Nixon’s Awful Legacy, Part Two
Setting a disastrous course in nuclear energy
Barring a truly disastrous future run of chief executives, Richard Nixon will always be listed among the very worst of American presidents. But his impact extends far beyond that of Watergate, the political scandal that led to his downfall. By a quirk of fate, Nixon happened to be in charge when a series of crucial issues appeared in need of decision. And in so many cases, his choices were not just wrong but horribly wrong, with negative effects that persist to this day.
In 1971, in a grand announcement, Nixon announced a grand program to build nuclear power plants across America. The revolutionary source of energy would be plentiful, clean and safe.
For decades to come, Nixon’s rationale behind the announced funding would remain the staples of the nuclear industry, although the assurances are becoming rather stale in light of events. It no longer seems quite so plentiful, given the staggering cost of building (and, decades later, refurbishing) nuclear power plants; it no longer seems quite so environmentally conscious, given the vast amounts of incredibly toxic waste that will bedevil the world for thousands of generations; and in the wake of Three Mile Island, Chernyobl and Fukushima, few still believe the technology is safe (or worth the expense).
The video embedded above has some darkly amusing aspects. First is Nixon’s open and repeated aknowledgement that his understanding of nuclear technology was extremely limited. Second was the introduction of individuals who would forever be associated with Nixon: John Erlichmann and Henry Kissinger.
But among the introductions was of a new head of the Atomic Energy Commission. The previous head of the agency, Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel-Prize-winning nuclear scientist who had powerfully encouraged the nation’s civilian nuclear power efforts, had just resigned after many clashes with Nixon. Seaborg’s would be the first of two major “nuclear resignations” under Nixon. The second, and most important, would come two years later, with the ousting of Alvin M. Weinberg, head of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1973.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Cold War was well entrenched, with both sides of the Iron Curtain racing each other to develop and produce nuclear weapons that were more powerful, more lightweight and more numerous, using weapons-grade nuclear material produced in secret government reactors. However even during the early days of the Manhattan Project it was apparent that those reactors, in addition to creating substances like plutonium, could also generate electricity in great quantities cheaply, safely and without pollution.
As early as the 1950s, Canada began developing its CANDU civilian power reactor system, and the Soviet Union its RBMK reactor — with competing designs underway in Great Britain and France, with all systems reaching commercial maturity by the 1970s. From an economic perspective, a huge new market was about to dawn on humanity, with potentially thousands of nuclear power plants to be built (at hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars per reactor). Well into Richard Nixon’s first term, it was becoming obvious that America needed to be a part of the action, and quick.
Nixon was the perfect man to get things done. He, like few other presidents, understood how to use the power of the presidency, to gain support when his power reached its limit, and exploit every step of the process for personal political gain. The prospect of all that funding served as a major inducement to Congressmen, Senators and more. After a great deal of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the program was on. The Atomic Energy Commission predicted that over a thousand nuclear power plants would be built in America alone. There was only one problem: the technology.
Nuclear reactors are huge, complex machines, but their basic functioning can be reduced to very simple terms. A reactor core employs nuclear fission to generate intense heat. That heat is used, mainly by water, to create steam and generate electricity. Hot radioactive core, steam, electricity. But the water also serves a crucial role: by creating that steam, the water draws off heat from the core, thereby moderating its temperature. Not all reactors operate this way, but so-called “water reactors” make up the vast majority of nuclear power plants in the world today.
Without the water, the core can quickly overheat, even superheat, then melt. This is a “meltdown.” In a worst case scenario, the overheated core comes into contact with water, either through the plant’s water system or, in theory, by melting through the floor of the plant until it hits the location’s water table, then flashing the water into massive clouds of toxic radioactive steam.
A nuclear reactor, therefore, is a delicate dance. Incredibly close attention must be paid to that water coolant. They employ backups and backups to those backups. They also have shutdown systems, whereby control rods are inserted into a core to absorb fission-triggering neutrons, thus preventing nuclear reactions and cooling down the core. But all these systems require hyper-vigilance, and management systems that operate perfectly. Trouble is, humans, and their systems, are fallible.
This was not unknown, even in the early days. In the 1976, three high-profile whistleblowers quit their jobs as experienced high-level nuclear engineers to protest the risks presented by nuclear power as it was being practiced at the time, particularly the dangers emanating from human error.
And human error has proven instrumental in causing each of the most infamous nuclear accidents of the past few decades.
SL-1 Reactor, 1961: This small American experimental reactor suffered a meltdown when someone withdrew a control rod too quickly, causing a massive heat surge that caused the reactor to explode, killing three workers. Thankfully the SL-1 was located in a remote section of Idaho so there were no civilian injuries. The reactor was later dismantled and buried. No one knows why the control rod was withdrawn the way it was; some theories include revenge for a torrid love triangle involving a co-workers wife, or even, believe it or not, “suicide by meltdown.”
Three Mile Island, 1979: This large reactor, located in Pennsylvania, experienced a clogged water valve after workers improperly cleaned a filter. This shut down the pumps feeding the reactor with coolant, which caused it to overheat. The system automatically inserted control rods to halt nuclear fission, but even control rods cannot completely shut down the reactor’s heating — natural atomic decay can still be hot enough to trigger a meltdown. Here, human error had repair work being performed on emergency backup systems, rendering them inoperative. Heat from the reactor began to turn water in the system into radioactive steam, threatening a massive explosion. Although complete confusion reigned in the control room for hours (with misreading of instruments and bad assumptions based on insufficient information), coolant was fortunately restored to the reactor before it blew up. Although the reactor core did partially melt down and massive amounts of radioactive water was spilled inside the plant, complete disaster was averted and it seems that no radioactivity escaped into the environment. It was a very close call, with Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City potentially sitting downwind of a worst case scenario.
Chernyobl, USSR, 1986: Technicians in the control room of the huge RBMK power plant in northern Ukraine wondered what would happen if their reactor lost power. It may seem odd, but a critical danger in nuclear power plants is a loss of electricity. The coolant pumps need power to run, and will shut down if power is lost. Nuclear plants therefore use backup generators to power those all-important pumps. However, there will always be a delay between loss of electricity and the powering-up of the generators, up to a minute in the RBMK reactor — more than enough time to trigger a meltdown. At Chernyobl, they thought they could jury-rig a system to shorten that delay, so they planned a test shutdown to see if it would work. Unfortunately mistakes were made at many points, which turned what should have been a reasonably safe experiment into a full-blown crisis as the core began to heat up. Control rods were quickly inserted to power down the plant completely, but a disastrous design flaw in the control rods (unknown to the technicians) meant that power briefly spiked when the rods were quickly inserted. A meltdown was triggered, the system’s water flashed into steam and the reactor exploded, taking the entire building with it. As the fuel turned into superheated slag, it began to burn its way through the reactor floor. Even as a volcano of radioactive steam and smoke spewed into the sky, technicians remembered there was a huge pool of water beneath the core, right in the path of the meltdown that, if brought into contact with the scorching-hot fuel, could turn an already-catastrophic accident into something even worse. Donning wetsuits, three men heroically plunged into the pitch-black pool, found the valve (by touch) to drain the water, and succeeded in opening it. All three later died of radiation poisoning, as did many others — thousands of soldiers and firefighters were mobilized to contain the catastrophe, with many receiving lethal doses of radiation. To this day, around 100,000 square kilometres around the site remain contaminated and uninhabited.
Fukushima, Japan, 2011: A major earthquake and tsunami cut off power to the American-designed nuclear power plant, located on the northeast coast of Japan. The plant did have backup generators, but despite previous warnings they were located in the basement, where tsunami water knocked them out. As a result three reactors melted down (other reactors were fortunately shut down at the time). The company in charge of the plant, already infamous for decades of evasions, coverups and mismanagement, was consistently slow to recognize the danger of the disaster. Around half a million people from the area were evacuated as a precaution, and at least a thousand died in the process. There were some explosions at the plant, but a Chernyobl-style steam explosion, miraculously, did not occur. The meltdowns did, however, serverely damage the reactors, so that some coolant water getting pumped into the cores leaked out after getting irradiated — and years later continues to do so. Huge amounts have entered the ocean and been detected on the other side of the Pacific. At the time of the writing of this article, in 2015, the reactors are still too hot to approach, so the true extent of the damage is unknown; it will be years before they can be fully assessed.
All these catastrophes (and many other smaller, less-destructive mishaps) have several things in common. First, they all employed the standard water-cooled design. Second, human error caused and worsened each disaster. And third, the disasters were all preceded by poor management decisions where the overriding priority was allaying public fears of nuclear power rather than ensuring exacting safety standards.
Earlier in this article the name Alvin M. Weinberg came up; former head of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who was fired by Richard Nixon in 1973. Weinberg, a nuclear physicist and Manhattan Project alumnus, was among the foremost experts on nuclear power. He deeply opposed Nixon’s drive for the rapid expansion of America’s civilian nuclear program. The chosen pressurized-water approach, was inviting what he called a “Faustian bargain:”
Even in the short range, when we use ordinary reactors, we offer energy that is cheaper than energy from fossil fuel … But the price that we demand of society for this magical source is both a vigilance from and longevity of our social institutions that we are quite unaccustomed to.
In other words, while nuclear energy offered many benefits, especially regarding carbon emissions, the technological vulnerability built into the design meant that using pressurized water systems would require management that was 100% effective 100% of the time, every day, for years, decades, even, potentially, for centuries.
Has any human institution been so infallible? Not one. Ever. Hence Weinberg’s (justified) fears. Fears that have been proven correct by history.
Sadly, it didn’t have to be this way. It’s not widely known, but there are many alternative nuclear power systems that don’t make use of the horribly vulnerable pressurized water coolant method. Weinberg for instance was an expert in “Molten Salt” reactor technology. This uses a chemical substance bsed around melted, liquid salt as the coolant, and even as the fuel as well. The system is far safer, cannot experience meltdowns, and produces far less radioactive waste —and the waste it does produce is toxic for a far shorter time than with standard water-cooled reactors (generally speaking, for centuries instead of tens of thousands of years).
What’s more, the molten salt system can be used as a basis for a reactor based on thorium instead of uranium or plutonium. Thorium has spectacular advantages over the other fissile materials: it is far cheaper, more common, way less toxic, cannot be turned into nuclear weapons, and again, when used in a reactor cannot experience meltdowns.
So why have these potentially revolutionary technologies based on thorium and molten salt been pretty much ignored for decades in favor of the liquid water system, which has proven itself to be extremely dangerous, extremely expensive, extremely demanding in terms of management and supervision, and which produces waste materials that remain deadly for more years than human civilization has existed? Simple: the decisionw as made years ago, under Richard Nixon, to commit to the water-based system.
Once committed, an infrastructure was built, an economy developed, jobs were created — in other words the nuclear power system became a self-sustaining machine, not just in the US but worldwide. The result? Nuclear power has a horribly bad reputation. Hardly anyone even knows there are different approaches to spliting the atom and only some of them risk meltdowns.
It must be noted that molten salt technology — and the many other systems that don’t use pressurized water — are still experimental, with many kinks to be worked out. The truth is, no one has ever made a serious effort to research alternative systems. There were some attempts during the Cold War, but almost nothing since.
One thorium-based molten-salt reactor is currently being designed in China. Yes, China. It’s attracted international funding, including from the United States. Why would the US fund nuclear research in its primary economic competitor? Two reasons: first, China’s the only country willing to try, and second, support for nuclear research is almost nonexistent in the US, so that funds simply couldn’t be found for an American attempt, leaving them to contribute to a Chinese program.
With luck, molten-salt thorium reactors will be developed to the point where they can become commercially viable. And perhaps by some miracle people can be made to understand that this is a different kind of nuclear power. Unfortunately the perception is that meltdown-happy water-based systems are nuclear power, so there will be major hurdles to overcome.
The truth is, the huge opportunities offered by nuclear power in general may never be realized, thanks to the dead end road down which Richard Nixon steered America. China, it seems, is making the right decision early on. In the years to come, hopefully, they will pave a trail the rest of us can follow.
