, industry and foreign policy, and the only recourse will be to recalculate the recommended daily dosage of millirems: a 21^st century version of “day glow” fashion.