In 2000, a reporter attended a climate conference and wrote in an article for the Dutch alternative magazine Ode that purveyors of nuclear power hailed the energy source as “a ‘safe and clean’ way to generate electricity.” Perhaps, the speakers said, nuclear energy was even the singular solution to climate change.
The reporter framed the meeting’s discussion in the negative, citing evidence that nuclear power has “nothing good to bring to people and nature,” and concluded that “now is the time to bring the nuclear industry down, before it can ruin the twenty-first century.”
Years later, Marco Visscher stumbled across this article while doing research for his recent book “The Power of Nuclear,” which makes a provocative case in favor of nuclear power.
BOOK REVIEW — “The Power of Nuclear,” by Marco Visscher ( Bloomsbury Sigma, 320 pages).
The Ode reporter, it turned out, was himself.
Back in 2000, Visscher writes, he “wanted nothing to do with anything nuclear.” He gradually moderated his stance over time, but it wasn’t until Dutch politicians started talking seriously about nuclear energy in his own country that he conducted the research that caused him to do a full 180. “Just about everything we think we know about nuclear power turns out to be wrong,” he writes, including his former self in that “we.”
In “The Power of Nuclear,” Visscher aims to right those wrongs, offering “the incredible story of a technology that was misunderstood from the beginning,” he writes. “A story of life and death, of hope and fear.”
Today, Visscher finds nuclear power to be “a great miracle” and he wants to convince others of the same. “Throughout society nuclear power is met with deep-rooted suspicion,” he writes. “For many, nuclear has something evil about it, something shady. To these people, there is a mysterious, ominous feel to it, a threat of imminent danger. It’s almost as if the fission of atoms, as in a nuclear reactor, does not belong in this world.”
To show skeptics it does belong, his account systematically lays out reasons why widespread fears and hesitations about atomic energy are misguided, illogical, and propelled by unscientific thinking.
Visscher begins with a bit of history, exploring the origins of atomic oomph in the typically conversational and philosophical style that carries the book. “Scientists discovered this power out of curiosity and developed it further — not to supply energy to society, but to create a brutal military weapon for the world’s most powerful country,” he writes. “What nature had hidden so well, they had uncovered.” He is writing here, of course, about the Manhattan Project that first created nuclear bombs.
“Throughout society nuclear power is met with deep-rooted suspicion,” he writes. “For many, nuclear has something evil about it, something shady.”
It was only after these brutal weapons were created that calmer uses of radioactivity entered society, spurred on by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The “fearful atomic dilemma,” he said in a speech that later came to be called “Atoms for Peace,” was to figure out a “way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”
That way was nuclear energy generation.
But the atomic reactions that enable nuclear weapons to be weapons are the same ones that make nuclear power powerful, forever connecting the two — in reality and in the collective consciousness. That connection shows up, Visscher points out, in the language of anti-nuclear protests, which he details early in the book and where “No Nukes” meant both bombs and power plants when energy opposition took off in the 1970s and ’80s. “In the nuclear reactor, neutrons split atoms; outside, they split society,” he writes, in one of many pithy distillations that sometimes make his point seem like a propaganda pamphlet — territory the book’s goal of advocacy and its strident language can veer into.
In those early anti-nuclear protests, and general opposition to atomic energy, Visscher sees a divide that remains to this day. Nuclear opponents rely on the limbic system to make their points; proponents rely on statistics and schematics. “They showed their emotions and appealed to those of others,” he writes of the opposition, “while nuclear advocates came across as detached accountants.”
If that is true, “The Power of Nuclear” is only partly successful in humanizing the pro-nuclear lobby. While the book does share stories that call upon the pro-nuclear side’s feelings, its fundamental argument is be logical. If that accountant’s call didn’t bring people and their emotions to favor of nuclear power before, it’s unlikely to work in this book.
But Visscher makes a valiant attempt, in part by looking backward. The second section of the book re-examines the nuclear power industry’s most famous accidents, like the meltdowns at Chernobyl, in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), and Fukushima, in Japan. The first was caused by design flaws and human error, the second by an earthquake and resulting tsunami.
Visscher narrates these accidents with personal and colorful details, describing, for instance, a propaganda sign at Chernobyl that read, “Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier!” After the initial reaction explosion, he notes, “some thought: the Americans have come.”
Despite the cacophony, the Chernobyl disaster, he says, wasn’t as disastrous as it is in our collective memory, resulting in only dozens of deaths in the short-term and, according to a 2006 report from the United Nations Chernobyl Forum, a few thousand more due to cancer projected to occur during the lifetimes of those alive during the accident. In comparison, other industries have seen far more people killed directly in a single accident.
Similarly, he points out that no one died from the reactor meltdown in Fukushima — though thousands of people did die during the evacuation, and suffered psychological trauma afterward. Among the relocated, for instance, “the children were bullied and excluded; the other children said they were radioactive,” he writes.
A number of misconceptions, Visscher says in the final section of the book, have left nuclear power stifled and sidelined in discussions of climate-change solutions.
In fact, he writes, the non-radioactive effects of the accidents may be worse than the radioactive ones. After all, Visscher points out, we encounter plenty of it naturally in small doses. “Could it be,” he asks, “that radiation is not nearly as terrible as we think?”
But most people are bad at assessing raw risk, he notes. “Basic knowledge of statistical probability changes little, because we humans are selective in how we process information,” he writes. “Even the mind of the smartest person can be held hostage to incorrect assumptions and irrational fears.”
Still, Visscher spends much of the book trying to dispel assumptions and fears with logic and empirical data. Much of the argument, in terms of accidents, hinges on the idea that they’re uncommon and kill few people. Similar arguments, later in the book, apply to nuclear weapons themselves. “Compared to the destruction caused by regular air raids the effects of the atomic bomb were not that special,” he writes “Would it really have been less bad if Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been hit by hundreds of regular bombs?”
But such arguments aren’t likely to win over many readers.
Nevertheless, in following chapters, Visscher develops similar lines of thought, looking at the medical protocols around radioactivity, which are based on the idea that any radiation is harmful and all radiation exposure should be minimized, ideas he claims aren’t very scientific.
Similarly, he writes, nuclear waste — which has inspired some of the most vocal opposition to atomic energy — isn’t as dangerous as it’s treated. He cites energy analyst Rauli Partanen of Finland, who “wonders what message the industry is sending to the public when it ‘packs the waste in several layers of different protective materials, digs a hole that is half-a-kilometer [1,600ft] deep for the waste and fills it with concrete afterwards.’”
“Partanen provides the answer,” the author writes: “Who in their right mind would believe that the waste is anything but the most dangerous and deadly stuff on the planet?”
These kinds of misconceptions, Visscher says in the final section of the book, have left nuclear power stifled and sidelined in discussions of climate-change solutions.
But things may be turning around, he argues. “It is too early to say that nuclear power is on the rise,” he writes. “Between 2000 and 2023, a total of 117 nuclear reactors were connected to the grid. However, in the same years, 121 have been permanently shut down.”
“The problems with nuclear power have nothing to do with technology. The problems are between the ears.”
And Visscher does find himself in increasingly popular company, as other thinkers and doers — including the likes of Bill Gates — bring nuclear back to the climate-solution table, and as startups get big money to try to make fusion energy happen.
That’s one innovation, but nuclear power researchers have also been focusing on so-called advanced reactors — a general term for many new nuclear technologies, which includes smaller reactors that use thorium instead of uranium. But Visscher maintains that the pivot to novelty is actually also a reaction to preconceived notions about nuclear danger, and the bad reputations of the old reactor designs. “Why is there so much focus on innovation, really?” he writes. “Nuclear plants have a pretty good track record. The problems with nuclear power have nothing to do with technology. The problems are between the ears.”
That may be true, but what’s between the ears is important, even if its gears sometimes turn illogically. Revamping nuclear power’s reputation may take more than just informing readers that they’re wrong.