Review of “Atoms to Ashes”

I just finished reading “Atoms to ashes: A global history of nuclear disasters” by Harvard history professor Serhii Plokhy. The book provides detailed accounts of six major nuclear accidents:

• The Castle Bravo Test (1954), a hydrogen bomb test on the Bikini Atoll that was more powerful than expected;

• The Kyshtym Disaster (1957), a nuclear waste tank explosion in the USSR;

• The Windscale Fire (1957), the worst nuclear accident in UK history;

• Three Mile Island (1979), a partial meltdown at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania;

• Chernobyl (1986), a reactor meltdown in Soviet Ukraine caused by a flawed design;

• Fukushima (2011), a major radiation release in Japan caused by an earthquake and tsunami.

The technological explanations here are lucid and helpful to a lay reader. For example, this is the first time I heard about “Wigner energy,” a form of potential energy that accumulates in graphite-moderated reactors when atoms are knocked out the graphite lattice. The process of releasing Wigner energy, called “annealing,” requires heating the graphite in a controlled way. In the Windscale reactor, an air-cooled reactor designed after the X-10 reactor in Oak Ridge TN, the heating to anneal the graphite moderators became uncontrolled, causing a fire. The fire only came under control when the plant managers realized that the air was feeding the fire instead of cooling the reactor, and by shutting off the air, the fire was starved and extinguished.

While the circumstances of each accident vary considerably, the book finds several commonalities:

• Human error and hubris: the accidents were often worsened by mistakes, poor judgment, and inadequate training;

• Ideological pressures: the first five accidents occurred during the Cold War, with politics political and ideological factors influencing decisions and safety procedures. A veil of secrecy compromised decision-making, whether the overlords were Soviet, western governments or captains of industry;

• Long-term consequences: Plokhy highlights the liabilities and dangers of nuclear technology that extend far beyond the immediate event, including public distrust of the technology and the long-term problem of waste disposal.

The writing here is superb and I found the storytelling riveting from beginning to end. Each episode situates the reader in the murky unfolding of events as people—many well-intentioned, some not—try to grope their way to an understanding of the scope of the unfolding crisis and its consequences. As someone who grew up in Oak Ridge, I was well-aware of the military, political and financial ramifications of nuclear power and the secrecy that envelopes it. That awareness gave me a sense of empathy for the actors in each of these disasters and the people who found themselves in the vicinity of mortal danger, led by people unable or unwilling to share vital information about potentially existential threats to themselves and their communities.

Nuclear power, with all its risk, must be part of any global solution to anthropogenic climate change. Unlike solar and wind, nuclear doesn’t suffer from the intermittency problem. Of course, there are several forms of nuclear reactor, each with virtues and problems. If you have any interest in the impact that nuclear can have on global warming, you should read this book.