They
continued and expanded for the same reason: to perpetuate themselves mainly. In
the United States an additional interest was greed, money to be made through capitalism.
In the former Soviet Union, an additional motive was communism's worshipful commitment
to technology. As the 1958 book Atom For Peace of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences
stated: "Atomic energy is a powerful tool of technical progress. The speediest
and fullest utilization of this new source of power is thus in the interests of
humanity."
"Atomics, like science and technology in general, finds
its natural home in socialism, which alone makes possible social planning, and,
therefore, the use of productive forces for the benefit of the people," declared
the Marxist analyis Atomic Energy and Society published by International Publishers.
But whether atomic technology was developed under U.S.-style capitalism or
Soviet communism, the end result was the same: nuclear pollution destroying life
and contaminating the environment in both our nations.
In the United States,
atomic technology began with a letter to our president in 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
from Albert Einstein – written in Peconic on Long Island, New York. (I live
15 kilometers away.)
In late 1938 fission was accomplished in Nazi Germany.
Physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, like Einstein refugees from the Nazis,
fearing Hitler might develop a bomb based on the energy unleashed by fission,
with others asked Einstein to write the letter. Einstein wrote to the president
about information that "leads me to expect that the element uranium may be
turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future,"
how "it may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass
of uranium" and of "this new phenomenon" leading "to the construction
of bombs…extremely powerful bombs of a new type."
Out of that letter
came the Manhattan Project run by the U.S. Army. Scientists and engineers were
gathered and put to work at facilities secretly built at locations across the
U.S. The biggest were laboratories and manufacturing plants in Los Alamos, New
Mexico; Hanford, Washington; Argonne, Illinois; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Large
corporations and universities were retained to manage the facilities. Indeed,
Einstein's letter had suggested that "government departments" join with
"university laboratories" and "industrial laboratories" for
this crash program to beat the Nazis to nuclear weapons.
General Electric and
Westinghouse – which were to become the Coke and Pepsi in the U.S. manufacture
of nuclear power plants – got their start in atomic technology as Manhattan
Project contractors.
By 1945 four atomic bombs had been built, one used for
a test and two dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
Also by 1945, 600,000
people had become part of a program on which two billion dollars, in 1940's dollars,
had been spent. The Manhattan Project had become a major part of the U.S. economy.
With
the war's end there was anxiety among many of those involved in the Manhattan
Project. Many of the scientists and government officials didn't want to see the
endeavor and their jobs over; corporations didn't want to see their contracts
ended.
As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos Laboratory,
with the war over there were now problems of "job placement, work continuity…more
free time than work…hardly enough to keep everyone busy…without a crash
program underway."
Some of the people and corporations could continue building
nuclear weapons, and they did. And they built even bigger bombs – the "super,"
the hydrogen bomb, Teller's project. Nuclear weapons do not lend themselves to
commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to perpetuate
the nuclear establishment that rose with the Manhattan Project? In the first nuclear
reactors, built at Hanford to turn uranium-238 into plutonium-239, fissionable
atomic bomb fuel, lay a clue for commercial use of atomic technology: use the
heat caused by fission to boil water to turn a turbine and generate electricity.
There
were other schemes: using nuclear devices as substitutes for TNT to blast huge
holes in the ground. Indeed, the U.S. in the 1950s planned to string 250 nuclear
devices across the isthmus of Panama to create a new canal – dubbed the Panatomic
Canal. It would, though, rain radioactive debris on a large section of Central
America. Finally, what the Manhattan Project became in 1946, the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission, withdrew the project because of "prospective host country opposition
to nuclear-canal excavation."
There was even a scheme to close the Straits
of Gibraltar with nuclear devices. The Mediterranean would then rise and desalinate
so its waters could be used to irrigate the Sahara Desert. Atomic scientist Glenn
Seaborg who went on to become AEC chairman acknowledged that "of course,
the advances of a verdant Sahara would have to be weighed against the loss of
Venice and other sea level cities."
There were plans, too, to use nuclear
technology to radiation-expose food to extend shelf life, to build nuclear-powered
airplanes and nuclear-powered rockets.
The nuclear establishments in my country
and here pushed on and on and on…
In the U.S.S.R., it was a letter sent
by physicist Georgii Flerov to Joseph Stalin in 1942 that, as the book Red Atom:
Russia's Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today relates, began your atomic
program. "In the same way Albert Einstein's letter to President Franklin
Roosevelt gave impetus to the Manhattan project, Flerov's letter convinced Stalin
to pursue an atomic bomb," notes Paul R. Josephson.
Out of that letter
came your nuclear establishment. You know better than I of its devastating costs,
costs that parallel the price we in America have paid in lives lost, parts of
our nation left horribly polluted.
As Josephson states in Red Atom: "The
physicists desired energy 'too cheap to meter' through power-generating reactors.
They sought new ways to produce nuclear fuel – plutonium – cheaply through
liquid metal fast breeder reactors…They built small nuclear engines intended
to power locomotives, rockets, airplanes, and portable power plants…They
sterilized various food products with low-level gamma radiation to prevent spoilage
and increase shelf life. They pioneered the so-called tokamak reactor in pursuit
of fusion power. And they used 'peaceful nuclear explosions' for various mining,
excavation, and construction purposes. Nuclear technology was at the center of
visions of a radiant communist future."
He continues, "whether nuclear
reactors or food irradiation programs, small nuclear engines or factories spitting
out…liquid sodium or isotope separation equipment, each of these technologies
developed significant momentum. As if divorced from human control, the programs
expanded." Just like in the U.S.
In 1954, in a race with the United States,
the first Soviet reactor to produce electricity, Obninsk, started up – despite
what Josephson says were problems causing the reactor to be "unstable and
in need of constant attention."
The first commercial nuclear plant in
the U.S., Shippingport in Pennsyvlania, started up in 1957. It was built by the
U.S. government under the direction of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the "father"
of our nuclear navy. The private utilities in the U.S. were reluctant to build
atomic power plants, fearing their exposure, their liability in the event of an
accident. With the opening of Shippingport, Lewis Straus, chairman of the Atomic
Energy Commission, declared that "it is the commission's policy to give industry
the first opportunity to undertake the construction of power reactors. However,
if industry does not, within a reasonable time, undertake to build types of reactors
which are considered promising, the commission will take steps to build the reactors
on its own initiative."
This was the stick to compel the U.S. utility industry
to build nuclear plants. The carrot was the Price-Anderson Act, a law passed in
1957, supposedly as a temporary measure to encourage a nuclear industry to start,
which severely limited liability in the event of a catastrophic accident. But
the Price-Anderson Act continues to this day, indeed the U.S. Congress recently
voted to extend it another 15 years. Meanwhile, also in 1957, the first U.S. report
on the consequences of a nuclear accident was released. The AEC's WASH-740 report
projected the potential impacts as 3,400 killed, 43,000 injured and $7 billion
in property damage.
That, however, was based on a nuclear plant with a fifth
the power of those that actually were built in the 1960s and 70s. In 1982, the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the successor agency of the AEC, issued a report
reflecting the increased power. This analysis, Calculation of Reactor Accident
Consequences, projected consequences such as, for the Indian Point 2 and 3 nuclear
plants 28 miles north of New York City – over which, might I note, one of
the jets that crashed into the World Trade Center September 11 flew – 46,000
"early fatalities" if Indian Point 2 underwent a meltdown with breach
of containment; 50,000 "early fatalities" from a meltdown at Indian
Point 3. Peak "early injuries" from 2: 141,000. From 3, 167,000. Cancer
deaths, 13,000 from 2; 14,000 from 3. And as to property damage, the study estimated
$274 billion – in 1980 dollars – as a result of a meltdown at 2; $314
billion as a result of a meltdown at 3.
Another important U.S. government admission,
on the "likelihood of a severe core melt" accident, came in 1985: "In
a population of 100 reactors operating over a period of 20 years, the crude cumulative
probability of such an accident would be 45%," said the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission.
Your nuclear whistle-blower Lydia Popova has written how "the
Soviet nuclear industry began with the creation of deadly weapons in secret cities
and secret laboratories." Your counterpart to our governmental nuclear regulatory
agencies, the Ministry of Atomic Power, as Popova states, "acquired the privileges
of the [nuclear] weapons program – including its secrecy and total financial
dependence on the taxpayer. Its commitment was to serve the interests of the industry
and a select group of nuclear specialists at the expense of ordinary people."
We
had our Three Mile Island accident about which our nuclear establishment is still
in denial. A TV documentary I've done is called Three Mile Island Revisited in
which it is revealed that despite the claim of our nuclear establishment that
"no one died" as a result of the TMI accident, the owner of the plant
has quietly been giving cash settlements to people who suffered impacts including
the loss of loved ones.
Here Chernobyl brought horrific devastation and as Popova
has written, your nuclear establishment is also "unrepentant," seeking
to have Chernobyl "forgotten."
And both Russian and U.S. governments
are now are pushing for a "revival" of nuclear power – many more
nuclear power plants in both nations. As one official in the U.S. process, Treasury
Secretary Paul O'Neill, has said: "If you set aside Three Mile Island and
Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear power really is good." Really.
Your
government would establish Russia as a repository for much of the world's nuclear
waste. My government is now moving to dump U.S. nuclear wastes in Yucca Mountain
which is on or near 32 earthquake faults and is 100 miles from Las Vegas. Speaking
of a big gamble.
In their 1992 book Ecocide in the USSR, Murray Feshback and
Alfred Friendly, Jr. wrote: "When historians finally conduct an autopsy on
the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism, they may reach the verdict of death by
ecocide…No other great industrial civilization so systematically and so long
poisoned its land, air, water and people. None so loudly proclaiming its efforts
to improve public health and protect nature so degraded both. And no advanced
society faced such a bleak political and economic reckoning with so few resources
to invest toward recovery."
They write about how the Soviet Union endangered
"the health of its population – especially its children and its labor
force – the productivity of its soil and the purity of its air and water.
Ten years later, the people of Russia are examining alternative systems. There
are those in my country who would sell you on our system. Capitalism, they say,
is the answer.
Life, I say, is the answer. To life, to the preservation of
life – that is what a nation should aspire.
In my country, cancer is now
epidemic. Nearly one in every two Americans is expected to get cancer. And analysis
after analysis has attributed a majority of cancer cases to environmental pollution:
the toxic soup of air pollution, water pollution, the impacts of dangerous chemicals
and radiation.
As a Presidential Toxic Substances Strategy Committee reported:
"Environmental factors…are significant in the great majority of cancer
cases seen."
As the First Annual Report to Congress by the Task Force on
Environmental Cancer and Heart and Lung Disease stated: "The environment
we have created may now be a major cause of death in the United States.'
Rachel
Carson whose 1962 book Silent Spring sparked the modern environmental movement
in the U.S. spoke of a "barrage" of toxics "hurled against the
fabric of life" and causing widespread death. That barrage continues.
The
government is of little use in protecting its citizens.
That's the way it has
always been
Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a physician known as the "father"
in the U.S. of pure food regulation (there's even a U.S. postage stamp bearing
his likeness), came to Washington, D.C. in 1883 to become chief chemist of the
U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The U.S. was changing – from a rural to
an industrial society – and dangerous chemicals had begun to be put into
processed food. These chemicals, Dr. Wiley determined, were "real threats
to health." So he formed Dr. Wiley's "Poison Squad," a group of
Department of Agriculture volunteers who under the gaze of the press ate doses
of chemicals being used to color and preserve and otherwise treat food, to show
their negative effects on human beings.
The populace became alerted and alarmed
by Dr. Wiley's campaign and the publication of the book, The Jungle, by crusading
writer Upton Sinclair, about the filthy, unhealthy way meat was beginning to be
processed in the U.S. And there was citizen action led by an early consumer group,
the National Consumer League.
This led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs
Act of 1906. It could be regarded as the first environmental law in the U.S.
But
passage of laws and their implementation are two different things.
Government
inspectors did not enter food processing plants – unless allowed to do so
by plant management. Penalties were light. Pesticides, including those containing
poisons like arsenic, had come into use, but attempts to deal with pesticides
under the law were beaten back by industry. In 1912, as a matter of conscience,
Dr. Wiley resigned from U.S. government service. He decided he would be able to
more effectively fight against poisons in food outside of government.
He wrote
a book: The History of a Crime Against the Food Law. In it, he stated: "There
is a distinct tendency to put regulation and rules for the enforcement of the
law into the hands of industries engaged in food and drug activities. I consider
this one of the most pernicious threats to pure food and drugs. Business is making
rapid strides in the control of all our affairs….It is never advisable to
surrender entirely food and drug control to business interests." The Pure
Food and Drugs Act had been "perverted," Dr. Wiley declared.
This
conflict, this dialectic – between efforts to protect the health of people
from poison put into the environment and the power of those who do the poisoning
– continues in my country. The big difference is that in recent decades the
poisoning, the pollution has become far more severe. And the toll in illness and
death, especially from cancer, has become more and more intense in the U.S.
As for U.S. government regulation of atomic power, forget it. Neither the Atomic
Energy Commission or Nuclear Regulatory Commission ever denied an application
to construct or operate a nuclear power plant anywhere, anytime in the U.S. Our
regulatory agencies have been lapdogs not watchdogs.
One thing I have learned
clearly in being an environmental journalist for more than 35 years is that virtually
all polluting processes and products are unneeded. They can be replaced –
indeed, many have been and are – by clean, unpolluting, safe, sustainable
processes and products. The threat to peoples' lives, the environmental destruction
is unnecessary.
A classic example: PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls. The U.S.
company Monsanto started churning out PCBs in 1929 producing 85 million pounds
of the stuff by the 1960s, after it had become obvious that PCBs impact on health,
were carcinogenic.
PCBs main use: insulating fluid in electric components such
as capacitors and transformers. Insisted Monsanto in a press release in 1970 as
it tried to prevent the U.S. from following Japan which in 1968 banned PCBs after
rice oil became contaminated with PCBs and poisoned a thousand people, several
fatally: "There are no substitutes available." Monsanto insisted that
PCBs have an "irreplaceable role" for industrial society.
Well production
of PCBs in the U.S. was banned the following year. Industrial society in the U.S.
has continued. What has been the major substitute for PCBs? Not an exotic substance
at all but mineral oil.
In fact, whether it is production of electricity with
cancer-causing, lethally dangerous nuclear power – for which solar, wind,
geothermal, appropriate hydropower and a host of sustainable, safe alternatives
can substitute – to agriculture with toxic, synthetic chemicals which increasingly
is being shown to be counter-productive and highly expensive compared to organic
farming, to the replacement of ozone-damaging chloroflourocarbons in spray cans,
safe alternatives, substitutes in harmony with nature are here today. The central
problem: the vested interests that gain from polluting processes and products.
Those
on the left in my country like to point to big business, giant corporations as
the cause of environmental destruction. Under capitalism, they say, the bottom
line is profit. So what if people die and pieces of the planet are destroyed in
the process? And the left is not incorrect.
On the other hand, look at the mess
at virtually all the U.S. government-owned national nuclear laboratories in the
U.S. – including Los Alamos and Oak Ridge.
No matter what the system–
and we all have our preferences – whether it be the "market economy"/capitalism
or socialism or communism (or nudism), foremost is that we must be ecocentric.
Life first.
Life, and not to be anthropomorphic, all life, must come first!
What's
to be done? Democracy; transparency; independent, honest science; independent,
honest epidemiology – desperately needed. In the U.S., we must end the current
system of accomodating pollution. We must say "no" to death by contamination.
We must eliminate bad environmental actors – and substitute processes and
products in harmony with nature, with life. We must prosecute criminally those
who cause injury and death by pollution. In the words of an American singer, U.
Utah Phillips: "The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And those who
are killing her have names and addresses."
Fundamental change is needed.
Citizen
activism is critical. We must engage politically. We must organize, agitate and
creatively litigate.
We must prohibit media ownerships by corporate environmental
wrongdoers. Nuclear plant manufacturer and corporate outlaw General Electric today
owns the NBC, MSNBC and CNBC TV networks. GE should be watchdogged by the press,
not own the press. A media that challenges power, that honestly and properly informs
the public, is crucial. Conveying the information through the educational system,
too, is vital.
Above all: democracy! Let an informed public make the decisions.
They are far too important to be left to corporate executives and scientists and
government bureaucrats.
Admiral Hyman Rickover, in the end, regretted what
he had done. In a farewell address before a committee of the U.S. Congress in
1982 he said: "I'll be philosophical. Until about two billion years ago,
it was impossible to have any life on earth; that is, there was so much radiation
on earth you couldn't have any life – fish or anything. Gradually, about
two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in
the entire system reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin…Now
when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature
tried to destroy to make life possible…Everytime you produce radiation, you
produce something that has life, in some cases for billions of years, and I think
there the human race is going to wreck itself, and it's far more important that
we get control of this horrible force and try to eliiminate it. I do not believe
that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation." The man who built
America's first commercial nuclear power plant, recommended that "we outlaw
nuclear reactors."
Indeed, we must shut down every nuclear plant.
This
is my fourth visit to Russia in four years. I have been working with the Center
for Russian Environmental Policy and its leaders, Alexey Yablokov and Vladimir
Zakharov. I have been impressed by the Center's calls for the adoption of the
precautionary principle here, the "greening of the economy," establishing
"an integrated system to assess human health and environmental health,"
the stress on the paramount importance of health and development of clean, safe
alternative energy sources.
I attended the Second Annual All-Russia Congress
on Nature Conservation. There I heard Dr. Tamara Zltonikova of the State Duma
declare: "To protect the environment is to protect life on Earth." And
I heard speaker after speaker – from all walks of life – espouse the
kind of wisdom for which people here are known.
Sixty years ago, we of the
United States of America and you of Russia were allies in the Great Patriotic
War, what we call World War II, against forces that would destroy life. As during
the Great Patriotic War, we and you again face the same enemies – forces
that would destroy life.
Some of our experiences in the U.S. – our environmental
successes (we do have a wonderful national park system) and our failures –
might be helpful to you. We and you are again pitted against a common foe. We
much achieve victory, both of us, to survive – for life to survive. There
is a way: a wise, life-affirming, eco-centric, green way.
Spaceeba.
