Could a Chernobyl Level Nuclear Disaster Happen in the US?

Like thousands of others you may've been

glued to your television screens

watching HBO's new miniseries Chernobyl.

Which tells the story of one of the world's

worst nuclear disasters.

When the Chernobyl power plant

had a reactor that blew up in the USSR, in 1986.

The television show has the highest rating on IMDB ever.

And has even inspired tourists to flock

to the radioactive zone in Ukraine.

If you watched in the US, you may feel like

the show had almost nothing to do with your real life.

After all, it's about a tragedy that took place

a long time ago, all the way across the world,

in a different political system.

But could it happen here?

To understand the likelihood of a meltdown in the US

Wired caught up with nuclear historian Kate Brown

from MIT to talk about the risks of a nuclear disaster

in the US and what would happen

if a Chernobyl happened here.

My name is Kate Brown and I'm a professor

of science technology in society at

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And I study environmental history and nuclear history.

You've been to Chernobyl, you've spent

a lot of time there, did you watch the show?

What did you think?

I found that visually it was quite good.

I used to live in the Soviet Union

during those same years, so people, you know,

dressed in that same way.

Certainly the characterizations of firemen

getting sick and their skin, you know, dissolving,

and those horrifying scenes in the hospital,

those do come out, those are similar pictures

that they got from medical manuals.

And I think the show presents kind of two so-called truths.

One is that only the Soviets, it could never happen

like here in the United States, only the Soviets

could lie so thoroughly, be so incompetent,

screw up so royally.

Yet at the same time the show shows

these same Soviets heroically, altruistically

sacrificing their bodies to save the world

from yet greater nuclear hazard.

And so many of the people who were

watching the show this past month

have said, wow, I'm so glad I live in America.

Could this happen in the US?

We have had accidents in the United States

at nuclear power plants, and Three Mile Island

was the biggest of them.

There was a plane flying over, you know,

the American southeast, and it accidentally

dropped two nuclear missiles,

poof, landed right, you know, on the ground.

I mean we've so many things that almost went wrong,

went close to being wrong.

We have a real problem with radioactive waste.

If it's not put in a stable place

and monitored for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years,

it will overheat and blow up,

and create a big nuclear accident or explosion.

Every nuclear power plant is storing

its radioactive waste right there onsite.

In cement pools, the water acts as a moderator

so that we won't have a criticality accident.

But if something were to happen to these pools

that are just chock full with spent fuel rods

that are highly radioactive.

If, you know, we've had all these,

with climate change, all these extreme

weather situations, if there's a tornado,

a hurricane, that cracks the pool, the water drains out.

These spent fuel rods will start to heat up,

and once they start to heat up they'll start to

perhaps go critical, and they could cause explosions.

Explosions that would, you know,

make Chernobyl look like a picnic.

Our biggest Superfund site in the country

is the Hanford plutonium plant site,

which is a Hanford nuclear reservation today.

There's high level waste that's stored in bins

that were built to have a shelf life of 10 years.

And that was 60 years ago.

And those underground storage bins

are starting to crack and to leak.

And they're leaking high level radioactive waste.

A Dixie cup of which would poison everybody

in a large auditorium.

All that is leaking towards the watershed,

towards the Columbia River.

What are the state of our protections

for the workers at these sites?

If a disaster happens,

is there a protocol that everyone knows?

I think if you were to poll people

who live near nuclear reactors around the country

you would find that they probably

don't have any idea what they're supposed to do.

Radioactive isotopes are so dynamic

and invisible, and insensible,

it's really hard to keep track of them and to manage them.

It's really hard to keep the people around

any kind of nuclear site safe.

I mean we can't have nuclear power

without putting the waste somewhere.

So is there a solution?

Despite that sort of can-do America,

you know, we can do anything kind of attitude,

we have not solved this problem.

Even though we are the pioneers

of nuclear energy and nuclear bombs.

Finland is the one country in the world

that's built a deep underground nuclear repository

for their waste, and most people consider that

a successful program so far.

But mind you they have to have this place watched,

and a infrastructure, and energy going to it

for a thousand years.

So, you know, it's hard to imagine

that kind of stability, political, economic,

infrastructural stability of any society.

Maybe human society doesn't have the ability

to deal with the timescales that nuclear power

and nuclear waste demands, when we're

talking about centuries and millennia.

Maybe that's just beyond our human capabilities.

Thank you so much for chatting with us.

This has been really enlightening and terrifying.

And it was just a pleasure to talk.

Okay.

Thanks for having me on your show.

Take care. You too.

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