Science

When the nuclear option is in the wrong hands

Meltdowns such as Chernobyl are dramatic and capture lots of attention, but a dirty bomb is just as worrying

A Ukrainian emergency ministry rescuer attends an exercise in the city of Zaporizhzhia on August 17th, 2022, in case of a possible nuclear incident at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant located near the city. Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

Stuart Mathieson
Thu Nov 10 2022 - 06:00

For those of us old enough to remember the cold war the word “nuclear” will often generate conflicting memories. Atomic energy was billed as a cheap and clean alternative to fossil fuels but raised questions about the safe operation of plants and the responsible storage of its waste products, which could stay dangerously radioactive for thousands of years.

International diplomacy was carried out against a backdrop of a nuclear arms race that could destroy all life on the planet several times over. The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are the first five countries to acquire nuclear weapons.

The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has reignited a level of interest in the power and dangers of the atom. Russia inherited the Soviet Union’s place on the council alongside its nuclear arsenal. While its conventional forces have underperformed, its threats of nuclear retaliation have discouraged western nations from becoming directly involved in the conflict.

Ukraine is also the site of the world’s biggest nuclear catastrophe, Chernobyl, and Europe’s largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhya. The latter plant was the scene of intense fighting in the early stages of the Russian invasion, much of it livestreamed on social media.

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More recently Russia illegally annexed the Zaporizhzhya region, including the power plant, which Vladimir Putin declared Russian federal property.

The invasion has also raised suggestions that a “dirty bomb” might be used. This is a device in which radioactive material is mixed with conventional explosives to spread it over a wide area. Meltdowns such as Chernobyl are dramatic and understandably capture lots of attention, but a dirty bomb is perhaps just as worrying. Close contact with many kinds of radioactivity can lead to serious adverse consequences, and many people are unaware of the prevalence of radioactive materials in everyday life, such as in hospitals and food sterilisation.

These consequences are usually magnified by the fact that radioactivity is so long-lasting and is not as easy to remove by washing or burning as other contaminants. In 1984, for instance, thousands of people in Mexico and the United States were exposed to high levels of radiation when material from a radiotherapy unit was accidentally smelted into thousands of tonnes of structural steel.

In 1987, a similar incident occurred in Goiânia, Brazil, when a radiotherapy unit was stolen from an abandoned hospital. The thieves attempted to break the unit open before eventually selling it for scrap, but meanwhile developed symptoms of radiation exposure, including nausea and burns. The scrap dealer, Devair Alves Ferreira, noticed a glow from inside the device and brought friends and family to his house to observe it. Devair’s brother, Ivo, managed to remove some of the glowing material, which was the highly radioactive and easily dispersed caesium-137, and took it home. There, his daughter came into contact with it and accidentally ate some. She and three others would die as a result of exposure.

The former Soviet Union has also seen its share of radioactive incidents. In 1987 the eldest son of a family living in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, died from leukaemia. The apartment that they lived in had previously been inhabited by another family in which two teenage children and their mother had also died from leukaemia. An investigation eventually found a container of caesium-137 lodged in the wall, which had fallen out of a radiation detector into a gravel pit.

Georgia has had two serious incidents. In 1997, 11 soldiers at the Lilo training centre developed severe radiation burns, with the cause eventually tracked down to a series of radioactive devices abandoned by Soviet troops.

In 2001, three friends from the town of Lia were searching for firewood near the Enguri Dam when they discovered two cylinders emitting large amounts of heat. Because of snowy conditions they were unable to travel home and instead made a camp beside the canisters to keep warm overnight. These turned out to be radioisotope thermoelectric generators, a type of nuclear battery that Soviet engineers had used during construction in the isolated region before abandoning work. After becoming increasingly sick on their return home, the three were admitted to hospital with radiation sickness. Two required specialist intensive treatment abroad, with one discharged after a year and the other dying after almost three years of treatment.

As these cases demonstrate, nuclear energy has many practical and powerful uses, but can be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands.

Stuart Mathieson is a postdoctoral fellow in the school of history and geography at Dublin City University

Ukraine Crisis