Japan

 

And there fell a great

star from heaven, and

many men died

 

Catherine Czerkawska

 

Tuesday 26 April is the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. I was three months pregnant when the radiation cloud drifted towards Scotland. A few years earlier, my father, a biochemist of some distinction, who worked with radio isotopes, had been seconded to the IAEA in Vienna, and from there travelled the world, funded by Unido, as a visiting expert helping to set up agricultural projects which used experimental radiation for peaceful means.      
     Although by no means anti-nuclear, and very far from ignorant, my father remained sceptical about the rush towards nuclear power, mostly on the grounds of safety and cost. His quietly but constantly made point was that, when the nuclear industry was promoting itself as cheap, green, clean and efficient, it seldom, if ever, included the costs of straightforward decommissioning in the sums, never mind the exponentially increased costs if the unthinkable were to happen and something went badly wrong.
     When I was researching 'Wormwood', my play about Chernobyl, and about some of the people affected by the disaster, I talked to my father at length. Sadly, he never lived to see the production. The play was staged at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1997, to excellent reviews, but by then dad was dead, at the age of 68, only diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the day before he died. The play was subsequently published by Nick Hern Books, and later became a Scottish Higher set text. It's still in print and I'm still asked to speak about it in schools from time to time, although it never received another professional production. Perhaps the subject matter was just too uncomfortable.
     I've found myself thinking about 'Wormwood', and about my dad, while I've been following events at Fukushima. As I finish writing this, the news is better, but still not exactly reassuring. Only a few days ago, CNN was talking about 'extremely hazardous' radiation, while the US government suggested a 50-mile exclusion zone – 'the further away the better,' said Timothy Jorgensen, professor of radiation medicine from Georgetown University. Now, the least damaged reactors appear to be stable although the personal cost to the people working on site won't be known for some time.
     The most commonly repeated mantra from the experts has been 'this is no Chernobyl' – which is true. It could be bad enough, and still be 'no Chernobyl'. Pro-nuclear interests in the West have successfully promoted the idea that Chernobyl 'couldn't happen here'; that it was all down to faulty reactor design, coupled with a lack of technical expertise and a 'don’t care' attitude. And they have a point. But it's only a half truth.
     The design was not good. There was lack of technical expertise, or rather there was plenty of it, the Russians were no fools, but a 'jobs for the boys' mentality, coupled with the need to respond to a particular political agenda, meant that the technical expertise available was watered down, compromised, if you will. But which government in the world can swear, hand on heart, that political, financial, ideological agendas don't impact on decisions about risk and safety?

 

     Chernobyl was a safety experiment, using inadequate technology that went wrong, in a dangerously unforgiving environment. Added to this, there were political demands and agendas at work: nearby Kiev needed power come hell or high water (in the event, hell came) and not enough skilled personnel on that shift to realise what was about to happen. Reading through the accounts pieced together afterwards, one can only think that they forgot precisely what they were dealing with. Which was one of the points I was trying to make in my play.
     It's believed that some time before the 'accident' the computers were spewing out data saying that the reactor must be shut down without delay. Nobody in the immediate vicinity was competent to read the data and by the time somebody realised what was happening, it was much too late to do anything about it. The explosion blew the lid – more than one thousand tonnes of steel, 17 metres across and three metres thick – up into the night sky, where it turned 'like a giant Catherine wheel' as observers described it, before it fell onto the reactor itself and ruptured all the fuel rods at once. People in the nearby town of Pripyat had come out to watch it, thinking it some spectacular natural phenomenon.
     The build-up at Fukushima has been slower, less immediately dramatic, but perhaps even more appalling for that very reason. Watching live pictures of a potential meltdown is a nightmarish experience – especially in view of the absolute horror of surrounding events. Over the weekend water cannon aiming jets of seawater at the mangled buildings for hours on end were reasonably successful and a subsequent reduction in radiation allowed workers to reconnect electricity to the site, which in turn has meant that the least damaged cooling systems could be reactivated.
     At the same time – and perhaps predictably – the WHO is saying that radiation levels are higher than first thought and – after a release of smoke from two reactors – workers have been evacuated from the site. The UK (albeit not the US) news media, already slightly bored with the situation, seem anxious for it all to be over, so they can move on to the next story. You can tell by the way they're reporting on it. But nuclear accidents don't work like that.
What they will do with this site in the long term is another matter entirely, and not one anybody seems willing to talk about yet – besides, there is enough cleaning up of a different sort to be done first.
     Watching events unfold 'before my very eyes', as they are wont to do nowadays on NHK World, the Japanese English language television channel, on Twitter and Facebook, on Sky and CNN and the BBC, I am struck by the way in which – with all these media available – the picture is still so uncertain, so unclear, with so many conflicting opinions.
     At first, all the confident assertions of safety came from complacent men, sitting in studios many thousands of miles from the site of the reactors. The BBC's first 'expert' seemed wilfully unworried, although he's a little less gung-ho now. On Japanese television, the men from the electric company looked simply knackered. Exhausted and apologetic and shaky. I've been watching them for a long time, late into the night, listening to simultaneous translation from a string of competent young women. Once or twice, their gentle voices trembled slightly, and one of them emitted a deep and heart-rending sigh, which the microphone picked up.
     It led me to think about the gap which exists between the simplified diagrams shown on television and online, while the experts tell us what 'they' will do next – and the hideous situation on the ground for those who are doing the doing, so to speak. Not Chernobyl, where the firemen were trying to walk on roofs made of bitumen that melted as they stood on them, and where the reactor core lay exposed and burning with – as one of them observed – 'a crazy light' and flames with previously unknown colours, for which he had no name. Where some of those who fought the fire became sick and died and had to be buried in lead lined coffins since they themselves had become sources of contamination. Not Chernobyl.
     But bad enough.
     Meanwhile, the cacophony of voices goes on: everything from the calmly reassuring to the wildly panic-stricken, with all stages in between. The proponents of nuclear accuse the opposition of being 'irrationally fearful'. But only a little research into safety limits shows us that they seem to have a certain flexibility, which correlates directly with the desperate need for operatives and the general public to risk exposure.
     Are we wholly irrational in suspecting that, if even a fraction of the real costs of nuclear had been devoted to developing renewables and to energy-saving ventures such as solar panels in every single new build in this reasonably sunny country, we wouldn't now be contemplating the promotion of a technology whose default position is instability and one about which our expertise and understanding – although infinitely better than at Chernobyl – still don't seem to be up to the job?

 

     Experts are too fond of dismissing protests with the rejoinder that we are only afraid of nuclear because we are ignorant, imagining it to be some kind of magical force. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are afraid of nuclear because we understand all too well that something which may affect our health adversely but silently over a long period of time – quite long enough for those who caused it to disclaim all responsibility – is inherently unacceptable.
Couple that with our human tendency to familiarity and its even more dangerous big brother, complacency, and we have a technology which – whatever the experts may tell us – seems too risky for comfort.
     We don't have to go as far as Chernobyl or Fukushima to demonstrate this. Remember the 65-metre-deep Dounreay shaft into which an unholy cocktail of waste was tipped over many years without any real assessment of what mixture might be formed? The shaft was seldom monitored and few waste disposal records were kept. Cleaning up this filthy mess must surely contribute to the decommissioning costs at Dounreay, estimated to be in the region of £3 billion over the next 25 years.
     The truth is that I never intended 'Wormwood' to be an anti-nuclear polemic. If I had, I wouldn't be my father's daughter. But my sympathies as a playwright were with my characters, caught up in a drama which was not of their own making: the schoolteacher who goes outside in the morning of 27 April 1986, sees the mysterious ash on the new rose leaves and tastes metal on her tongue, her fireman husband who struggles to put out the fire while being 'showered with radioactive graphite' and dies soon after.
     And finally, the mysterious Artemis who speaks about the concept of 'unlikeliness'.
     'You conduct experiments to increase the safety margins. But then you decide that some things are so very unlikely to happen that they can safely be ignored. You have covered all eventualities, the unthinkable can't possibly happen and so you realise that it would be a waste of time and resources to plan for it happening. But then, if it should happen, not only will you not know what to do. You will not even know what to think. And worse than that, if it should even begin to happen, neither you, not your colleagues, will notice, until it is much too late to do anything about it.'
     'How can you possibly plan for something so unpredictable?' asks another character, scientist Natalia.
     'If you find that to be the truth,' replies Artemis, 'then maybe you have to think very carefully about whether you can continue to subscribe to the whole bargain. But there would be consequences, of course. There are always consequences.'
     As for the name of the play: the Russian word Chernobyl means wormwood, of the genus Artemisia, which grows in profusion in the region. It's the hallucinogenic plant which gives absinthe its kick. Or as Revelations has it: 'And there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon a third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood. And many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.'
     Talking of hallucinatory experiences, CNN is showing a film about 'Chernobyl tourism'. They're about to start marketing the place and its nearby town of Pripyat as a tourist attraction, now that the radiation has abated somewhat, 25 years down the line. Not, of course, that the visitors will be accommodated on site. Nobody gets to stay that long.

Catherine Czerkawska is a playwright and author