Category: Remembering

36 years later – Chernobyl and the War

By Achim Klüppelberg

One year has passed and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is still asking questions that demand answers. The wild response to HBO’s miniseries “Chernobyl” and the continuing publication of high-class scientific literature has established again that both scholarly and public interest in the catastrophe has not subsided, even 36 years after the catastrophe happened. Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl and Brown’s Manual for Survival are only two examples, and I highly recommend reading both.

Liquidator’s memorial at Chernobyl NPP and second Sarcophagus in the background (photo courtesy of Pixabay).

There are many reasons for the continued interest in Chernobyl. First, there are still issues that demand an explanation regarding the accident and its consequences. What about the inherent safety features of a humanly made and controlled technological system? Perrow in his Normal Accidents taught us that accidents are inevitable in complex high-tech-systems in which humans play a crucial role. What does this mean for nuclear energy in the context of failing to meet the 1.5°C goal specified in the 2015/16 Paris Climate Agreement?

Second, those consequences still play a profound role in the present for many people, especially in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Can and will Russia finally shut down or replace all Chernobyl-type reactors that are still online at Leningrad-1 (2 active RBMKs), Smolensk-1 (3), and Kursk-1 (3)? True, they were updated after 1986 to compensate for intrinsic safety deficits, but can the state utility ROSATOM really guarantee that their operation poses no threat?

Third, the potential future of nuclear energy is linked to what Chernobyl means and represents, especially in regard to the watershed question whether long-term exposure to lowly to medium elevated radiation levels would be harmful to human societies over a long period of time. If one answers with yes, then many steps of the regular nuclear lifespan, such as mining, transportation, reprocessing and waste storage would have to be evaluated as dangerous liabilities. Recently, nuclear infrastructure has been interpreted as resembling colonial trade structures, as Jacob Darwin Hamblin writes in The Wretched Atom. While I am not convinced of his comparison with Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial classic The Wretched of the Earth, Hamblin has a point when it comes to the exploitation of uranium mines in previously or still colonised countries. The French Arlit mining complex in Niger serves as a sound illustration of this circumstance.

So where are we standing now, 36 years after the nuclear nimbus of technological progress, while not being destroyed, was at least severely dented? Recently, Chernobyl was in the news yet again because parts of the Russian invasion force into Ukraine captured the plant and caused disruptions, which in turn fuelled fears of the possibility of a renewed accident.

When the Russians retreated from Chernobyl after the failed first attack on Kiev, it became news that Russian soldiers had in fact built trenches in the heavily contaminated Red Forest, close to the station. Media outlets such as CNN, BBC and Reuters were wondering about the cases of radiation sickness within the Russian force and the renewed spread of radioisotopes through the interplay of wind and contaminated dust. This additionally testifies to the fact that Chernobyl has become what Kalmbach and Uekötter called an Erinnerungsort; a place which both became site and projection space for a catastrophe, for heritage, and for imaginaries of the future. It became a metaphor for nuclear fallout, technocratic hubris, and also the hope to overcome its consequences. But also for its vulnerability to war and terrorism.

A stretch of contaminated woods in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (photo courtesy of Pixabay).

Chernobyl’s 36th anniversary demands once again to reflect upon the danger of nuclear energy. Unfortunately, this question has apparently become urgent again, since all Ukrainian nuclear power plants evidently face the danger of warfare, inflicted by Russian arms. Today Ukraine is host to four active nuclear power plants: Khmelnytskyi, Rivne, South-Ukraine, and Zaporizhzhya. The latter also became recently famous beyond the circles of nuclear experts. Unfortunately, it was not because of its sheer size. (Zaporizhzhya is with its 6 GWe nominal capacity the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.) Instead, it was in the news because Russian troops shot at the plant’s facilities with cannon-sized shells, hitting one administrative building in a brutal attempt to take over the plant against local resistance.

This incidence has made it clear that in a time of war, civil nuclear power plants are highly dangerous objects. Here I am not only talking about potential damage received through military actions, but also harm done to the prevention of established security working routines. If workers are not able to regularly rotate their shifts and to get necessary rest, mistakes in operation will inevitably happen.

The same is true for the disruption of power lines. Electricity is necessary to keep the cooling system going of both an active nuclear power plant, and spent nuclear fuel as well as nuclear waste storage facilities. Every facility has backup generators, usually running on diesel. But if the stocks are depleted, for example if the outage takes substantially longer than three days, the situation can become dangerous. The problem is that the established nuclear infrastructure needs stability and adamant security routines to operate in a relatively safe way. A war in this environment is madness, as the warring parties, in the worst case, risk another nuclear meltdown with subsequent releases of large amounts of radioisotopes into the environment. Such an event, as shown by the Chernobyl catastrophe, can include Ukraine, Russia and other nations.

Personally, I have a lot of respect for all those workers at nuclear installations in Ukraine who stay at their workplace and try to keep it safe – in the cases of Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhya under direct risk for their personal health and also private fate. The future of Ukrainian nuclear power plants is of course linked to the outcome of the war. But it is clear that the previously established interconnectedness of nuclear infrastructure between European countries, including Russia, will be renegotiated. An independent Ukraine will probably have good reasons to never again cooperate with Russian nuclear specialists after what is happening now. This would have severe consequences for the Ukrainian nuclear industry in the spheres of uranium and fuel element provision, as well as the storing of spent nuclear fuel. In such a situation, Ukraine would probably have to find national solutions in addition to other non-Russian trading partners to compensate for that.

This situation in Ukraine during the war is a case of precedence, as there had earlier never been any conventional warfare in nuclearised landscapes. 36 years after the catastrophe of Chernobyl hit, we are now to rethink nuclear energy under these new circumstances. Chernobyl keeps asking us questions, which demand answers to secure the safety of established nuclear infrastructures in Europe in general and in Ukraine in particular. The events that are happening right now will profoundly change the European energy system. Besides the fossil fuel industry, also nuclear will have to re-organise. It is clear that we cannot continue like we did before February 2022.

Fukushima – 10 Years Later

By Achim Klüppelberg

On 11 March 2011, Japan’s east coast fell victim to the Tōhoku earthquake. The earth shook for several minutes, causing a huge tsunami, 370 km from Tokyo in the Pacific. As a consequence of both, earthquake and tsunami, several nuclear power plants suffered damage. The one most affected was Fukushima-Daiichi. In the course of the following days, three of six nuclear reactors suffered meltdowns. In reactor four, serious damage through hydrogen explosions occurred.

How was that possible? Japan is located in an area highly prone to earthquakes. In the past, there were multiple occasions on which earthquakes were followed by tsunamis, causing substantial damage to the built environment along Japan’s coasts. When building a nuclear power plant, designers and decision-makers, clearly, need to minimize the plant’s vulnerability to external events. A key question is how to do this when it comes to events that occur only once in a century, millennium, or every ten thousand years.

The reactors in Fukushima-Daiichi were constructed between 1967 and 1979. This was also the time when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant started to be built. In an effort to increase safety and in stark contrast to their Soviet counterparts, the Japanese designed their reactors with containments, which added a layer of protection against the unwanted spread of radionuclides. While the Soviet Union also built power plants in seismically active areas – notably in Armenia – the Japanese plants had higher standards when it came to anti-earthquake safety. All in all, the Japanese reactors were state-of-the-art facilities and with regard to safety on par with those in countries such as the United States, France or Sweden.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/HD.15.055_%2811839699333%29.jpg
The construction site of the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant around 1971. Author: U.S. Department of Energy, Public Domain.

So what happened? In essence, safety considerations were not taking exceptional disasters of the scope of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami into account. In other words, the magnitude of the earthquake and the height of the tsunami were simply greater than the maximum anticipated strain on the nuclear power plant. The plant operator, TEPCO, did not consider an earthquake of magnitude 9 to be a “credible event” in the Japan Trench, as the IAEA concluded in its 2015 report on the accident. TEPCO did not find it economically justifiable to invest in measures to protect the plant against such an event. As NUCLEARWATERS project leader Per Högselius writes in a forthcoming article, the company did consult historical earthquake and tsunami reports, but the conclusion was that although immense tsunamis did occur from time to time along the coast, no tsunami higher than 5.7 meters had ever been recorded in the particular stretch of coast where the Fukushima NPP was located.

Soon, a Japanese parliamentary panel declared that the disaster was not only a natural one. It was also a human-made one, because official institutions believed that measures taken were sufficient and that the cost-safety calculations were appropriate. This is correct, since humans created this envirotechnical system, in which the nuclear power plant was integrated into the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Environmental historian Sarah Pritchard (Confluence) takes inspiration from Charles Perrow’s normal accident theory and Thomas P. Hughes analyses of technological systems. Following these scholars, accidents inevitably happen in complex human-made systems. The creation of the nuclear technological system, of which Fukushima-Daiichi was part, embedded high-risk large-scale technology into an environment prone to natural disasters. Pritchard argues that the Tōhoku earthquake and the ensuing tsunami did not rupture the envirotechnical system between the power plant and the Pacific Ocean, but instead altered it. Water is still being used as a coolant, only this time the reactor has emitted radioactive substances into the sea.

For Pritchard, both the nuclear station and the aquatic system are still bound to and interwoven with each other. This becomes clear when studies find tritium in the groundwater, showing that the envirotechnical system extends beyond the obvious connection to the Pacific. This further leads to the question of how to deal with the accumulating nuclear waste from the plant, much of it in the form of contaminated water stored in tanks on site.

For TEPCO water was both a saviour that made it possible to re-establish cooling of the molten reactor cores and a medium of contamination at the same time. Currently, the operator struggles with securing the rests of the destroyed reactor cores and storing them somehow safely on land. Radioactivity prevents a lot of the decommissioning work. The reactor cores need permanent cooling to prevent further uncontrolled nuclear reactions. Due to the initial destruction of the cooling circuits and the following makeshift replacements, water was not kept within and reused as coolant, as it leaked into the reactor building. From there, it was pumped out, treated and stored outside the plant. On several occasions, it was ultimately dumped into the Pacific. At the time of writing, no end to this problem is in sight.

In connection with the ten-year-anniversary of this tragedy, I was interviewed by the local Greenpeace Group Gießen, Germany. We discussed issues of safety, the current situation at Fukushima and the exciting question of whether nuclear energy could be useful in the context of the current climate crisis.

The interview can be watched here.

This year, we will also commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Therefore, it makes sense to reflect upon the role that nuclear energy plays in global and European energy supply. This is even more true in view of the fact that the nuclear industries in France, Britain, Sweden and other countries face tough decisions whether or not to reinvest into the aging nuclear infrastructure, the alternative being renewable energy sources.