Every healing drug has its side effects, every inspiring politician her megalomaniac tendency, every Greek hero his heel. Nothing is purely good or evil, favorable or unfavorable. Nuclear technology is the same. Despite its tremendous potential to benefit humanity, nuclear technology is not perfect. We needn’t view nuclear technology through rose-colored glasses. We can handle its unfiltered, imperfect hue.
When an atom fissions, it almost always splits into two smaller atoms and emits a few neutrons. These two atoms are not the same two every time – there are thousands of possible pairs, although some pairs are much more likely than others. We call these atom pairs “fission products.” Having been produced out of a chaotic churning mass of protons and neutrons, these fission products are unnatural, highly unstable and highly radioactive. They successively morph into other, more stable atoms, and the result is a fairly large portion of the whole periodic table all mixed together in one hot stew.
This stew is nuclear waste. It remains hot for hundreds of years and lukewarm for hundreds of thousands of years. Some of it, if ingested into the human body, can damage cell DNA, which directs cell behavior. This damaged DNA can occasionally cause cells to replicate uncontrollably, such that huge masses of tissue build up in odd places. We call these masses tumors, some of which are cancerous.
Of course, people incur radiation from a variety of sources everyday – soil, the sun, outer space in general, the dentist’s office, processed food, and even some unprocessed food (bananas, for example). The quantity of radiation an average person receives from nuclear energy and its waste is quite miniscule relative to these other sources.
.In retrospect, concern for waste management was glaringly absent from early worldwide nuclear reactor development and expansion. Beating Nazi Germany to the bomb was far more urgent than fretting over fission products with thousand-year half-lives. Fermi’s Chicago Pile was hazardous, as he and two of his assistants later succumbed to cancer. The early reactors at the Hanford Site in Washington State actually dumped their waste into the Columbia River after a brief holding period. Efficient electricity generation was considered most important, with the efficient use of fuel a secondary concern—although the subsequent discovery of vast uranium resources soon obviated that issue
As the commercial nuclear industry developed, plants began to simply store their waste in on-site water pools out of convenience. In the 1970s, the federal government began to search for a centralized location to store the waste long-term. By that time, however, the politicization of nuclear waste and radiation was already well under way. The modern environmentalist movement blossomed, and one of its chief aims was opposition to nuclear energy based on radiation health risks. Consumer activist Ralph Nader was the titular head of the U.S. anti-nuclear movement, and he garnered national attention for his efforts. A fear of radiation was instilled in the public, and the federal government began searching for a centralized location to store nuclear waste in order to appease this fear.
After my sophomore year at MIT, I elected to do an internship at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in Maryland—just outside of Washington, D.C. By day, I performed technical analysis for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada, returning home to the campus of George Washington University with a potpourri of congressional interns. For the first time in my life, I was immersed in politics. I heard the political interns debate every scuffle between Bush and Reid, Cheney and Pelosi. I watched all the presidential primary debates (for both parties). I saw Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama emerge from blackened vehicles onto a sidewalk in front of my residence to attend a candidate forum across the street. Obama rode in an SUV, Clinton a sedan. He was a “rock star” on a vanity campaign. I watched my roommates plan their law school applications and strive to schmooze their way into elite Independence Day receptions on “private decks.” It was a hot summer—far too hot for a guy from the Pacific Northwest.
The most interesting aspect of this political immersion was how it shaped my perspective on the relationship between science and politics. That summer saw three major clashes between science and politics – stem cell research, climate change, and nuclear waste. On the subject of stem cell research, science indicated that significant breakthroughs were plausible, but the President and others were morally opposed. On the subject of climate change, science indicated that a far-off crisis could be likely were appropriate action not taken, but few conservative or moderate members of congress would defer to Al Gore. On nuclear waste, science indicated that a far-off crisis would not be likely as a result of Yucca Mountain, but Harry Reid, whose Nevada constituents strongly oppose nuclear waste in their state, was intent on killing the project.
At work, I performed technical analysis of nuclear waste storage, and then came home and listened to my history major housemates (who knew nothing of physics or nuclear technology) debate the validity of my analysis. I watched Reid politicize the numbers I produced and claim that they were fallacious. I liked it about as much as the climatologists or the cell biologists liked what Bush said about their numbers.
Sometimes one political party, usually whichever captivates a majority of intellectuals, will claim the mantra of “science” and decry the ignorance of their opponents. In reality, things are never that simple. No political movement monopolizes science. Rather, every political movement manipulates science to justify their aims. Politicians don’t pick their positions based on science – they pick their science to justify their positions.
In July, the NRC sent me to a conference in Las Vegas. I had never been, and it was dazzling. I sat through radiation containment talks by day and roamed the Strip by night. On the final day, we took a tour of Yucca Mountain.
We headed north out of Vegas, then west to into Amargosa Valley. It was desolate. Shortly after whizzing by a Nye County brothel, we pulled off the highway onto a sandy desert road. As we left the highway far behind, we passed by ramshackle rocket launchers and dilapidated survivability structures.
We were in the Nevada Test Site. The U.S. government detonated 928 nuclear weapons here between 1951 and 1992, most of them underground.
Finally, we reached Yucca Mountain, which is actually the most prominent ridge in a series of parallel ridges. Unlike most surrounding geologic features, these ridges have a volcanic origin. This makes them extremely resistant to erosion and groundwater permeation, mechanisms that would facilitate fission product escape. The choice of this site has long been at the center of contention between national and local interests. In the 1980s, the State of Nevada created the short-lived Bullfrog County, situated around this mountain. This was the only county in U.S. history to have a population of zero, and it existed solely for the purpose of exacting exceptionally high tax rates on any potential waste repository. Years later, the cartoon character Yucca Mountain Johnny would extoll the virtues of the site to Nevada children.
We drove around the backside of the mountain and walked to the top in over 100 degrees of dry desert heat. From the top of Yucca, we looked west to see both Mt. Whitney (the highest point in the contiguous 48 states) and Death Valley (the lowest point in the contiguous 48 states). To the northeast, we could just barely make out part of Area 51.
Then we went inside. There was a great horizontal borehole about twenty feet in diameter. It was huge. It was cavernous.
It was empty.
There was no waste. They dug the hole, but it was empty. It’s still empty. They spent nine billion dollars digging and analyzing an empty hole.
The husband-wife pair Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie synthesized the first artificial radioactive material (an isotope of aluminum) in 1934. Just two years later, in 1936, John Lawrence had used artificial radioactive phosphorus to treat leukemia. This earned him the title “father of nuclear medicine,” but suitable artificial isotopes were scarce and difficult to produce. It wasn’t until after the Manhattan Project built nuclear reactors, which produce a plethora of artificial isotopes, that nuclear medicine began to thrive. In 1946, physician Sam Seidlin used iodine-131 (a fission product) to perform the first successful cancer treatment in nuclear medicine.
Fortuitously, some of the radioactive fission products created in nuclear reactors, which would otherwise be deemed “waste,” are ideally suited for medical applications. These “medical isotopes,” when inserted into the human body, emit radiation that devices can detect outside the body without causing significant damage to the body itself. Computers can then determine the origin of this radiation in order to pinpoint the location of the medical isotopes – how they move throughout the body, and where they tend to congregate.
Thus, doctors can attach medical isotopes to a variety of organic molecules in order to track how certain substances move and coalesce throughout the body. They can actually reconstruct three-dimensional images of where diseases are located. They can image a cancerous tumor in order to ascertain its extent, and to more precisely target it for destruction during an irradiation treatment.
The most prevalent medical isotope is technetium-99m, which is usually produced as a secondary fission product. Every year, about twenty million medical procedures worldwide rely on it. These medical isotopes have revolutionized the fields of medical imaging and cancer treatment.
If we weren’t putting these wonders into our bodies to save our lives, we would be calling them nuclear waste, and spending billions to keep them as far away from us as possible. We would spend decades digging and analyzing empty holes in remote deserts only to later deem those holes unsafe.
Just as nuclear energy is a dichotomy of war and peace, radiation is a dichotomy of sickness and health. If unleashed, it can cause cancer, but if harnessed for good, it can facilitate curing cancer. It’s a marvelous paradox.
Some say that nuclear waste is the bane of nuclear technology. That argument is certainly not without merit – nuclear waste is a real hazard, and its public policy is a perennial political quagmire. That said, to simply label radiation as a plague would be to overlook its curative applications. We won’t view nuclear technology through rose-colored glasses, but we won’t view it through muck-colored glasses either. Every technology has weaknesses, but sometimes, when viewed through innovative eyes, those weaknesses reveal themselves as strengths. Sometimes, an affliction is really an asset. Sometimes, a bane is really a boon. Realizing this requires the willingness to see things differently; to flip the coin, to rock the boat, to eat the banana peel. The petty call it crazy, but the wise call it genius.
When an atom fissions, it almost always splits into two smaller atoms and emits a few neutrons. These two atoms are not the same two every time – there are thousands of possible pairs, although some pairs are much more likely than others. We call these atom pairs “fission products.” Having been produced out of a chaotic churning mass of protons and neutrons, these fission products are unnatural, highly unstable and highly radioactive. They successively morph into other, more stable atoms, and the result is a fairly large portion of the whole periodic table all mixed together in one hot stew.
This stew is nuclear waste. It remains hot for hundreds of years and lukewarm for hundreds of thousands of years. Some of it, if ingested into the human body, can damage cell DNA, which directs cell behavior. This damaged DNA can occasionally cause cells to replicate uncontrollably, such that huge masses of tissue build up in odd places. We call these masses tumors, some of which are cancerous.
Of course, people incur radiation from a variety of sources everyday – soil, the sun, outer space in general, the dentist’s office, processed food, and even some unprocessed food (bananas, for example). The quantity of radiation an average person receives from nuclear energy and its waste is quite miniscule relative to these other sources.
.In retrospect, concern for waste management was glaringly absent from early worldwide nuclear reactor development and expansion. Beating Nazi Germany to the bomb was far more urgent than fretting over fission products with thousand-year half-lives. Fermi’s Chicago Pile was hazardous, as he and two of his assistants later succumbed to cancer. The early reactors at the Hanford Site in Washington State actually dumped their waste into the Columbia River after a brief holding period. Efficient electricity generation was considered most important, with the efficient use of fuel a secondary concern—although the subsequent discovery of vast uranium resources soon obviated that issue
As the commercial nuclear industry developed, plants began to simply store their waste in on-site water pools out of convenience. In the 1970s, the federal government began to search for a centralized location to store the waste long-term. By that time, however, the politicization of nuclear waste and radiation was already well under way. The modern environmentalist movement blossomed, and one of its chief aims was opposition to nuclear energy based on radiation health risks. Consumer activist Ralph Nader was the titular head of the U.S. anti-nuclear movement, and he garnered national attention for his efforts. A fear of radiation was instilled in the public, and the federal government began searching for a centralized location to store nuclear waste in order to appease this fear.
***
When I was twenty, I went to Yucca Mountain.After my sophomore year at MIT, I elected to do an internship at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in Maryland—just outside of Washington, D.C. By day, I performed technical analysis for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada, returning home to the campus of George Washington University with a potpourri of congressional interns. For the first time in my life, I was immersed in politics. I heard the political interns debate every scuffle between Bush and Reid, Cheney and Pelosi. I watched all the presidential primary debates (for both parties). I saw Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama emerge from blackened vehicles onto a sidewalk in front of my residence to attend a candidate forum across the street. Obama rode in an SUV, Clinton a sedan. He was a “rock star” on a vanity campaign. I watched my roommates plan their law school applications and strive to schmooze their way into elite Independence Day receptions on “private decks.” It was a hot summer—far too hot for a guy from the Pacific Northwest.
The most interesting aspect of this political immersion was how it shaped my perspective on the relationship between science and politics. That summer saw three major clashes between science and politics – stem cell research, climate change, and nuclear waste. On the subject of stem cell research, science indicated that significant breakthroughs were plausible, but the President and others were morally opposed. On the subject of climate change, science indicated that a far-off crisis could be likely were appropriate action not taken, but few conservative or moderate members of congress would defer to Al Gore. On nuclear waste, science indicated that a far-off crisis would not be likely as a result of Yucca Mountain, but Harry Reid, whose Nevada constituents strongly oppose nuclear waste in their state, was intent on killing the project.
At work, I performed technical analysis of nuclear waste storage, and then came home and listened to my history major housemates (who knew nothing of physics or nuclear technology) debate the validity of my analysis. I watched Reid politicize the numbers I produced and claim that they were fallacious. I liked it about as much as the climatologists or the cell biologists liked what Bush said about their numbers.
Sometimes one political party, usually whichever captivates a majority of intellectuals, will claim the mantra of “science” and decry the ignorance of their opponents. In reality, things are never that simple. No political movement monopolizes science. Rather, every political movement manipulates science to justify their aims. Politicians don’t pick their positions based on science – they pick their science to justify their positions.
In July, the NRC sent me to a conference in Las Vegas. I had never been, and it was dazzling. I sat through radiation containment talks by day and roamed the Strip by night. On the final day, we took a tour of Yucca Mountain.
We headed north out of Vegas, then west to into Amargosa Valley. It was desolate. Shortly after whizzing by a Nye County brothel, we pulled off the highway onto a sandy desert road. As we left the highway far behind, we passed by ramshackle rocket launchers and dilapidated survivability structures.
We were in the Nevada Test Site. The U.S. government detonated 928 nuclear weapons here between 1951 and 1992, most of them underground.
Finally, we reached Yucca Mountain, which is actually the most prominent ridge in a series of parallel ridges. Unlike most surrounding geologic features, these ridges have a volcanic origin. This makes them extremely resistant to erosion and groundwater permeation, mechanisms that would facilitate fission product escape. The choice of this site has long been at the center of contention between national and local interests. In the 1980s, the State of Nevada created the short-lived Bullfrog County, situated around this mountain. This was the only county in U.S. history to have a population of zero, and it existed solely for the purpose of exacting exceptionally high tax rates on any potential waste repository. Years later, the cartoon character Yucca Mountain Johnny would extoll the virtues of the site to Nevada children.
We drove around the backside of the mountain and walked to the top in over 100 degrees of dry desert heat. From the top of Yucca, we looked west to see both Mt. Whitney (the highest point in the contiguous 48 states) and Death Valley (the lowest point in the contiguous 48 states). To the northeast, we could just barely make out part of Area 51.
Then we went inside. There was a great horizontal borehole about twenty feet in diameter. It was huge. It was cavernous.
It was empty.
There was no waste. They dug the hole, but it was empty. It’s still empty. They spent nine billion dollars digging and analyzing an empty hole.
***
Just when nuclear technology’s application as an energy source began to flourish, another field emerged and developed in parallel: nuclear medicine.The husband-wife pair Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie synthesized the first artificial radioactive material (an isotope of aluminum) in 1934. Just two years later, in 1936, John Lawrence had used artificial radioactive phosphorus to treat leukemia. This earned him the title “father of nuclear medicine,” but suitable artificial isotopes were scarce and difficult to produce. It wasn’t until after the Manhattan Project built nuclear reactors, which produce a plethora of artificial isotopes, that nuclear medicine began to thrive. In 1946, physician Sam Seidlin used iodine-131 (a fission product) to perform the first successful cancer treatment in nuclear medicine.
Fortuitously, some of the radioactive fission products created in nuclear reactors, which would otherwise be deemed “waste,” are ideally suited for medical applications. These “medical isotopes,” when inserted into the human body, emit radiation that devices can detect outside the body without causing significant damage to the body itself. Computers can then determine the origin of this radiation in order to pinpoint the location of the medical isotopes – how they move throughout the body, and where they tend to congregate.
Thus, doctors can attach medical isotopes to a variety of organic molecules in order to track how certain substances move and coalesce throughout the body. They can actually reconstruct three-dimensional images of where diseases are located. They can image a cancerous tumor in order to ascertain its extent, and to more precisely target it for destruction during an irradiation treatment.
The most prevalent medical isotope is technetium-99m, which is usually produced as a secondary fission product. Every year, about twenty million medical procedures worldwide rely on it. These medical isotopes have revolutionized the fields of medical imaging and cancer treatment.
If we weren’t putting these wonders into our bodies to save our lives, we would be calling them nuclear waste, and spending billions to keep them as far away from us as possible. We would spend decades digging and analyzing empty holes in remote deserts only to later deem those holes unsafe.
Just as nuclear energy is a dichotomy of war and peace, radiation is a dichotomy of sickness and health. If unleashed, it can cause cancer, but if harnessed for good, it can facilitate curing cancer. It’s a marvelous paradox.
Some say that nuclear waste is the bane of nuclear technology. That argument is certainly not without merit – nuclear waste is a real hazard, and its public policy is a perennial political quagmire. That said, to simply label radiation as a plague would be to overlook its curative applications. We won’t view nuclear technology through rose-colored glasses, but we won’t view it through muck-colored glasses either. Every technology has weaknesses, but sometimes, when viewed through innovative eyes, those weaknesses reveal themselves as strengths. Sometimes, an affliction is really an asset. Sometimes, a bane is really a boon. Realizing this requires the willingness to see things differently; to flip the coin, to rock the boat, to eat the banana peel. The petty call it crazy, but the wise call it genius.
***
Mark Reed received his S.B. degree in Physics, as well as his S.B. and S.M. degrees in Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Nuclear Science and Engineering. To view his previous pieces in Fortnight--including an exclusive video tour of the MIT Nuclear Reactor--see Violent Nascence and From War to Peace.