Nuclear perils

Today's news that war damage to electric lines has interrupted monitoring of the radioactive Chernobyl site in Ukraine makes the thoughts of Mohamed ElBaradei even more to the point.

Chernobyl

In 2002, Mohamed ElBaradei was Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He called bullshit on the Bush administration's 2002 claim that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed nuclear weapons. He was correct. The U.S. (make that John Bolton) worked to get him canned from the agency. International opposition defeated that move and in 2005 ElBaradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

So ElBaradei's observations on the nuclear implications of the Russian invasion of Ukraine seem well grounded.

Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear facility, is home to six nuclear reactors, any one of which could have been jeopardized by the fires that were started during the Russian shelling of the facility and fighting at the plant. That the flames were extinguished quickly is a testament to the professionalism and bravery of the plant’s workers. But with Russian officers now interfering in the running of the plant, the Zaporizhzhia reactors remain at risk. 

The world got lucky, as it did with Russian troops’ equally dangerous incursion into the shuttered Chernobyl plant during the first days of the invasion. Yet there are still another half-dozen nuclear reactors scattered across Ukraine, which means that the worst-case scenario remains a live possibility. The release of radioactive material could render entire population centers uninhabitable, threatening hundreds of thousands of people – and not just in the immediate vicinity. ...

The point he's making here is something we need to listen to. In recent years, climate hawks have insisted that nuclear-generated electric power has to be part of overcoming dependency on coal and oil if we hope to mitigate carbon pollution. Nuke plants make clean energy, as least with regard to carbon emissions.

Certainly nuclear power is attractive on its face -- and most likely engineers have figured out how to make nuke plants safer than Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Designs do get better with experience.

Every once in a while, I try to inject a question like "have they figured out what to do with the waste?" into online discussions. Either there is no answer or people who've been beat up for even thinking about nuclear get hostile.

My question is not hostile. I'm just trying to inject the human dimension into the discussion of nuclear power. Our species is not capable of behaving carefully or sensibly for the thousands of years it takes for high end nuclear waste to decay. We're bright and creative hominids, but we fight wars. The horror of  Ukraine is a reminder that in a crisis, the soldiers can take over from the engineers with dire consequences.

* * *

ElBaradei goes on to summarize where the global nuclear weapons danger is today:

As we have seen in the Ukraine war, nuclear weapons have once again become instruments of security strategy. All nine [Nuclear Weapons States] NWSs – China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the UK, and the US – are, indeed, now in a frantic race to modernize their arsenals. 

Even more ominously, the NWSs are availing themselves of new cyber and artificial-intelligence technologies, as well as advanced sci-fi-like hypersonic missiles that are designed to evade existing defense systems. And many – including Britain and France – now keep their nuclear weapons on heightened alert, a status that raises the probability of a nuclear-weapon launch (be it intentional, accidental, or as a result of cyber manipulation). 

Despite all our past legal commitments, we are still living in a world where security strategy ultimately depends on nuclear weapons. ...

He goes on to call for the sort of patient, tiresome negotiation and confidence building which created the nuclear treaty firewalls which successive Republican administrations in the U.S. and the aggressive autocracy in Russia have torn down over the last 20 years.

His prescription includes a mobilized global public opinion which makes "the hoarding of [nuclear] arsenals ... a taboo akin to genocide." Such a force existed for awhile in the 1980s -- the Ukraine war reminds us we still need it.