There is a millennia long fascination with the atom and its secrets, that began about 2500 years ago, with the Greek philosopher Liucippus being credited with the origin of the ‘atomic philosophy’, and his student Democritus naming the smallest unit of matter as ‘atom’ (meaning indivisible) around 430 BCE (roughly around that same times, Indian philosopher Kanada was also proposing a somewhat similar idea). Similar but lesser known stories exist in the Soviet nuclear test sites of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, Novaya Zemlya and others, the French nuclear test sites of Reggane & Akker in Algeria and the Mururoa Atoll in the Pacific, the British test sites in the Australian territories of Monte Bello, Maralinga, Emu Field, and the Chinese test site of Lop Nur in the Uygur Autonomous region.īut where and how does the story of nuclear bombs and energy start? The tales of the major US testing site, the Marshal Islands and how its unsuspecting citizens were used as nuclear-exposure guinea pigs, is another horror story. That’s not the end of nuclear bombs destructive story, though, as the ‘nuclear powers’ have tested over 2000 of these nuclear weapons of mass destruction in several designated areas of the world. And it’s better not to forget the cataclysmic nuclear bombings of Hiroshima (over 1200,000 dead from one small fission bomb) and Nagasaki. Many such nuclear disasters happen every decade in many countries operating nuclear power projects, at various smaller scales. These are not events, these are apocalyptic events. One was reminded of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster as the only comparably horrendous nuclear disaster, both being classified at the highest rank of Level-7 in the deceptively named “International Nuclear and Radiological Events Scale INES”. And that disaster is still unfolding 12 years down the line, with no certainty about when the technologically and financially sound Japanese government and the corporate world (TEPCO owns and ran the Fukushima Daiichi NPP) will be able to fully contain and decommission these reactors. Lakhs of people were evacuated, huge areas became uninhabitable for decades or even centuries, massive radioactive water was (and is still being) dumped into the Pacific Ocean, causing untold damage to marine life. Three of the six boiling-water nuclear reactors went completely out of control into meltdown, spreading deadly radioactive materials. What followed is now well known to the whole world, as the live television coverage of the apocalyptic events streamed into all homes across the globe. A huge Tsunami, triggered by the gigantic Tohuku earthquake, which swept away towns and villages, also hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants on the coast, overwhelming the defensive sea walls. Twelve years ago, on the 11th of March 2011, ‘all hell broke loose, again’ in the Pacific coast of Japan. There is no exact or agreed upon figure of human costs in terms of deaths and serious diseases like cancer, but a study by three scientists published in 2009, by the New York Academy of Sciences, estimated the total death figures in those years to be about 985,000! No one is sure how close or off that mark is, but it brings home the point about the massive risks. The radioactive fallout spread quickly throughout Europe and beyond. The complex control systems comprising the graphite moderators, boron carbide control rods, Xenon 135 build up and decay, unexpected power fluctuations quickly took all means of control out of the hands of the desperate crew. Ironically, the plant operators were trying to demonstrate one of the claimed ‘safety features’ of using the inertial energy of the spinning systems to supply crucial cooling power during the transition due to a power failure and switchover to backup power. Just about 37 years ago, on April 26, 1986, in the then Soviet Union, one of the four 1000 MW nuclear fission reactors in the Chernobyl nuclear power station started to go out of control, becoming possibly the worst industrial disaster in human history, in terms of its toll on human lives and health. Particularly when we are standing close to 11th March 2023, when one of the worst disasters took place in the Fukushima prefecture, in Japan 12 years ago. In this period of ever-increasing Climate Crisis, when many voices pushing nuclear fission power as a supposedly zero-carbon safe’ energy are being heard, it is fitting to remember some of the catastrophic disasters of the nuclear power industry.
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