20 years after Chernobyl:

Is Blair leading Britain to nuclear catastrophe?

TWENTY YEARS ago, on 26 April 1986, the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl
in the Ukraine underwent a series of explosions followed by nuclear
meltdown. Chernobyl – in what was then part of the Stalinist USSR – is
now synonymous in people’s minds with the dangers of nuclear power
despite vested interests clamouring to convince us it was a ‘one-off’
catastrophe. By Thomas House.

There are conflicting accounts of the accident’s exact causes and
consequences. We know an experiment was being carried out during the
directorship of V.P. Bryukhanov (a turbine specialist with experience in
coal-fired stations) to test how the reactor would perform under an
electricity blackout. We know that a combination of technical problems
with the reactor design, ignorance and human error caused the deadliest
nuclear accident in history.

Nuclear fission, the method currently used in nuclear reactors,
involves splitting heavy nuclei to release the energy stored there. The
fuel is either uranium, which is found naturally then treated, or
plutonium, produced by uranium-fueled reactors.

Great care must be taken to keep the rate at which nuclear reactions
happen stable, which is done by ‘moderating’ the flow of neutrons –
subatomic particles that trigger the splitting of nuclei.

The Chernobyl reactor was moderated by graphite, as part of an
inherently unsafe reactor design called RBMK. The inexpert personnel
carrying out the experiment made a series of mistakes that increased the
rate of nuclear reactions in the reactor core to dangerous levels,
causing a steam explosion, then a graphite fire and release of
radioactive material.

Most accounts of the Chernobyl tragedy focus on how workers involved
in clean-up operations were kept in the dark about the true nature of
the accident. There is no doubting the courage they displayed.

Firefighters called in to deal with the initial fires reported
nausea, fatigue, strange sensations on exposed skin and a metallic taste
in their mouths; they must have known they were in grave danger yet
battled to extinguish the flames at the reactor. The workers’ heroism
stands in stark contrast to their bureaucratic ‘leaders’, whose response
was woefully inadequate.

Workers’ heroism

BY FAR the largest group affected were the ‘liquidators’, the workers
conscripted to help clean up the site. Given insufficient radiation
protection, misinformed and often sent directly to the site, accurate
data for the impact on this group is hard to obtain. The latest issue of
Socialism Today deals with this subject in more depth.

The clean-up process’ final stage was constructing a concrete
sarcophagus around the accident site. This building’s structural
weaknesses mean the Chernobyl story isn’t over. There are plans to
construct a still larger containment shelter – whether the private
companies subcontracted to perform this task in now-capitalist Ukraine
will do a satisfactory job is far from certain.

Chernobyl has consistently been used by capitalist commentators to
try to discredit the ideas of socialism, firstly by pointing to
Stalinism’s failures, then by falsely equating the monstrous Stalinist
system with genuine socialism. In fact, socialists have always
criticised the lack of democracy that existed in the Eastern Bloc
without thinking this discredits the idea of democratic economic
planning.

Undoubtedly, the secrecy inherent in the Stalinist system, together
with the fear that subordinates of the ruling bureaucracy felt if they
questioned orders, was a major factor in both the occurrence and
severity of the accident. But the market system has also had nuclear
accidents such as at Three Mile Island in the USA or Tokai-Mura in
Japan, in addition to reported and unreported ‘near-misses’, including
another in Japan this month.

The underlying political, economic and social structure can alter the
chances of an accident, but they can at most exacerbate the inherent
dangers of a given technology. And no matter how carefully safety
systems are designed to deal with human error, people can find more
irrational ways of behaving than the system designers considered. There
is also no guarantee that the safety mechanisms themselves were
implemented without mistakes.

No to nuclear power

FACED WITH massive increases in prices of oil, capitalist leaders
like Tony Blair are considering the ‘nuclear option’ again. The
multinational energy companies’ main interests are still the control and
supply of oil and gas reserves, but capitalism’s longer-term strategists
realise that demand for these commodities will vastly exceed supply
unless alternative energy sources are considered.

Short-term, this balance of supply and demand can be profitable – see
the cynical way in which UK gas suppliers increased domestic gas bills
much higher than the recent rise in gas prices. But long-term, economic
growth will be compromised by the lack of raw materials.

The government may make some concessions to public opinion by
increasing the proportion of energy the UK produces from renewables,
particularly wind power, but this will be well short of the massive
investment in research and infrastructure needed to generate significant
amounts of energy from renewable sources.

Instead, they may bring in incentives to make small-scale methods
more popular, such as supporting homeowners who install solar panels.
But nuclear power will take the lion’s share of non-fossil-fuel
electricity production.

Since Chernobyl still looms large in most people’s minds, the
capitalist media will doubtless downplay the severity of the Chernobyl
accident while using the anniversary to twist the knife still further
into Stalinism’s corpse. But socialists should use this anniversary to
expose the bankruptcy of capitalist energy policy, to oppose nuclear
power and to explain the advantages of a democratic planned economy.

Radioactive waste

AS WELL as the perils of a catastrophic release of radiation, other
long-term dangers are inevitably associated with producing nuclear power
using current methods. Most significant is the production of radioactive
waste, dangers like spent fuel rods, but also discarded radiation suits
and other ‘low-level’ waste.

There is no known method for dealing with this waste. Once something
becomes radioactive, the radioactivity level is halved after a period of
time known as a ‘half life’ – after two half-lives the material is a
quarter as radioactive etc. Technically, radioactive material never
stops being radioactive – radioactivity will at some point fall to a
level where it makes no difference to health.

Because much nuclear waste is both highly radioactive and has a large
half-life, it can sometimes take thousands of years before reaching an
‘acceptably’ low radioactivity level. The only known way to deal with
this is to store waste over massive periods of time, creating a lethal
legacy for future generations.

Few places on earth experience no geological activity like tremors
and earthquakes over such time periods, and few casing materials are
known to last so long.

Also, the civilian nuclear industry produces raw material for nuclear
bombs based on plutonium. Historically the line between nuclear power
and nuclear weapons has never been sharp. All grades of nuclear waste
have potential use by terrorists, whether trying to make a conventional
nuclear warhead or a ‘dirty bomb’ that distributes low-level radioactive
waste using conventional explosives.

Market system

UNDER THE chaos of the market system, nuclear power can never be
safe. A private company running a nuclear plant would be under the same
pressures as private companies everywhere: to cut staff, compromise
security and withhold ‘sensitive’ information. A combination of these
measures would, over time, make a future accident not just possible, but
likely.

Even if the nuclear industry were fully state-owned and run, on the
basis of a predominantly capitalist economy the state could not
guarantee enough money for sufficient security checks, and there would
be risks associated with the bureaucratic way in which state-owned
industries are run under capitalism.

On the other hand, future advances in science and technology might
pave the way for a safer version of nuclear power. Nuclear fusion, for
example, offers the possibility of nuclear power fueled by extracting
heavy hydrogen isotopes from water, without waste or risk of meltdown.

If nuclear fusion became an option, or even if there were massive
improvements in the technology around fission, then under socialism it
would be possible to have a fully informed, democratic decision made
about whether to use nuclear power following these advances.

Nevertheless, the most pressing need in energy policy is for massive
investment in renewables like solar, wave and wind power. This is simply
off the capitalists’ agenda: commercial research and development does
not take place as there is not sufficient opportunity to make profits,
and public funding is limited by governments’ neo-liberal policies.

By contrast, a democratic plan of production would open up
possibilities of increased research and massive deployment of the solar
panel or wind turbine technology currently available but deemed
‘inefficient’ – in reality unprofitable – by the energy corporations.