Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project

"It’s not, no. I’ve cheated with that one. This is a relatively little-known book, but I think it’s absolutely brilliant. It’s one of the first nuclear histories informed by the declassification of US archives at the end of the Cold War . In some ways, Chernobyl is linked to this. Because of Chernobyl, the Soviet Union and Gorbachev found themselves on rocky ground and they had tremendous problems financing the clean up. Gorbachav said that Chernobyl was the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union. And it was incredibly expensive. Of course, he might say that to deflect any blame levelled his way after the collapse of the USSR, but there is some truth to his speculation. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the consequences for this country was that the US Department of Energy no longer had a justification for classifying documents. In the months before Chernobyl occurred, American citizens had been pressuring the Department of Energy to release documents about the nuclear legacy, and the DOE had started to do that. Peter Bacon Hales writes a history of that process of producing nuclear bombs, but especially of creating space, creating nuclear reservations, and putting the people who worked in these spaces in their special communities dedicated to nuclear bomb production. He uses this Cold War notion created famously by George Kennan of “containment”—that is, that the US had to contain communism wherever it popped up. The idea of containment is used to talk about how American officials tried to contain nuclear waste (an impossible task), but also, more importantly, how they tried to contain information about radioactive exposures going offsite and exposing citizens. They disseminated information on what he calls a “need to know basis”. This was pervasive. This instinct not to convey essential information even to on-site workers reminds me a lot of the situation Plokhy is talking about in his book. Soviet nuclear physicists knew of the design problem, of the positive void coefficient and of the fact that this was a really unstable reactor on start-up and shutdown, but they didn’t convey this information to the operators who really needed to know it. Peter Bacon Hales shows that this phenomenon runs throughout the Manhattan Project. He writes so beautifully about it. You can tell that as one of the first researchers to work in these newly declassified records, he was really angry, as an American citizen, about what the Manhattan Project legacy meant for the American landscape. That anger translates into really powerful prose. It’s really worth a read. As an accident, Chernobyl does qualify as the greatest nuclear accident of all time. But we have other spills of radioactive isotypes into the environment that were much greater than Chernobyl. For instance, in my book Plutopia , I wrote about the plutonium production plants—the Hanford plant in the United States and Maiak plant in Siberia—which each dispensed at least 350 million curies of radioactive waste into the surrounding environment. That’s much bigger, of course, than Chernobyl. The reason why these places are not household names is because the Chernobyl explosion happened on one night; it was a big dramatic accident that the media focused on. But at the Maiak and the Hanford plants, radioactivity was released into the environment as part of the normal operating order. It’s a pretty chilling realisation that while there were some accidents at those plants, the spillage of 350 million curies of radioactive waste was mostly a disaster by design. Engineers dealt with this radioactive waste by dumping it in rivers, or releasing it up smokestacks so it could travel downwind, or burying it in the ground. “We have other spills of radioactive isotypes into the environment that were much greater than Chernobyl” Nuclear testing also falls beneath the radar as a nuclear event. We talk a lot about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were two comparatively small bombs. But in the years that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the big nuclear powers tested over 500 bombs into the atmosphere. They blew up 520 nuclear bombs—and those bombs were not dropped on populated points like the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they worked like bombs: the radioactive clouds went way up high into the stratosphere and they travelled quickly, especially in the northern hemisphere following trade winds and coming down with precipitation. Chernobyl issued an estimated forty-five million curies of radioactive iodine. That’s just one radioactive isotope. Iodine is a powerful short-lived isotope which affects humans because it’s taken up by the thyroid. It causes thyroid cancer and other health problems. Nuclear atmosphere testing, just the Soviet and American bombs alone, issued twenty billion curies of radioactive iodine. Just so you get a sense of the difference. America was an unusual country in that we had a proving ground that was not in colonies. The UK chose western Australia and the south pacific, France chose Algeria and the south pacific, and the Soviets had Kazakhstan and the polar north. But we put a proving ground right in the American heartland, in Nevada. The first leader of the American Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss thought that it was a bad idea to have a continental test site. Many nuclear engineers agreed with him. But they went ahead with it because the Korean War was making the pacific ground difficult to get to. As they tested, they realised quite quickly that hotspots of radioactivity were not only landing at ground zero in Nevada but were in Minnesota and upstate New York, Iowa, and Tennessee. What happened was that the radioactive fallout went sky-high and travelled with the trade winds north and east and came down in the first places where it rained: in the humid midwest and the southeast. That’s something we really haven’t dealt with. The National Cancer Institute did a study and they estimated that there was up to an additional two-hunded thousand thyroid cancers from that fallout, and that was a study that looked only at thyroid cancer. We haven’t really examined any other possible health outcomes. But what we do know is that since the 1940s, in this country and many countries in the northern hemisphere, we have rising rates of cancers of all kinds but especially paediatric cancers which used to be a medical rarity. Male sperm counts in the northern hemisphere have halved since 1945. Now, these are correlations—but whether there’s causation, we really don’t know; we have not done those studies. So, when scientists say we have no evidence of any health problems from global fallout, that’s not because the study has been done. That’s what sociologists call “undone science”. And I think we should ask our leaders and our scientific experts to get more curious."