I’ve always had this idea of creating a Chernobyl Nuclear Fallout Snowdome, in memory of those who sacrificed themselves to clean the immediate aftermath, and those affected by the fallout. Nuclear energy intrigued me ever since the accident, 33 years ago today, and there’s more to it than just energy and bombs – nuclear energy, to me, is symbolic to the human condition. We should also cherish it more, because it’s the only way to meet the climate goals we’ve set ourselves.
Today it is 33 years since the Chernobyl disaster. I had just turned 10 years old and although at the time I knew very little about nuclear technology, the fear I sensed from the adults was very real. Nobody had any concrete information, but the fact that we were told not to play in the sand at the playground was concrete enough for us kids. We were wondering though: what is this radiation stuff? Whenever a car or a house in our town caught fire, there was smoke and the firemen came. When somebody farted you opened the window and a few minutes later all was forgotten. This was different though: not only was there no smoke, or any other perceivable difference, the source of our playground-prohibition was hundreds of kilometres away. Rather than being afraid I was intrigued, and I’m no less intrigued today. In 1999 I had the opportunity to visit the reactor in Borssele, the main nuclear power plant in the Netherlands, which is now closed to casual visitors for security reasons. Two years ago I visited Facility 816, an unfinished nuclear plant located inside a mountain in China. And recently I completed the Chernobyl Nuclear Fallout Snowdome with the help of a 3D-printer. It seems a silly idea, but to me it’s a mini-monument to the “human robots” who cleaned up the mess, and to those who had to leave their home because of what happened in 1986.
It’s not just the fact that we cannot directly perceive radiation that makes it so intriguing, but nuclear technology also says something about the human condition in general: Humans can at the same time achieve great things (like harvesting energy by splitting atoms) and at the same time we can create bombs that could have a more destructive effect than the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs.
Humans can spend a whole day at work in a concentration camp, killing other humans as if they were filling a form, and then go home and play a Beethoven Sonata.
Humans can develop devices that fit in the palm of their hand, which are capable of retrieving almost all the facts and ideas known to mankind, yet many people use it to share pictures of cats on social media.
It’s like a sinus shape that goes up and down a baseline in symmetry: the further it goes up, the further it goes down. The more good we appear to do, the more we seem to counter-balance it with evil. In his book “discontent in culture”, Freud argues that we cannot stand happiness for very long. Happiness, and also beauty, is meaningless if it’s always at the same level. This is why we plant brutalist buildings in the middle of historic towns: it’s the contrast that matters. The contrast between good and evil, between life and death, between happiness and sadness. This is what humans thrive on, and we will always make it so. The further our technology advances, the more the sinus wave goes up and down between good and evil.
After the stone age, the ice age and the middle ages we have now arrived in the atomic age, or the age of the bomb. Contrary to those previous ages, the age of the bomb is of our own making. We, homo sapiens, have for the first time in history created an instrument capable of completely annihilating ourselves, our planet, and everything else that lives on it. The paradox of this age is that it only exists because we haven’t used the bomb. There would be no history of a nuclear war because there’d be nobody left to write it. It is often said that when the next war is fought with nuclear bombs, the war after that will be fought with sticks and spears again. Yet since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than 160 wars have been fought and none were nuclear. The bomb is therefore an instrument of politics, even of philosophy or culture, but not of war. It is the threat of “Mutually Assured Destruction”, or just M.A.D., that has prevented World War 3 from breaking out. As ironic as the M.A.D. acronym is perhaps the fact that thanks to this threat we are currently experiencing the longest uninterrupted peace-time in Europe. Even though the atomic threat has mostly diminished to the level of background radiation, it takes just one dictator or terrorist group to awaken the cold war fears, as proved by Kim Jung Un.
It’s no less ironic that radiation can be used to heal people: from spotting broken bones on Roentgen photos to radiation therapy for cancer patients we can heal people by controlled exposure to radiation. Visiting Chernobyl won’t help in curing cancer though, although it won’t get you cancer either. There are other reasons to visit the polluted no-go area around the city of Pripyat though: the abandoned buildings, reclaimed by nature. The eerie silence, interrupted only by the crackling sound of your Geiger counter. The wildlife that’s teeming due to human absence. I haven’t been there myself, but many have, and it’s on top of my bucket list. It’s interesting how the horrors of Chernobyl have become part of our culture in much the same way as the horrors of WW2. Both have inspired books, movies, video games and countless newspaper articles. But while WW2 has bequeathed us some important historical lessons, the founding of the EU and Israel, and a healthy distaste for anti-Semitism, all we got from Chernobyl is fear. Fear for something most people don’t know much about, something they can’t directly perceive and yet is all around us. The media have found a gold-mine in nuclear fear-mongering, feeding off our instinctual obsession for apocalyptic scenarios. Writers like Gudrun Pausewang, who wrote the young-adult novel “The cloud” about a nuclear disaster, also did their part. The result is that nuclear research and development slowed significantly since Chernobyl. It is hard to imagine how far we would have come in solving some of the (admittedly serious) nuclear problems like waste storage if we didn’t let ourselves lead astray by basic instincts. Things got worse since the Fukushima accident: by that time we had social media and live coverage of the accident. The tsunami killed 20.000 people, but nobody came to direct harm from the Fukushima accident. Still, within weeks the German government had decided to accelerate the abolishment of nuclear power.
Nevermind that in terms of emissions per kilowatt-hour, nuclear is the cleanest energy of it all.
Nevermind that nuclear waste is the only one that can be contained, unlike the burning of fossil fuels which goes straight into the environment.
Nevermind that solar panels, which are full of heavy metals, produce 300 times more waste than nuclear for the same amount of energy produced, AND cause 4 times as much co2 than nuclear.
Instead, Germany continues to burn coal, and recently wanted to cut down one of Europe’s oldest forests to harvest more of it! All this we can thank to a strong anti-nuclear lobby which, much like the media, uses fear-mongering instead of facts.
Here are some more facts, if you are open: 134 of the heroes who helped reduce the direct aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion got acute radiation sickness, 28 of which died soon afterwards. 6848 children got thyroid cancer in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl: not because of airborne radiation, but because the authorities failed to inhibit them from drinking milk contaminated with Iodine-131. Compare this to 7 million people who die annually from air pollution, some of which could be reduced by switching from coal to nuclear. If we embark on an intercontinental flight we expose ourselves to a higher dose of radiation than on a visit to Chernobyl or Fukushima. I don’t write any of this to downplay the nuclear incidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima, for they have indeed been horrible accidents, but the attributable death toll is much lower than the media and lobbyists want us to believe. We have to realise that if we are to tackle carbon emissions and global warming, we need to tackle the downsides of nuclear power. We need to crank up research and development to fast-forward technologies like Thorium reactors, which not only need much less fuel and emit much less radioactive waste, they also don’t produce plutonium needed to make bombs. We also need more research in how to store the radioactive waste we do have, and how to make nuclear reactors even safer than they already are.
Sting said it in 2016 in much the same words: “If we are to tackle global warming, nuclear is the only way you can create massive amounts of power.”