Commentary
I’m old enough to remember a time when using the term “nuclear energy” didn’t evoke the fear and terror it so commonly does today.
From the first announcement that scientists had unleashed the power of the atom through the 1960s, references to nuclear energy brought forth visions of a bright future, with cheap abundant power spreading prosperity around the world at unimaginable speed.
There was, of course, a dark side to the dream. If man could harness nuclear energy for the good of all mankind, he was also capable of unleashing the devastating power of the atom to level cities and murder tens—or hundreds—of millions. A grim part of the Cold War, assuming that one grew up in a NATO or Warsaw Pact nation, was living with the reality that one side or other might drop “the big one” at any moment and reset civilization back to the Stone Age megaton by megaton.
Like my contemporaries growing up in urban America in the 1960s, I knew where to go when the air raid sirens screamed for real. The neighborhood fallout shelter that I passed every day on my way to school was a stark reminder of the terror lurking just beyond the horizon of imagination. For me and my classmates, “ducking and covering” beneath one’s desk when the big one went off wasn’t the ludicrous exercise many in post-Cold War generations believe it was.
We knew that the biggest danger outside of the blast radius was fallout, and the biggest danger in fallout was alpha particles. The radiation from alpha particles is by far the most dangerous of the three types of radiation associated with radioactive decay (beta and gamma radiation being the others). But you don’t need lead walls to stop alpha particles. Relatively common materials, like the wood of a classroom desk, for example, could protect you. That was why “duck and cover” made sense. You wanted to get as much material, of virtually any sort, between you and the alpha particles in the cloud of fallout that followed a nuclear detonation.
I can’t refer to any formal studies or rely on any psychiatric education to say this, but I believe that the reasonable fear of nuclear annihilation that ate away at the American psyche throughout the Cold War slowly bled into unreasonable anxiety over nuclear power.
Fanciful scenarios, such as reactor cores melting through the Earth’s core (the “China Syndrome”) and containment vessels rupturing to spew massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere were postulated and, all too often, taken seriously.
Needing a Cause
In good times, Americans have an almost pathological need to find something—anything—to worry about and, equally importantly, to adopt fixing it as a just cause. An increasing number of Americans (and like-minded people around the world) were consumed by the environmental movement, which fulfilled both needs. It gave us a problem to worry about: the health of the entire planet. And it gave us a noble crusade: saving the entire planet.In this atmosphere, jumping the fence that separated the threat of nuclear war from the promise of nuclear energy didn’t take much effort.
Sober nuclear engineers and the professional overseers of the Atomic Energy Commission kept the doom-mongers in check for a time, but mistakes in the best-planned and -designed of human endeavors are inevitable.
