Atoms and Ashes review — the perils of a nuclear future

Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima by Serhii Plokhy (Allen Lane, £25).

At the beginning of February, the eminent Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy gave an interview about Russian official attitudes to Ukraine. It proved prescient. 

Plokhii explained to the New Statesman that Putin’s version of Russian history was one prevalent in 19th Century Imperial Russia, where the Tsars ruled three combined Russias; Russia itself, “little Russia”, i.e. Ukraine, and “White Russia”, today’s Belarus.

This is now Putin’s view. It looks to the Tsars over the shoulder of the imperialism of Josef Stalin. Putinism yearns to restore the legacy of the Yalta Conference of February 1945, when Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to carve the world into respective “spheres of influence”. 

For Stalin, this meant that any area of Europe liberated by the Red Army should fall under the thrall of the Soviet Union.

This has now become the Putin broken record purporting to be historically informed policy. This, says Plokhy, leads to a belief that smaller countries do not have the right to full sovereignty. 

Too much democracy cannot be allowed to exist in client states, whether it’s Finland after 1940, Armenia since the revolution of 2018, or Ukraine from 1991 on. “Countries being both democratic and pro-Russian in geopolitical terms is a virtual impossibility. A democratic Poland would not have been a member of the Warsaw Pact in the Cold War.”

This means the war in Ukraine is going to be tough for Ukraine, and for Russia — for whom it could be a disaster in its present political configuration. The reason why Putin’s Russia and Moscow clique are approaching an abyss is hinted at in Plokhy’s new book Atoms and Ashes, a look at nuclear disasters, from Bikini Atoll to Fukushima.

Plokhy, now a professor at Harvard, has written previously about his native Ukraine, Russia and the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986. The new book is both timely, and out of time. 

Nuclear energy and the legacy of Chernobyl are its central themes. But there is so much more to be said about them in the aftermath of the Russian attack on Ukraine on 24 February. 

The mismanagement and bungling of the official approach to the explosion at the plant, the mishandled evacuations of populations and the terrible retribution of technicians and political blame-shifting have echoes in the blundering Russian operations still underway in Donbas, Mariupol and Odessa.

The book gives brisk and highly readable accounts of six major disasters, opening with the Castle Bravo US nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll in March 1954. 

Inhabitants of two island groups in the Marshalls were evacuated almost as an afterthought as radiated debris spread. An unnoticed Japanese fishing vessel, Lucky Dragon No5, was also caught, and the testimony of its contaminated crew on return to port at Yaizu proved damning. 

The explosion on 1 March produced double the calculated yield of radioactive material. The chief scientist at the test, Al Graves, claimed little effect at a hearing in 1957 but died in July 1965 at the age of 55. “The thyroid gland was so atrophied, it was hard to identify,” according to the medical report.

The narrative moves from Bikini Atoll to the explosion at a plant in Kyshtym, a reactor complex in a closed city to provide material for the burgeoning Russian H-bomb programme. Much of the incident is still shrouded in mystery, though the chaos of the rescue, evacuations and cover-up were a harbinger of the Chernobyl blow-up in 1986. 

Many of the early nuclear power plants were dual-use — civil and military — providing power for the domestic electricity grid, and fissile material for nuclear weapons.

This was the case at Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast, where the reactors there and at Calder Hall were providing material for Britain’s attempt to develop its own independent nuclear weapon. 

An “annealing” process of heating and then cooling and restoring the casing was underway at the reactor Pile 1 at the Windscale complex on the morning of 7 October 1957. Unexpectedly fire broke out, and within hours this became a full-scale emergency.

Fire in the reactor was to be repeated in the disasters at the wholly civil plant at Three Mile Island outside Harrisburg in Pennsylvania on 27 March 1979, at Chernobyl in 1986, and the Fukushima disaster on 11 March 2011.

All are tales of bad procedures, poor training and staff organisation, and bad instrumentation at the controls of the plant.

Plokhy is strong on the actions of the political leaders in each incident, and none comes out with entire credit. The most knowledgeable was Jimmy Carter, a naval nuclear engineer who had worked with Admiral Rickover building the first nuclear submarines as a young associate in 1952.

He really understood what was going on, including the myth of the “China Syndrome” — which originated from a film of the same name — predicting a nuclear plant melting through the Earth’s core.

The author is weakest on the Sellafield disaster, bearing the risk of food contamination across North West England and into the Irish Sea. He is shaky on geography, insisting Cumbria is in the North East of the UK, which he claims had become the heart of nuclear Britain. 

Nothing is mentioned of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, still going strong today as the AWE, or the associated Royal Ordnance sites at Burghfield and Cardiff. 

Aldermaston was the target of the Easter marches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Committee of 100, which so troubled Harold Macmillan in selling his nuclear plans to the public. 

Of CND there is no mention, and the initiatives of Bertrand Russell, Oppenheimer and Salk in their Pugwash Conferences for disarmament and world peace get a scant reference, too.

Macmillan gave up on an independent British nuclear weapon when he signed the Anglo-American Treaty for nuclear cooperation in 1958. The author misses a trick here, too. 

The 1958 treaty is the model for the new AUKUS treaty involving nuclear submarine cooperation between the US, UK and now Australia to confront nuclear China. This important development at least bears mention by footnote.

These omissions in Atoms and Ashes reflect the difficulty books of this nature have in navigating between history, contemporary history, current affairs and raw journalism. It bears out Alan Bennett’s brilliant quip in The History Boys, “there is no period so remote as the recent past.”

The last two incidents recounted, the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, and the destruction of the Fukushima plant on Honshu in March 2011, point up issues that are vividly alive in the Ukraine war.

The explosions and fires at the Chernobyl complex on 24 April 1986 caused the biggest damage and loss to human life of all six incidents in the book. Rescue crews and helicopter pilots deliberately risked their lives. 

The zone is still polluted. Even Russian formations advancing from Belarus from 24 February this year, used the grounds of the old plants as tank parks, kicking up clouds of dust and debris still thought to be contaminated. The effect on the young soldiers was not, and will not be, recorded.

The pollution from the initial blasts spread across the borders of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. Today, Ukraine still derives half its electricity from nuclear power — with five main complexes and a total of 15 reactors. 

One of the biggest nuclear centres is at Zaporizhzhia on the Dniepr and whose oblast includes Mariupol. A few weeks ago we had videos of tanks firing on the reactor centres. To what end and what risk one may only guess. There are huge questions about the nuclear future of the entire region.

The Fukushima incident of March 2011 raises another critical issue in the geopolitical fallout of the Ukraine war, whose true depth and scale we are only beginning to grasp. 

At 2.46 pm local time on 11 March 2011 one of the biggest earthquakes in a thousand years took place under the sea 40 miles off the coast of the large Japanese island of Honshu, and 110 miles from the complex of six reactors at Fukushima. 

It took some hours before the plant was hit by a tsunami in the three phases. A fire broke out and panic ensued, not helped by the innate commercial caution and technical incompetence of the TEPCO and the insistence by prime minister Naoto Kan, a quintessential control freak, that he take command.

Evacuations took place slowly and 520 contaminated wastewater found its way to the ocean. A further 1.25 million tons of wastewater remains sealed up in tanks. 

Altogether 10,000 suffered radiation in some form, and 150,000 became refugees, though this is only half the number at Chernobyl. The total cleanup bill has been calculated at $35 billion.

Fukushima caused panic in China, which had planned to build 52 new reactors. In Germany, the Bundestag voted to close all nuclear power facilities by 2022, and Chancellor Merkel declared there would be no new ones. 

Germany thus became even more dependent on Russian hydrocarbon fuel — not forgetting that Angela Merkel’s predecessor Gerhard Schröder became vice president of the premier Russian state energy contractor, Gazprom.   

Events since 24 February render much of the author’s concluding thoughts obsolete. The UN nuclear panel, the IAEA, calculates that the world needs to increase its generation of nuclear power to provide electricity from the current ten per cent to at least 25 per cent by 2050 if we had to get half a grip on the challenges of climate change. 

Plokhy suggests that the risk is too dangerous. The development of nuclear power generation is a story of human error, bad practice and training, and weak monitoring down to poor and inadequate instrumentation for regulation. 

He quotes, with approval, one scientist’s prediction; “one core meltdown accident very 37,000 reactor years.” Nuclear energy should now enter its autumn years with as much safety preparation as possible.

Is it all over for nuclear power? 

The question is raised but not answered by Atoms and Ashes, a quirky and brilliant read of a book. There is a lot more to be said about filling the energy gap and the fossil fuel challenge. 

There is either a much shorter or longer book screaming to get out of this one, with its dense recitations of facts and figures. 

But before that, we need Serhii Plokhy to give us more of his powerful insights into the tangled saga of Russia and his beloved Ukraine.