nuclear power Archives - Not Even Past

By Michael Dorman

In the early morning hours of April 26th, 1986, Chernobyl reactor number four experienced a series of explosions that resulted in the world’s most devastating nuclear disaster to date. The local population did not believe that a nuclear accident could happen in the Soviet Union, so no one living or working in the affected areas had been properly prepared or trained to respond to a nuclear accident. Soviet authorities at all levels of government were largely uninformed as to the procedures and precautionary measures that should have taken place. Local officials in Kiev waited a full 40 hours to receive orders from their superiors in Moscow. It took another two days for them to publicly acknowledge that the accident had occurred. On the Saturday morning following the explosion children went to school, men went fishing in the reactor’s cooling ponds, and, with the exception of those called to help at the reactor, the daily lives of those in the contaminated areas continued as usual. The reactions of party members and plant workers in the hours and days following the accident were characterized by fear, confusion, and an overall lack of understanding of the severity of the accident. Outside of the circles of upper level Soviet officials, no one would know that Belarus had received an amount of radioactive fallout equivalent to 350 nuclear bombs until 1989.

Map of Soviet Union - Administrative Divisions, 1989. Via Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas Libraries.

Map of Soviet Union Administrative Divisions, 1989. Belarus is colored green in the top left corner. Via Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas Libraries.

The Chernobyl nuclear energy facility in Ukraine was located just 16 km from the Belarusian border. As a result the radioactive rain (or “back rain”) that followed in the wake of the accident dispersed 70% of the total fallout on Belarus. This left 23% of the republic’s territory contaminated with cesium-137 and 80% contaminated by radioactive iodine. It is thought that many of the thyroid diseases that occurred immediately following the accident were caused by iodine 131, as the effects of the other forms of radiation that fell on Belarus would have taken much longer to manifest.

Since the catastrophe, 2.3 million Belarusians, including 700,000 children, have been affected by Chernobyl. In Gomel, Belarus’s second largest city, congenital deformities have increased 250 percent and birth defects have increased by 200 percent. The incidents of thyroid cancer in the Gomel region are 10,000 times higher than prior to the accident. With 2.1 million people currently living on contaminated land (just over one fifth of the population), it has been in the governments interest to downplay the effects of Chernobyl whenever possible. According to the NGO “Hope To Children In Trouble,” since the accident the deaths of 160 children in Belarus have been “black listed” in order to hide their causes of death and to deflate statistics regarding the birth defects and congenital diseases in republic. In Voices From Chernobyl, Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich includes an interview from the mother of (at the time) “the only child in Belarus to have survived being born with such complex pathologies.” The mother describes the body of her newborn daughter as being without an anus, vagina, and left kidney. This family was from a village that had initially been marked for evacuation but due to lack of government funds was left in place. Additionally, many birth defects that are life threatening in Belarus would require mere outpatient operations in most western countries. Cleft pallets, tonsillectomies, minor heart defects, and the likes can be fatal in Belarus due to the lack of advancements in the Belarusian medical system. Thus the seriousness of Chernobyl-related birth defects are greatly heightened due to the poor state of Belarusian health care.

In the latter days of the Soviet Union Belarus already had over 100 non-government organizations (NGOs) working within the republic to aid in the Chernobyl clean up and minimize the impact of the fallout on the children born in the contaminated areas. The idea of large scale problems being solved by non-government organizations rather than government agencies was a foreign concept in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. This skepticism of NGOs has largely carried over into independent Belarus. The tendency among government officials has been to treat NGOs with suspicion while looking to Moscow to provide funding (even after 1991), as accepting help from western organizations contradicts decades of deeply engrained Soviet values. Since the mid 1990’s, many of the NGOs operating in the Republic of Belarus have either left or found themselves operating under hostile regulatory conditions. Currently in Belarus, 114 NGOs continue to operate; however, their projects must stay apolitical in nature, avoiding the temptation to encourage a more democratic civil society in the republic. Additionally, while many of these NGOs have spent millions of U.S. dollars renovating and building facilities to provide various forms of care for those affected by Chernobyl, their stories are completely absent from Belarusian media.

Nearly 25 years after the collapse of communism, the debate over the scope of the devastation Chernobyl caused in Belarus continues, with many western organizations such as the United Nations and World Health Organization dismissing the effects of the accident and attributing the rise of all health problems, with the exception of those related to thyroid diseases, to “radiophobia.” Since the accident, Chernobyl’s visibility in Belarusian media has steadily declined, finally reaching its present state of virtual nonexistence. As Olga Kuchinskaya points out in The Politics of Invisibility, “those who should worry most, or at least more, often appear to be the least concerned; the experience of living with increased radiation danger does not necessarily bring out more anxiety.” This observation not only disputes the idea that radiophobia is a legitimate issue in Belarus, but most importantly points to the fact that the dangers of radiation and the gravity of Chernobyl’s effects have been extirpated from the national consciousness of Belarusians.

Sources and Further Reading

Olga Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl. Cambridge, Massachusettes: MIT, 2014. Print.

Cliodhna Russell, “Column: How My Trip to a Children’s Mental Asylum in Belarus Made Me Proud to Be Irish.” TheJournalie. N.p., n.d. Web. Nov. 30, 2015.

Vladimir Tsalko, “Mineral Resources.” Brill’s New Pauly (n.d.): n. pag. Web. Dec. 5, 2015.

David R. Marples, Belarus: From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Print.

David R. Marples, “Chapter 8.” The Long Road to Recovery: Community Responses to Industrial Disaster. Tokyo: United Nations UP, 1996. 183-230. Print.

Chernobyl Heart: The Dark Side of Nuclear Power. Dir. Maryann DeLeo. 2003. Youtube.

“STRANGLING THE NGO COMMUNITY.” Human Rights Watch. N.p., 1997. Web. Dec. 6, 2015.

Valentina Pokhomova, “Belarusian Victims of Chernobyl – Hope to Children in Trouble.” Belarusian Victims of Chernobyl – Hope to Children in Trouble. N.p., 2015. Web. Dec. 6, 2015.

“Belarusian Civic Organizations Database – En.ngo.by.” Belarusian Civic Organizations Database – En.ngo.by. N.p., n.d. Web. Dec. 7, 2015.

“Map of Chernobyl Fallout.” Http://www.nuclearfreeplanet.org/, n.d. Web. Dec. 4, 2015.

by Jonathan Hunt

The hourglass-shaped towers of the Chinon nuclear plant look out of place so near the Loire Valley’s famous castles.Regardless, nuclear energy generated almost 80 percent of all electricity in France last year, more than any other country, and a sizable surplus for export, too. Gabrielle Hecht’s book, The Radiance of France, recounts how these monuments joined the Eiffel Tower as symbols of modern France. Hecht illuminates the country’s nuclear history through the prism of what she calls “technopolitics,” the process by which technical decisions are made in light of non-technical, often political, considerations. Thus, according to Hecht, the “engineering choices” that set the trajectory of French nuclear development “must be understood as part of a struggle to define Frenchness in the postwar world.”

France underwent a national identity crisis after World War II. The toll of war, Soviet-American power and anti-colonialism, and colonial insurgencies in French Indochina and North Africa threatened the lofty perch that France had grown accustomed to as a European heavyweight possessing a global empire. French leaders saw “technological prowess” as a way to regain the nation’s footing and fading grandeur. An elite corps of technocrats from L’École Polytechnique was installed at the Commissariat Général au Plan to help the country reach its scientific and technological potential. Wielding cutting-edge statistical tools popularized in the U.S. such as econometrics, these bureaucrats devised multi-year programs with heavy industry a major priority.

If industrial progress was the “bridge” between a “mythologized past and [its] coveted future,” nuclear power was that bridge’s symbolic pillar. French politics had animated the nuclear industry from the start. The priority given to non-technical issues was evident, for example, in the Commisariat à l’Énergie Atomique’s (CEA) promotion of a filière française, a gas-graphite reactor, rather than American and Canadian variants using light- and heavy-water, respectively. Charles de Gaulle had founded the CEA in 1945, appointing the world-famous chemist Frédéric Joliot-Curie as its High Commissioner. But Joliot-Curie’s communist sympathies and his hostility to weapons-related research and development led to his ouster in 1950. Though never authorized by the Fourth Republic’s run of short-lived, dysfunctional governments, the new commissioner, Felix Perrin, made pursuing an independent nuclear arsenal a cardinal goal. This ministerial policy laid the foundations of a military nuclear program and justified a gas-graphite system that would breed the maximum bomb-usable plutonium.

The Chinon nuclear plant in France’s Loire Valley. (Image courtesy of gpf2009/Flickr Creative Commons)

Prime Minister Félix Gaillard pronounced building the Bomb an official national policy in 1958. De Gaulle reaffirmed this policy when he rose to power later that year when a military crisis in French Algeria triggered the Fourth Republic’s collapse. When the first French bomb exploded in the Sahara two years later during the Algerian War of Independence, de Gaulle announced the test at L’École Polytechnique, declaring it had shown the “whole world the value of French technologists and considerably reinforced our country’s position.” The CEA’s role in establishing a “breakthrough capability” for France thus shows how bureaucratic choices can predispose a state to “go nuclear.”

The book ends with an in-depth account of the battle between the CEA and Electricité de France (EDF), a national public utility, over competing reactor types at Chinon and Marcoule. The CEA wanted more plutonium while the EDF wanted more electricity. In squabbles over plutonium pricing, the kilowatt-hour’s cost structure, and the optimal export reactor, each party used statistical models to rationalize its position. Hecht’s presentation of the interagency clash makes the remaining chapters about cultures of labor at nuclear plants and nuclear power’s contested meanings in the countryside seem relatively peripheral. The intricacy of the political maneuvering, the diversity of characters (trade unionists, nuclear engineers, government committees, even antinuclear Buddhists), and the elegance of the account of how commercial demands trumped national pride when a light-water design associated with American power rather than French ingenuity replaced the filière française all bring to mind Tom Wolfe’s better novels.

The Radiance of France’s place among the canonical histories of science and technology is chiefly warranted by Hecht’s deep and measured thoughts about the realm of technopolitics. Her insights open new windows through which to contemplate how technology and engineering of any type or scale evolves in concert with political life. She accomplishes this feat while conferring a historical sense on those gray towers as deep and nuanced as one might expect of a baroque châteaux.

Remembering Chernobyl

The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II by Gabrielle Hecht (1998)

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