From Chernobyl With Fear: Lessons for Japan About How We Terrify Ourselves

Japanese officials are said to be pondering a “Chernobyl solution”—which, in a literal perversion of the silly stock metaphor, we might call the most apocalyptic (and apoplectic) of all “nuclear options.” In the end, Chernobyl was abandoned and basically concreted over from above (all the pilots shortly died of cancer), leaving a 19-mi “exclusion zone” that remains a sort of earthworks memorial to the unmourned twentieth century of cold war, split atoms, and human hubris.

Or is our species’s error here actually unhinged hysteria? As long as it’s still fissioning and belching, Fukushima will be an acute crisis in anyone’s book. As at Chernobyl, some plant workers will probably die from their exposure, and probably rushed to the site knowing it. But does even the worse-case scenario at a civilian nuclear facility inevitably lead to a slice of Fallout-style wasteland?

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For the twentieth anniversary of Chernobyl, BBC’s Horizon returned to the exclusion zone with a mother and daughter permanently evacuated from the closest town. The daughter was just a fetus in 1986, when Soviet doctors set up mass abortions as part of the relief work. The mother was one of the few women who resisted, and her daughter is now as physically and mentally healthy as any 20-year-old could be expected to be.

There’s much evidence that the pair represent the rule, not the outliers, of Chernobyl’s long-term effects. Two decades on, related diagnoses of leukemia and other cancers are a tiny fraction of the thousands that had been predicted. With no people, wildlife has flourished in the exclusion zone, and so far none of the deers or trees studied have been particularly mutant.

The experts say that the overreaction was a failure of extrapolation – we extended the graph of hyperextreme radiation exposure and its related disasters to much smaller (indeed, Fukushiman) levels, suggesting they’d still be life-challengingly dangerous. But it now seems probable that, like the nuclear chain reaction itself, radiation needs to hit a certain critical level to do its damage.

Our special terror about anything atomic is, of course, a historical holdover from Hiroshima, not to mention “Godzilla” and other sci-fi horrors. (In fact the uranium in a bomb is at least 97% enriched; in power plants, around 3%.) But our fear is probably also deeper, neurological even. We simply don’t, or rather can’t understand a technology as sophisticated and unusual as nuclear power – and not just in the sense of being really bad at fixing it. We attach to it a special kind of fear.

A similar aura of danger surrounded the Concorde: when one of them crashed, the whole fleet was grounded and taken out of service. But tons of 747s have crashed in the time since the concorde was introduced, and no one has called for their prohibition. Oil gets a similar pass. We know how oil will kill us: we’ve seen the ducks and seals trapped in the muck; we smell and hear the angry chemistry of our cars and jets. And even after the Deepwater Horizon spill – which spread more and wider natural devastation than Fukushima ever will – the categorical, immediate halt of all human petroleum use would have been politically and socially preposterous.

The scary thing about radiation is not that it kills, but that it kills in a way human beings aren’t evolutionarily equipped to fathom. The causality modules of our ape brains can’t handle an inanimate shiny rod that might (or might not) eat your brain in 20 years or deform the child you conceive in 20 months, which is probably an adaptation that helped our science get to the point where it could do just that.

This reminds of a classic experiment with rats: One group of rats was given a shock right after a light comes on. Another group was zapped with x-rays that cause tummy aches right after drinking a sweet liquid. Both learned almost immediately to avoid the light, and the drink. But if you shock a rat after it drinks, or zap its tummy when the light comes on, it’ll never learn – because in the natural world that invented the rat brain, the associations light/nausea and taste/shock are completely illogical, and would probably kill the individuals that make them.

Trapped coal miners, and smog, and destroyed beaches, and Saddam blowing up the oil fields, and (for most) melting glaciers make sense – we wanted the lights to come on, and sometimes that means shocks. We have no idea how, or if, or when, the nuclear light will hit our tummies, and so what else to do but run around the cage, going mad?