For the past week I've barely been sleeping while researching and
doing interviews about Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant in the wake of the earthquake and tsunamis. In 2002, I learned that I had moved into the "peak fatality zone" of Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County, New York, and for the next four years I wrote about it on a weekly basis, interviewing people on both sides and in between. The relationship between humans and energy consumption is the core beam of our evolution as a species, from the time we first harnessed fire and nearly drove whales to extinction for their blubber before we turned to kerosene. This issue is a nuanced one, riddled with danger and short-sightedness.
At that time I wrote a manuscript about my experiences. My agent, Jim Levine, asked me yesterday to send it to him. This is the first time I've reviewed it since writing it. One section in particular, which depicts a private Earth Day tour of Indian Point nuclear power plant, is very chilling. The excerpt, pasted below, explains many of the issues associated with the spent nuclear fuel rods. The inability to cool the rods at Fukushima poses a much larger hazard than the possible meltdown of a reactor core.
Names have been changed but otherwise the events depicted in the excerpt are factual, based on my experiences at the time. Fragments of the experiences were published as articles.
With a dosimeter strapped around my neck to measure exposure to radiation, I push green foam earplugs into place. It is Earth Day and I am taking a six-hour tour of the nation’s oldest nuclear plant, Indian Point, located 35 miles from midtown Manhattan on the Hudson River in Buchanan, New York. The day starts at the crooked cement blocks that have been mandated at the front entrance to stop trucks after September 11.
The closest I have ever come to the plant before then was during a protest at the front gate, when flatbed trucks had rolled by with giant caskets on the back to symbolize the mass death that could occur in the event if a nuclear fire at the spent fuel rod pools. Because nuclear plants are private businesses, they are not required to protect themselves against acts of war or enemies of the United States.
The spent fuel rods are removed from the reactor cores and stored in pools. The rods, which are only spent in the sense that they are no longer functioning at reactor level capacity, are made of zirconium cladding filled with ceramic pellets that contain deadly radioactive isotopes including cesium 137 and strontium 90, which is also found in the baby teeth of some of the children living around the plant.
When the rods are removed, they require at least five years of pool cooling before they can be put in dry cask storage, which is far more safe. When experts raised awareness about the danger of spent fuel rod pools, which require cooling water at all times to avoid an unapproachable and lethal nuclear fire, some European countries took the hint and started storing cooled nuclear fuel in hardened, dispersed casks. For the most part, in the US, casks are only used when pools are filled to capacity, and even then the industry seeks the cheapest approved option.
While reactor cores are protected by thick domes capable of repelling aircraft and keeping radiation inside, spent fuel rod pools are not, which means that if the water keeping the rods cool is removed or disappears, the nuclear fire that could result would sweep straight up into the air. While relatively few rods are active in a reactor core at a given time, the pools often contain all of the rods that have ever been in the neighboring core.
Over the course of the year before the tour at Indian Point I’d interviewed a number of experts who explained what might happen if an unchecked fire were to occur at the site. The consensus was that the eastern seaboard could remain uninhabitable for the duration of humanity in a worst case scenario. Industry proponents seldom argued this point but they did contend that the conditions leading to such a scenario were unthinkable. If terrorists try to remove the water, they’ll be stopped and the water replenished before a fire breaks out. No other incident or accident, defenders argue, could possibly go unchecked long enough for a fire to occur. Anyone who criticizes this failure of imagination is labeled anti-nuclear--but it's not that simple.
Bill Barrow, who is leading the tour, meets us at the front door of the reception building.
A receptionist with a fish on her desk gives us badges with our names printed neatly in black letters. Almost immediately, Barrow takes us into the control room and stands by while Will snaps photographs of hundreds of little dials, buttons and glass panels labeled with words that correspond to parts of the facility.
Endless reels of ticker-tape spool outward. The Control Room Operator sits at his desk, smiling wanly and drumming his fingers out of boredom.
“If there’s a problem anywhere,” Barrow says, pointing to darkened glass panels with words etched in black, “The lights go on behind those little words there.”
“What if there’s no electricity?” I ask. “Like if there’s an emergency.”
Barrow shrugs as if that couldn’t possibly be a problem.
“We’ve got back-up generators. This is a very sophisticated operation, Rita. A very sophisticated operation.”
“Bill, the sirens failed during a power outage six months ago because their back-up batteries were dead.”
“We learn and move on.”
In Barrow’s worldview, a nuclear catastrophe is a source of concern only for hysterical fools. The tour is scheduled to last six hours. Already I am lightheaded from nervously touching my dosimeter.
“It will beep if there’s a problem,” Barrow repeats. “Stop obsessing.”
“That’s not a sound I want to hear.”
“You won’t hear it.”
“How do you know?” I persist.
“Because,” he says through clenched teeth and a smile, “it’s a precautionary measure.”
“In case we get dosed with radiation.”
"Which we won't. Period."
In the emergency command center, I expect to finally see some examples of cutting-edge technology even though the facility was slated for construction in 1954. The site had once been a park with beaches, trails and a boat launch, and then later, a circus. Now, the nuclear plant has swallowed every memory of those happy times. Clipboards and pulleys are rigged up to ropes that run between the upper and lower levels. Barrow opens a drawer on a large square box that contains transparent overlays with various combinations of possible weather events and radioactive plumes, flips a switch on the box to turn on the light and arranges one of the clear sheets over a map of the “peak fatality zone,” a ten-mile radius around Indian Point.
“This looks like a science fiction film from the 1950’s about the future,” I say. “It’s amazing that people can come up with the ability to create nuclear energy, but it just doesn’t seem like the best option when there’s a flaming ball of power waiting to be harnessed in the sky.”
“Pie in the sky,” Barrow says dismissively.
At the end of the hallway outside the emergency command center, a group of men in white coats hunker up in a boardroom.
“Engineers,” Barrow says, “always working to make us safer. Safety is our number one priority.”
“Corporations are legally required to place shareholder profits first,” I say. “Safety is expensive.”
“There are no profits without safety. Look how many people die in automobile accidents each year but cars are still manufactured. Life is filled with hazard and risk.”
The plant is old, and I can’t help feeling that it is falling apart a bolt and gasket at a time, and that at any minute a toxic plume will surround us with its inescapable truth: that the unthinkable can happen, and it sometimes does.
Every time we get to the end of a cement hallway, Barrow slips his badge into a slot and a green light goes on to permit entry through heavy doors. Every once in a while we pass a checkpoint, where paunchy guards are supposed to make sure we don’t have weapons. The fact that we accompany Barrow seems to be enough of an indication that we aren’t dangerous or psychotic. Nobody checks.
“Do you want to see the spent fuel rod storage pool?” Barrow asks.
We follow Barrow through a maze of dark corridors, and while I expect to emerge in the bowels of the plant, we end up in an office area brightly lit with fluorescent bulbs. A man named Tagliamonte with a handlebar moustache sits at his desk, surrounded by shelves of black binders.
“The radiation is measured in beeps,” Tagliamonte says once he introduces himself and tells us that his job is to debrief us on the spent fuel rod pool rules. He holds up the dosimeter from around his own neck.
“What if it beeps?” I ask. “What does that mean?”
“The whole point is not to get that beep.”
“But what if we do?”
“You won’t if you pay attention to what I’m telling you. It’s very rare.”
“Statistics don’t mean anything to a person who has been struck by lightning,” I say. “And if we do get a beep?”
“Then we’ll deal with it.”
“Deal with it? How are we going to deal with it?”
When my mother found out I was taking the tour, she asked if I remembered the scene in the film
Silkwood during which the title character, played by Meryl Streep, is scrubbed down, naked and wet, because she has been exposed to radiation.
“If you end up in a
Silkwood shower,” said my mother, “don’t say I didn’t warn you. And don’t you remember how they ran her off the road at the end because she knew too much?”
The main problem with nuclear power, aside from the possibility of a catastrophic meltdown at the reactor core, is the spent fuel. At Indian Point, the storage pools are full, and the spent fuel, which is far more lethal when removed from the reactor cores than it was when it went in, are stored in pools and casks on the property.
While experts recommend a storage method that keeps the casks hidden and dispersed, separate and cool, Indian Point has opted for the cheaper casks, which are stacked up together and visible from the air. Critics fear that a single attack or a natural disaster might expose the whole load of stored fuel to create an unstoppable nuclear fire.
“Technology is always providing us with new options,” Barrow says with a smile as we walk to the spent fuel pool.
“What are the chances of the kind of nuclear fire experts warn about?” I ask. “Is it possible that the entire eastern seaboard could be wiped out?”
“Nah,” he says. “Those people are hysterical. They use emotion to manipulate other people. A nuclear fire would never be allowed to reach that level of intensity. We’ve got the river right behind the plant…”
“What if nobody can access the plant or the river?”
“Can you really imagine what kind of harebrained scenario would result in nobody, out of how many millions of people we’ve got living within fifty miles, being able to access the plant? The chances of such a thing happening are so infinitesimally small that you can just go right ahead and say it’s impossible. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says it’s impossible.”
I can very easily envision just such a scenario.
“And what about the leaks of radiation that are currently streaming into the Hudson River?”
“Trace amounts,” he counters. “Look, you get exposed to radiation when you get x-rays, or go on a flight, or get off a train at Grand Central Station.”
“But the effects are cumulative.”
“Trace amounts,” he repeats as we continued on our way through the maze of infrastructure composing Indian Point. Turbines whir. A jackhammer sound causes us to stop and slip our earplugs into place. Expanding from body heat, the foam instantly fills my ear canals and muffles the mechanical sounds.
Barrow slips his card into the entry point of the warehouse like building in which the spent fuel rod pool is situated. Immediately, we pass on a dumpster full of “radioactive laundry," according to a sign on the side of the container.
“What happens if we get exposed to radiation?” I ask again.
“Tagliamonte told you,” Barrow says. “You’ll get a beep. Or a series of beeps. I don’t know if I’ve ever even heard my dosimeter go off. You get exposed to more radiation from bananas…It’s like dirt,” Barrow says, gesturing with his hand. “You just brush it off.” He turns to Will. “Have you ever noticed that she worries too much?”
“I’ve noticed.”
“And neither of you are worried about walking past a dumpster of radioactive laundry on your way to gaze into a pool of the most toxic waste material known to mankind? Where do you even drop off radioactive laundry?”
“I’ve done this hundreds of times,” Barrow says. “I don’t even know if I’ve ever heard my dosimeter go off. Nope. I don’t think I have, come to think of it. And there’s a place in New Jersey that does the laundry.”
We climb a metal catwalk to the platform around the cement pool.
“Now that you’re in here, don’t you feel safer about the fact that there’s no way a plane could ever possibly land in this pool and displace the water? You see now how crazy it is when people say that?”
“Not really,” I admit, looking up at the tin roof that could have blown off the place in a stiff wind. Barrow had told me during a previous interview that the roof is “just there to keep the rain out,” and serves no security function. Dizzy and nauseous, I cling to the rail, fearing that I might faint and fall overboard.
"Even if that happened, which it will not, the water would be replaced immediately, before a fire could start. Here we go,” Barrow says, waving his hand over the most stunningly clear water I’ve ever seen, “the result of a twenty million dollar water purification system.”
The purification process was mandated after a massive spray of radioactive water tainted the Hudson River six years earlier. The pool is surreal, with water that resembles the pale transparent blue of a Caribbean beach, but glassy, somehow, even though Barrow says it’s just regular water. At the bottom, neat rows of rods are nestled 27 feet down in a perfect metal grid. Nearly every slot is full. They look small and harmless at the bottom of the water, and I can see how this tricks Barrow into believing that no harm could possibly come of their presence, the same way a little old white lady rarely gets her trunk checked by highway patrol.
A shrill beep breaks the silence and we all clutch frantically at our dosimeters. Even Barrow stares down in fleeting horror before he quickly realizes that it isn’t his.
“Its mine,” Will says. “It’s mine!”
“It’s okay,” Barrow says. “Calm down.”
The beeping continues with the insistence of a midnight fire drill in a rest home.
“Is your cell phone on?” Barrow asks as Will pulls his phone from his pocket and blanches as he turns it off. “Tagliamonte did say to turn off your phone.”
“It’s on,” Will says. Barrow shrugs.
“And there you have it. No big deal.”
“How do you know his cell phone is the problem?” I ask.
“Because it is,” Barrow answers. “That’s why Tagliamonte says to turn them off.”
When the tour is over, Barrow leads us into a room and up to a machine made of shiny metallic sheets on the inside of a cylinder that is tall enough to stand inside. It looks like a giant baked potato turned inside out, foil on.
“Put your arms inside the tunnels,” Barrow says, pointing to two holes cut on either side of the machine. “Press yourself flat like this, and when you put your arms in you’ll feel a trigger at the end. Pull the trigger and the scan will start.”
“What is it scanning?” I ask.
“It just lets you know if any of your organs were exposed to radiation. You’ll get a print-out when the results are in. Not a big deal. Everybody who works here does this all the time.”
I step inside to skittishly insert and withdraw my arms before I can get anywhere near a trigger at the end of those narrow tubes.
“Go ahead,” Barrow urges. He steps up without hesitation, grabs my elbows and shoves my arms into place. Instinctively I squeeze the triggers and the scan starts. When we are all finished, we put our dosimeters into a machine that reads them.
When I get home I sit at the edge of the water on the little beach at the lake, fearful of going inside and poisoning the house. The willows along the edge of the lake are coming alive in a singular shade of electric green. Swimming geese leave trails on the surface of the water. I’m starting to see that the path of human civilization is tied to the way in which energy is harnessed and consumed.
Months later, when the report detailing my exposure to radiation arrives, it is mostly composed of numbers and symbols that make no sense. The image of the rippling blue spent fuel rod pool lingers in my memory. The rods are like the sudden appearance of a shark fin, circling ever closer.
