Pencil drawing by the author; Bellefonte Nuclear Generating Station, Hollywood, Alabama.



by Mike Walker

History and science—or perhaps the history of science—as it pertains to the nuclear industry will be the main focus of this blog, hence the somewhat-mundane but honestly pragmatic title. I’ve long been an advocate of nuclear power (and in general an increase in peaceful applications of nuclear and associated technologies) both as a journalist and a software designer, but it took a rather specific incident to function as the catalyst for me to actually write this blog.



I was having dinner with a friend who is a Ph.D. student in the humanities one night—a really bright guy—and we were talking about a trip to Dunnellon we were planning to go hiking and swimming at Rainbow Springs State Park there. Dunnellon is near Crystal River, the site of Duke Energy’s ill-fated Crystal River Three nuclear plant. I mentioned we could drive down to Crystal River for dinner—they have some good seafood there—and also drive decently close-by the nuclear/coal power plant complex.



“Oh I don’t want to see it. Nuclear plants are big, ugly and scary!” exclaimed my friend.



I was awestruck. This guy will have his doctorate in a couple years and then will be teaching college undergrads—wait, hold up: he’s already teaching undergrads as a teaching assistant now, actually. Super-smart guy, as I said. Yet his immediate opinion of a “nuclear plant” and by obvious extension the entire industry, was that it was “big, ugly, and scary”.



Moreover, his opinion mirrored one I recalled from my own undergraduate experience. I was in a medical sociology class and something about nuclear power was brought up and the professor—a sociologist and college professor, mind you—responded in a very negative way as to suggest that nuclear power was unsafe and indeed, a haphazard and ill-run affair. I raised my hand and asked her on what she based her views and she replied—seriously—that “you know, Homer Simpson and all . . .”.



I responded that the evil Cobra character Dr. Mindbender in G.I. Joe was supposd to be an orthodontist yet a fictional character wasn’t going to give me a poor view of the entire dental profession, and she and the rest of the class laughed, but you see the greater point. There are people—very well-educated people who may be in positions as teachers or lawyers or otherwise to influence policy and public understanding—who nonetheless are quite ill-informed on nuclear power, or really, nuclear anything. If Homer Simpson or Hollywood otherwise are doing the job of educating people about nuclear power, we have a huge problem at hand.



There is no doubt that aside from huge, the problem is not new, either. Many of you know that the 28 March 1979 incident at Three Mile Island Generating Station’s Number-2 reactor happened mere days after the release of the Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon thriller The China Syndrome, which featured not only a serious incident at a nuclear power station but a corporate cover-up of flaws in the plant itself. The combination of this film and the actual TMI incident that happened so close to the film’s release are often cited as leading reasons why the public support of peaceful applications of nuclear technology in the 1950s through the 1970s turned sharply to greater criticism of not only military nuclear weapons, but nuclear power, too, in the 1980s. Other films such as Silkwood, The Day After and Testament also provided more fictional critique and an important if often less-than-accurate source of iconography regarding nuclear science. All three of these films, interestingly, were released in 1983 at the apex of late Cold War fear of nuclear attack or nuclear disaster germane to an incident at a power plant. The universal radiation warning icon, men in white or yellow “space suits” with protective boots and masks, wailing klaxons and alarms, complex control panels, evil corporations and corrupt generals and politicians—these are the images that Hollywood has provided of the nuclear world. No wonder my friend who studies fiction for a living found nuclear plants to be “big, ugly and scary”, for fiction has given them little else than this exact guise.



I feel very fortunate and thankful to live in a nation where public opinion influences—controls, even—political and corporate decisions and policies. However, I do not want to live in a world where people with the highest levels of education only know about technologies that can improve their quality of life per what movies or cartoons or novels may tell them. Thus, the main purpose of this blog will be to share what I have learned as a journalist and science writer about communicating to the lay public the real nature of nuclear technologies, both the very positive aspects and the areas that are valid causes for concern. If an informed public has questions or complaints about nuclear power or any associated topic, I welcome that, but the key is an informed public in the first place. The game as it stands is rigged against our industry and we don’t hold cards we really ought to hold so even now decades after Three Mile Island many of us will find ourselves in that same position I was in at dinner with my friend where I had to devote the rest of the dinner conversation explaining Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi, why a reactor can’t “blow on up”, and how despite what James Bond movies may suggest, a terrorist is not going to steal a bomber full of nuclear weapons and fly it off to his secret lair. And I was only glad to do this: someone needed to offer these facts, to counter what the mass media had produced piece by piece over years and years of offering more through fiction than fact regarding the nuclear world.



There are people like my friend who will tell you, despite their obvious lack of any supporting information, that “what happened in Japan could happen here” though it most probably could not. They will say that people have died from “chain reactions” that got out of control despite no one in the United States having suffered such a fate since the 1964 criticality accident at Wood River Junction, Rhode Island. (Nevermind, too, that most early criticality accidents were in good part the sad results of gross human error by people who really should have known better, such as poor Dr. Slotin.)



This blog will focus on how to communicate in an even, balanced, but pro-nuclear tone the actual, science-supported, facts of nuclear power and associated applications. The trajectory of how we came to a point in the United States were much of the public greatly fears nuclear power despite other forms of power being more damaging to the environment will be explored more as will other aspects of our nuclear history, as I expect readers will find such history pretty interesting. The Cold War era is rife with a history that is only now becoming fully in the public discourse as more and more of it is declassified and for the most part, it’s truth better than fiction, with ample tales of real-life heroes and impressive, pioneering, research. Whole books have been written on this topic, one of the best being one I just finished reading myself entitled Nuclear Power from Underseas to Outer Space by John Simpson (American Nuclear Society, 1994) which chronicles Mr. Simpson’s career at Westinghouse in nuclear research, his work under the direction of Admiral Rickover, and the evolution of early naval nuclear power applications. I cannot recommend it enough: well-written and covering some areas of history that have not been considered elsewhere, it should interest anyone in the industry. I will also cover current issues in the Russian nuclear industry since that’s my own area of expertise (alongside Russian/Slavic issues in general) and one little-reported in the US trade media, it seems.



So, welcome: I’m thankful that Nuclear Street has provided me with this blog and hope it will be of interest and use to everyone who reads it!



