By Peter Montague
In 1953 US President Dwight Eisenhower announced plans for the "peaceful
atom". The shining star of this program was to be thousands of nuclear-powered
electricity-generating plants, worldwide, making electricity "too cheap to meter".
Electricity was not the only promised benefit. According to author Catherine Caufield, news
articles soon began appearing with headlines such as, "Forestry Expert Predicts Atomic
Rays Will Cut Lumber Instead of Saws", and "Atomic Locomotive Designed".
Between 1946 and 1961, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) spent $1.5 billion to
develop an atomic airplane. (The entire Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb had
cost $2.2 billion.)
Problems with the atomic airplane were obvious from the beginning. The nuclear reactor
powering the plane had to be shielded, but shielding is heavy, so an atomic-powered airplane
could never get off the ground. According to New York Times science-columnist Peter
Metzger, for a time the AEC considered reducing the shielding and employing only older
pilots who wouldn't be planning to have any more children.
Another problem was that radioactivity would build up inside the nuclear engine: after
running for a year, the engine would contain 20 times as much radioactivity as was released
by the Hiroshima bomb. A plane crash would leave a major legacy of radioactive waste
spread across the countryside. The project was abandoned.
Staged accident
Atoms for Peace spawned other expensive schemes. NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket
Vehicle Application) was developed at a cost of $1.4 billion. On January 16, 1965, the AEC
staged a nuclear accident in the Nevada desert; a NERVA rocket was launched and a portion
of its engine was purposefully burned up so that AEC scientists could study environmental
effects of radiation. Six million residents of southern California were showered with
radioactive debris by this event.
Glenn Seaborg, head of the AEC, concluded that NERVA would be too dangerous to launch
from earth because of radioactive releases. The project died a public death in 1972, but in
1994 it was revealed that the Department of Defense had gone ahead and developed a
nuclear-powered rocket using its "black budget" (secret funds), as part of Star Wars
program.
The keel of a nuclear merchant ship, the Savannah, was laid in 1958. The ship toured the
world, aiming to improve the USA's image abroad. The Savannah was deactivated in 1971,
and the project was abandoned.
In the mid-1960s, the whiz kids at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico
began promoting nuclear-powered pacemakers to be implanted in the chests of patients with
heart problems.
The nuclear-powered pacemaker took advantage of a natural characteristic of plutonium-238,
which is so radioactive that it gives off heat, which can be used to make a "nuclear
battery" producing electricity.
Los Alamos scientists spent several million dollars and several years on the nuclear
pacemaker before they realised there was no way to keep track of such pacemakers and that
plutonium-238 would soon be wafting out of the smokestacks of crematoria.
The military developed a "man-pack" plutonium-powered battery for use by troops.
The device never went into service because, if one were blown up, a large area would have
been permanently contaminated by plutonium dust. Nevertheless, in 1970, newspaper writers
optimistically predicted that within three to five years campers would be carrying their own
plutonium-powered man-packs into the woods. The project was abandoned.
The Bulova watch company in 1969 announced it was developing a plutonium-powered wrist
watch, but the project was abandoned.
Plutonium underwear
The US Navy developed plutonium-impregnated "long johns" to keep divers warm
in cold waters. One set of nuclear long johns contained enough plutonium to provide 1 trillion
"maximum permissible lung burdens" of plutonium (333 maximum permissible
lung burdens for every human on earth in 1970). The project was abandoned.
The Monsanto Research Corporation, which operated the lab where the diving suit was
developed, promoted a nuclear-powered coffee pot. Such a pot would perk for 100 years
relying only on its self-contained plutonium-238 heat source. Each pot would contain enough
plutonium (5.67 grams) to provide 10 million lethal doses. The project was abandoned.
Even the crown jewel of the program — nuclear-generated electric power — fell upon
hard times. Despite billions of dollars of subsidies, a multitude of problems beset the industry
from the start. Since 1975, no new nuclear power plants have begun construction in the US.
Food
Despite these many failures, one part of the peaceful atom program has been kept alive. In the
late 1950s, the AEC began promoting a new way to preserve food — zap it with large
doses of radiation. By zapping food with 100,000 to 3 million rad of energy, insects and
bacteria could be killed, reducing food spoilage. (This is a large dose; 600 rad is sufficient to
kill half of the humans thus exposed.)
Unfortunately, it became clear from the earliest days that a dose of radiation sufficient to
achieve complete sterilisation would also cause profound changes in the food: unpleasant,
unfamiliar and dangerous degradation products formed.
Therefore, the program used less radiation than could achieve complete sterilisation, thus
scaling back the benefits from "long-term preservation" to "possibly extending
the shelf-life of some foods". To this day, no study has ever added up and described the
benefits to be derived from irradiated food.
Lack of quantified benefits has not slowed the program, however. In 1967, a truck-mounted
food irradiator built by the AEC criss-crossed the US promoting the benefits of irradiated
food. In the late 1960s, the army produced irradiated ham, to provide ham sandwiches for
front-line troops. However, in 1968, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared that
the irradiated ham could not be considered safe.
Despite this setback, in 1986, the FDA issued a mystifying and scientifically controversial
decision, approving the irradiation of spices, pork, fruits and vegetables. The data that the
FDA relied upon have been challenged.
Despite immense effort by government to create this new industry, no market for irradiated
food has developed. The public just doesn't seem interested. Therefore, food irradiation is
legal in the US but largely unused, except in the case of a few spices. Still the government
keeps pressing on.
Caesium
Originally, food irradiators used cobalt-60 as the source of radiation. But in recent years the
US government has been urging a shift to caesium-137.
Some critics suspect that food irradiation proposals are a way to use up the nation's limited
supply of caesium-137 and thus create a need to produce more of it. Evidence for this is the
fact that the government is willing to lease caesium-137 at bargain prices (0.83 cents per curie
per year), compared to cobalt-60, which sells for $1 per curie on the open market.
If a food irradiation industry can be created, it will soon sop up all available caesium-137,
and thus create a demand for more. This would require the government to start reprocessing
nuclear waste.
If wastes were reprocessed to extract the caesium, two things would follow automatically: the
caesium would become the responsibility of states, thus relieving the federal government of an
enormous waste problem. Secondly, plutonium could be extracted from the wastes
simultaneously — a dream that the atomic establishment has savoured since 1950.
In sum, the government wants to create a food irradiation industry, thus requiring waste
reprocessing to extract caesium-137, in order to revitalise a dormant plutonium-extraction
program, critics argue.
We see the pressure to create a food irradiation industry in a somewhat different light. Now
that the world's scientific community has reached consensus that global warming is upon us,
and that humans are causing the problem (at least in part) by burning oil, gas and coal,
pressure will mount steadily to shift to new energy sources.
There are only two alternative sources of energy: nuclear and solar. The public's distaste for
radiation has been, and still is, the ultimate barrier to nuclear power.
What better way to undercut distaste for radiation than by putting irradiated food on our
plates? If we can all be convinced to irradiate our food, then our great respect for, and fear
of, radiation will dissipate and ultimately vanish. By this means — and probably only by
this means — can the way be cleared for deployment of the global nuclear power industry
envisioned in Eisenhower's day.
Trillions of dollars — and major issues of global political control and environmental
contamination — are at stake.
[From Rachel's Environment
& Health Weekly.]