Dan Snow's History Hit - Nuclear Disasters

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

In 2011, a 43-foot-high tsunami crashed into a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. In the following days, explosions would rip buildings apart, three reactors would go into nuclear meltdown, and the surrounding area would be swamped in radioactive water. It is now considered one of the costliest nuclear disasters ever. But Fukushima was not the first, and it was not the worst.Acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy returns to the podcast. Serhii joins Dan to tell the tale of some of the nuclear disasters that shook the world. From the 1957 fire at the Windscale facility in Cumbria which burned for three days and released radioactive fallout, to the 1986 crisis at Chernobyl, Serhii shows how the same story of nuclear ambition, often clouded by political and economic motives, is tragically repeated time and again.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. A cheerful old subject for today, nuclear accidents. We're all talking about nuclear power at the moment. Was it wise of Germany, following the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011, was it wise of them to close down all their nuclear power stations, given that relying on Russian gas pumped in from the east would have consequences as well? This is a great time to talk about those nuclear disasters. This is a great time to talk to Sergei Plokhy, who's been on this podcast before many times. He's a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University. He has written about Chernobyl. He is now writing about nuclear accidents, going all the way back to 1954 Castle Bravo test by the USA on Bikini Atoll when pulverized coral rained down

on atolls in the Pacific and islanders were not evacuated for three days and many suffered radiation sickness. He also talks about the 1957 explosion of a waste tank in Russia, you'll hear that, which I'd never even heard of, and the 1957, that was a bad year, fire at the Windscale facility in Cumbria, when a fire burned for three days and released radioactive fallout spread across UK and the rest of Europe, partly caused by Britain's rush, its desire to be considered a great power, to develop plutonium for nuclear weapons, to be a big player in the world. And you'll be surprised to learn the government played down the seriousness of events at that time as well. So you're going to hear all about these nuclear accidents. Sahe is a great friend of

the podcast. He's a legendary historian. Please go and read his book afterwards. If you want to watch programmes about the Cold War, about the nuclear arms race, the race for nuclear power, we've got some available at History Hit TV. You follow the link in the notes of this episode, you click on that link, you get taken to our Netflix for History. It's good stuff, folks, you're going to love it. We're making new shows, we're making new shows in Egypt, making new shows in the UK and America at the moment as well. It's all happening. I mean, it's just awesome being part of it. So go and get involved in History Hit TV. But in the meantime, folks, here's Sahe Ploki talking about nuclear accidents.

Buckle up. So, hey, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. Well, it's a real pleasure. Thanks for having me. You've told me before how lucky I am to be alive. The tussle in the Soviet submarine of Cuba, where they decided whether or not to start, well, basically to initiate World War III. And now you've come back with some more extraordinary nuclear disasters. Let's go through a couple of them. Where do you want to start? Do you want to

start in 1957? I hadn't heard about this one, the gigantic Soviet disaster in 57. Kishtym, that was the year I was born. So speaking about us being lucky to be alive. So what happened there was that waste tank with nuclear waste at the main Soviet production facility for the plutonium just got overheated and exploded. And the Soviet Union was able to keep all of that under wraps and secret up until late 1980s. It's just the publicity and the relative openness that came with the Chernobyl that forced also the Soviet authorities to start speaking about that. But Kishtym makes it into one of the worst nuclear disasters in the world history.

It happened in September of 1957. And that's one of the episodes that I discuss in my book. There are six cases altogether and the book is evenly divided between three of them dealing directly with the production of the nuclear weapons and three dealing with the production of electricity. They're connected not only in my book, but they also are connected in terms of the design because still now we still don't have one single reactor in the world that was designed specifically to boil water and produce electricity. All of them are some variations of the reactors

that were produced for military purposes. So these things are interconnected. What does that mean for this? Does that imply that these things would be designed differently with perhaps safety more uppermost in mind if we were designing genuinely civilian nuclear installations? Well, one type of reactor of the kind that caught fire in Windscale in England in 1957 and then in Chernobyl in 1986, those were the so-called graphite reactors and they were created really with the purpose of producing fuel for the nuclear weapons and then in the Soviet case

readjusted so the Chernobyl reactor was a dual-purpose reactor. You could use it to boil water, and you could use it also to produce plutonium. The other reactors, more safe reactors, like the one that still went into partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island in 1979 in the United States or in Fukushima in 2011, they were modifications on the reactors that were built to power submarines. It is only now with the money going into the search for safer nuclear reactors and could input there by Bill Gates that there is not just the talk, but there is also design of allegedly more safe reactors specifically designed to, as I said, boil water. Those are supposed also to be smaller reactors that in unlikely case something goes wrong with them, the explosion will be not of the global proportions.

But they're not there yet. And once they will be there, they will have to be tested. Once they will be there, they will have to be tested. Because most of the accidents that I discuss, they happened in the first few decades of the development of the nuclear industry. So with every new technology, whether it is nuclear or it is you just invented a wheel, you have to go through the period of the design. This new technology has to be tested and there are accidents. There are accidents and you learn from those accidents.

So from that point of view, again, there is a big hope for this new generation of the reactors, but we also have to be very clear that nuclear technology is actually not different from any other technology. If anything, it's much more complex, and it's much more difficult to predict and to calculate and to make sure that nothing goes wrong. One thing that I certainly learned working on this book that things do go wrong. It's interesting, you link them together. You suggest that things go wrong because that's what happens in new technology. Or is there something about nuclear power? We didn't take it seriously enough? Or was the kind of global politics, the reputation, the importance of nuclear power, such that it meant that we cut corners, we rushed? There was more politics than perhaps there would have been

in a rolling out coal-fired power stations. When we either think about nuclear as atoms for war, think about nuclear as atoms for war, which means bombs, atomic and hydrogen, or we think about nuclear, especially today, as the production of electricity. We, in both cases, try to use it to avoid potential catastrophe. So there is an urgency there. During the Cold War, okay, the other guy will get the bomb first, and that other guy will drop it on us. So let's build ours as soon as possible. And let's cart as many corners as possible, because again, we are in the emergency situation. And the name for that is the nuclear race. That's what we had back then. What we have now is different, but also a little bit similar situation. The end of the world is coming because of the climate change.

We are running out of time. We have to do whatever we can to avoid it. So nuclear again emerges as one of the ways to deal with this existential threat and existential crisis. And we need it now, we need it yesterday. So we find ourselves again in the same race against the time. And when you're in a hurry, and especially with nuclear, we know what happens. and especially with nuclear, we know what happens. Are we very tough on nuclear? Like, millions of people have died from, well, extreme weather, from particular rates in the air pollution, effectively. And yet, here we are talking, pouring over these nuclear accidents and discussing exactly how many people died.

Does nuclear face that headwind as well? Well, nuclear, by definition, is something that occupies a special place in human imagination. It made this very dramatic entrance into our history with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No other technology probably entered the world scene in a more scare way. And then what adds to this perception of nuclear is that now it's maybe easier for people to understand what that means. It's like COVID, but 10 times worse in a sense. You can't see it. You can't assess where the danger is coming from, how big the danger is.

So it is super scary. It's everywhere and it is nowhere. That is the reaction that has been there to the nuclear accidents. If you look at the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island, then Chernobyl, and then Fukushima, you see that after each of them, there would be a prolonged period, sometimes up to 20 years, then the world would be scared enough not to touch nuclear anymore in terms of no more investments and no more construction of the nuclear power plants, or it goes down. After Fukushima, Germany makes a decision, I think a very rash decision, to abandon nuclear, and they find themselves, of course, in the embrace of the Russian gas and oil.

There's all sorts of consequences in terms of climate, not just climate, but political climate as well. If you think about nuclear as part of the mix to deal with the climate change, first of all, we have to know what the dangers are and assess them. Because any decision we make, it is about calculating risk. It's about risk management. So first of all, we have to know what we are dealing with and not to have this rosy perception. Okay, the new generation of reactors is designed not to explode, not to go into meltdown. The previous was designed allegedly. It's the same qualities.

And the second thing is to calculate not just the risks coming from the exposure, the impact on the death, the impact on the environment, but also the political risks. Because reactors go into meltdowns, and now the agents or the chances are there as well. The new generation will be coming. There, again, new technology. We should expect that there will be accidents.

It's unrealistic to think that there will be none. And then we can look at history and see what happens with one significant accident in a far place called Japan, which has an impact on Europe and on the decisions made in Berlin. So there is a saying in the people associated with nuclear energy and environment, Chernobyl anywhere is Chernobyl everywhere. So the accident anywhere has this global repercussions. So that adds to the political risks of the nuclear. If we want to deal with the climate change now in 10 years, 15, 20 years, God forbid there is another accident. Think about pausing this whole thing,

all these investments for at least another 20 years and looking somewhere else, to coal and to oil and other not very nice alternatives. You listen to Dan Snow's history, talking about nuclear accidents, more coming up, hopefully not. Hopefully not. Aeroplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions and the people who claim these ideas as their own. We uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects.

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And the thing that really makes it worthwhile is the fact that you could make it go on forever. So subscribe to Patented from History Hit on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Can you just talk me through, just for people that don't know, let's talk about Three Mile Island and then Fukushima. Talk about Three Mile Island in 1979. Talk about Three Mile Island in 1979.

The Three Mile Island story is about a very, very simple, mundane mistake made by one of the repair workers, forgotten to close one of the valves. And on the top of that comes the story of the instrumentalisation as not being there and the operators actually not seeing what was going on with the reactor. And then the third level is the operators themselves who were trained by the Navy and had a lot of experience of dealing with the small reactors at the submarines. at the submarines, and were treating a big, huge reactor for boiling water in the same way how they would treat the small one, which came with all sorts of mistakes and misjudgments. As the result of that, there is, by standards of the big nuclear accidents, a relatively small release of radiation. There is a lot, of course, of consequences because no one knew whether the reactor would go into further meltdown, whether it would explode or not.

There is an evacuation that is encouraged. Approximately 140,000 people live in the area in Pennsylvania near the plant. President Jimmy Carter, who started his career in the Navy as a nuclear engineer and was better prepared than probably any other politician in the world to deal with the consequences of such accidents, goes to the nuclear power plant to raise the morale. And around that time, the scientists actually discussing whether the reactor would explode now during the president's visit there or not. And by the time the visit is over, the good news are there. They introduced changes into the formula, how they tried to figure out what was happening inside of the reactor, because you can't see that. It came to the conclusion that it will not. So it's a very dramatic visit when the scientists and the politicians are waiting for Carter to arrive. And one of them is almost prepared to kill another one over the issue in the formula and in the calculations, whether the reactor will explode

now or it would explode later. So we are in the dark in many ways. And again, certainly a lot of progress has been done since 1979. But Three Mile Island turned out to be not the last nuclear accident, not the last warning. Chernobyl came after that and Fukushima then after that. Remind us about Fukushima, because I think in the gigantic tragedy of the tsunami in Japan. Perhaps Fukushima was underreported, really, because it was just part of that larger picture. Tell us about what happened to that nuclear power station. First of all, there was a really major, major earthquake that produced tsunami close to the shores of Japan, of the kind that happens maybe every thousand years. So it was something that was completely unexpected.

The Japanese live on those islands where they have earthquakes almost every second day, and I'm not exaggerating. So the buildings are designed appropriately, and there are certain procedures and were procedures in place in how to deal with the earthquake and tsunami at the nuclear power plant. So they immediately shut down their reactors and believed that the worst is over. The problem is that the wave of the tsunami gets through the protective wall, gets on the territory of the plant, destroys the electricity lines that come to the nuclear power plants, floods the accumulators, the batteries that were the

generators that were supposed to produce electricity in case the electricity is out, and leaves the reactors without electricity, and that means that the pumps can't work and can't pump water or cooler to keep the reactors under control. Because the fact that they're shut down, they're so overheated inside that they needed really days of cooling

to preclude a meltdown. And now they have no electricity to power the pumps and they have no water. They have no cooler. And because the area is destroyed around, it was really exceptionally difficult to come there to bring these new generators, to bring electricity. And you look at that and think, OK, just you can't blame engineers for that. You can't blame operators for that. It's the force of nature. This is not a human mistake, unlike, let's say, Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. But then you take another look at that and you realize that every single reactor in Japan,

and Japan relied significantly on the nuclear power, was built at the shore. It was built at the shore, open for the tsunamis, open for whatever was coming from the sea, for one simple reason, to cut the costs. Because if you look at, let's say, Chernobyl, they have the so-called cooling pond, and special procedures are there to bring water and cool it. In Japan, they are building on the shore, so they're taking the water from the ocean, and that saves a lot of money. So in the country that goes through the earthquakes, as I said, every second day, you try to save a couple of billions of yens or whatever it is, or millions of yen, whatever it was in the 1960s and 1970s, and make no exception whatsoever in terms of where you are building nuclear power plants.

So again, one more case when we all believed that all eventualities have been covered, and it turned out that there is just one more thing comes that we never thought about. We never believed that another tsunami of that proportion can happen, or that it was a stupid idea to put the generators and accumulators on the first low floors of the reactor complex built on the shore. Where do you end up between the obvious terrifying potential for accidents with nuclear power set against the catastrophic existential problems of generating power by burning things that come out of the ground, fossil fuels. Where do you end up at the end of this writing and research process? Well, my ambition in writing this book was at the same time very modest and very ambitious.

very ambitious. My day job is an educator. So the book was about educating myself and educating the public about the way in which, again, I'm not a nuclear engineer. So I was trying to present those facts. Hopefully I didn't make too many mistakes in discussing physics and chemistry and other things associated with that. But it was about how we humans deal with something like nuclear power. And one thing that I discovered that actually technology changes, but we don't change much. We tend to be quite arrogant. We tend to make mistakes. We all, despite the under communism, capitalism, authoritarian regime,

liberal regime, try to cover up things to a different degree. And that the social factors that contributed to those reactors are still with us. So that's one of my conclusions. And the overall appeal to the public at large that it's very likely that the accidents will be happening in the future. So if we think about investing in nuclear, including in the new generation of nuclear, let's calculate those risks. Let's actually know about that. Let's consider that. Let's talk about that. So that was the biggest ambition that I had, just to put it on the table to say, OK, that's where we are.

I believe that at least on the social level, on the political level, we didn't learn the lessons. I also tried to make a modest, more specific recommendation. And there I was really on thin ice. But still, I thought that the readers would expect from me also something more practical than just here are the facts. My approach is that, first of all, it would be completely irresponsible to follow into the German footsteps. After reading my book, going and shutting down all 440 reactors worldwide, it's 10% of the electricity worldwide, 20% in the United States, it seems to me 70 or 80 in France, and so on and so forth. I think that we have to keep those and actually invest in those to make sure that they're safe because it's an age and generation of the reactors to a great degree. But when we think about the dollars or euros or whatever it is, or yens that will go into

the new research and into the new technologies, my advice, because of the environmental risks and political risks coming with the nuclear, is to invest this new dollars and new money into the research dealing with renewables, clean energy, and all the ways how we can actually clean the gases and other things that are produced by not clean energy. So all sorts of filters and new technologies. So that is where my thinking is going in terms of what do you do with this danger? Again, danger, as I said, that exists on more than one level of nuclear.

Has there ever been a catastrophic accident involving a solar farm, say? I don't remember any. Again, I certainly remember a couple of personal catastrophes of being burned by sun and then suffering from that, but that's the only thing that comes to my mind. That's probably my fault and yours. Individual responsibility when it comes to that. Yes.

Thank you very much, Dean. What's your book called? The title is Atoms and Ashes, and it's from Bikini Atoll to Fukushima. This is the subtitle. And for listeners and, I hope, future readers in UK, again, one of six chapters deals really with the UK part of the story. It's called A Very English Fire.

This is about the Windscale Fire in 1957. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, folks. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a little rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account. So please don't ever do that. It can seem like a small thing, but actually it's kind of a big deal for us. So I really appreciate it. See you next time.