The Legacy of Hanford

One era's triumph can turn into another era's disaster, and perhaps no better example of that in the field of nuclear energy and weapons is the Hanford Site in south-central Washington State, about 200 miles from Seattle.  During the height of World War II, physicist Enrico Fermi designed a nuclear reactor for the Dupont Corporation to produce plutonium that was needed for nuclear weapons, as part of the ultra-secret Manhattan Project.  The small farming community of Hanford, Washington was selected for the site of the reactor and associated chemical processing plants, and more than 40,000 construction workers swarmed to the bank of the Columbia River in 1943 to build what became known after the war as the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. 

Because plutonium is one of the most deadly radioactive substances known, plant designers had to come up with novel ways of transporting large volumes of liquid and solid plutonium-containing material while keeping workers either far away from the load or behind several feet of radiation shielding.  Accordingly, one of the first industrial applications of closed-circuit TV was to view remote-controlled plutonium-handling equipment.  In view of the hazards of spills during transportation from the producing reactors to the processing plant, a railway tunnel was constructed of timbers and steel, buried in a foot or more of earth on top.  Plutonium that went into the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb used on Nagasaki, Japan probably passed through this tunnel, as did dozens of tons of plutonium used to make nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

Beginning in the 1960s, plutonium production ceased at Hanford, as it was realized that the site was heavily contaminated with long-lasting radioactive material and was no longer usable by then-current safety standards.  When the U. S. populace felt its back was to the wall during the war, not many people raised issues about long-term health hazards of working with nuclear weapons.  But as the threat of nuclear war declined after the Partial Test Ban Treaty between the USSR and the US in 1963, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, most production activity ceased at Hanford and instead, a massive cleanup became the top priority.  The U. S. Department of Energy now spends billions of dollars a year on the Hanford cleanup, employing 8,000 people at the site and taking reasonable precautions about keeping workers safe.  But since President Trump's appointment of former Texas governor Rick Perry to head the Department of Energy, the media has paid more attention to the Department and any problems it may have, the most recent of which is the collapse of part of the roof of the old railroad tunnel used to transport plutonium.

The hole in the tunnel, more than ten feet across, was discovered on May 9, and as a precaution, many employees at the site were told to shelter in place until measurements could be taken to tell if substantial amounts of radioactive material had been released.  Investigation showed that no such release occurred, and the hole has since been covered in plastic and plans made to fill the old tunnel with grout.  Several railroad cars used to transport plutonium remain in the tunnel, which is altogether too radioactive to be inspected by humans, although robotic inspections are possible.  A second larger tunnel built in the 1950s has also shown signs of structural instability, and Hanford managers are planning to do something about preventing its collapse by August.

It would be nice if engineering ethics consisted of a set of unchanging rules, and doing engineering ethically simply meant understanding and following the rules.  But a phrase I recently came across expresses nicely the difference between the discipline of ethics and the disciplines of the hard sciences. 

Ethics is a "humane science"—meaning not that it's kind to animals, but that its "laws" are really just generalizations that depend on the nature of humanity, and so cannot show the ironclad reliability and constancy of physical laws.  This is not to argue for relativism—the notion that all ethical principles are relative to particular times, places, and cultures.  Rather, it is to confess both ignorance—no finite human being can possibly know all the relevant considerations in a particular ethical situation—and the fact that as human cultures and societies change, what is regarded as ethical behavior in a given circumstance can also change. 

In the case of Hanford, what has changed the most is our sense of priorities.  In 1939, the U. S. suspected Hitler of building a nuclear weapon, and Japanese troops were showing signs of fighting to the last man on the last domestic island of that nation.  For good or ill (plenty of both, actually), Roosevelt gave the green light to the Manhattan Project, which led to the first production and use of nuclear weapons six years later.  Both leaders and ordinary citizens felt seriously that the U. S. was fighting for its life, and in such a situation, concerns about exposures to levels of radiation that might possibly lead to cancer in twenty or thirty years, or might pollute the environment for hundreds of years, simply faded into the background.

Having enjoyed relative peace in the North American continent ever since the end of World War II, the U. S. can now afford to deal with the messes it created during the war, Hanford being the leading example.  Many opponents of nuclear power take the acres of lethal radioactivity at Hanford to be proof sufficient to lead us to swear off all use of nuclear power forever, amen.  And it must be admitted that disasters such as the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear-reactor fire in Ukraine are uniquely horrible.  Shutting down all nuclear plants would presumably avoid such incidents in the future. 

But nuclear energy is also uniquely suited to address the increasingly prominent issue of global warming.  While it is an open question whether renewable energy can compete economically with nuclear energy for the world's short-term energy needs, it would be shortsighted to rule nuclear out altogether because of an emotional reaction against it not based on an objective view of the facts.  Unfortunately, there are lots of facts to view, and so nuclear power remains controversial, as it probably always will simply because its first public use was to bring us the horrors of nuclear war. 

Sources:  I referred to news reports on the Hanford tunnel-roof collapse carried by the Washington Post on May 9 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/09/tunnel-collapses-at-hanford-nuclear-waste-site-in-washington-state-reports-say/, and the Seattle Times on June 30 at http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/another-hanford-tunnel-storing-radioactive-waste-at-risk-study-finds/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on the Hanford Site. 

Earth Deserves Better Than TV Coverage of Climate Change

As I write this, a day after Earth Day 2017, the memory of hundreds of "Marches for Science" and in particular, a CNN report on climate change makes me wonder whether the medium of television is more harmful than helpful in bringing the attention of the general public to complex issues of public interest.  These thoughts are stimulated by an online article and video clip of the report, which featured an exchange between famed popularizer of science Bill Nye the Science Guy, and a man I have seen in person and exchanged emails with, one William Happer, a longtime Princeton physicist who thinks concerns about climate change are, to put it mildly, overblown.

An otherwise uninformed observer of the exchange saw two older men, Nye wearing a bright-red bow tie and Happer dressed in muted grays, in two panels of a four-screen split that included CNN anchors and a representative of an environmental group.  Nye was clearly upset at Happer's mild-toned assertions that carbon dioxide is something each of us produces two pounds of a day just by breathing, and to treat it as a pollutant is going too far.  What really got Nye going was when Happer compared the Paris climate accords recently signed by the Obama administration to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler's Germany prior to World War II.  This one stunned even the anchors, who asked Happer to repeat himself, and he explained that the parallel was that neither agreement was going to achieve its stated aim.  Chamberlain failed to stop Germany from grabbing more territory in moves that led directly to World War II, and according to Happer, the Paris accords won't do anything significant to slow down climate change.

What media experts call the "visuals" were all in favor of Nye, a practiced TV performer who brought the right amount of passion to be convincing without yelling or seeming to lose his cool.  But if you look at the academic qualifications of these two parties, you might begin to change your mind.  Mr. Nye's highest formal degree is a B. S. in mechanical engineering, after which he started doing amateur comedy routines and developed the on-air personality for which he is now famous.  William Happer holds a Ph. D. in atomic physics from Princeton and is the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics at that institution.

As encouraging as the Paris agreement was to many who believe that the only moral thing to do with regard to climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels yesterday and undertake a massive retooling to renewable energy, hardly any of its terms are binding on the parties involved.  Like many other such agreements, it consists of hopeful statements of intentions, but if history is any guide, the only countries that will fulfill their obligations under the agreement are ones that were headed in that direction anyway. 

As University of Oxford professor of energy policy Dieter Helm points out in his book The Carbon Crunch, looking to international agreements as an effective means of lowering carbon emissions is probably a fool's errand.  Many European countries are currently outsourcing carbon-intensive industries such as steelmaking and heavy manufacturing to places like India and China, and so Europe can show a net reduction in carbon footprints that is happening not only because of high-minded dedication to the environment, but because of changes in the makeup of their economies toward services and high-tech businesses that simply don't need as much energy. 

As for China and India, the future growth of their economies depends vitally on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.  They are not about to put the economic brakes on developments that have led millions of their people out of rural subsistence-farming poverty to improved lives in manufacturing-intensive towns and cities.  The Paris agreement may look good on paper, but according to Helm, the chances of any significant dent being made in the world's carbon production by such an agreement roughly equal a snowball's chances in Hades (my metaphor, not his).

Since Helm has made his professional career out of taking global warming seriously, and  spends the rest of the book describing real-world near-term solutions to the problem of fossil-fuel emissions, I think we can count him as a credible witness.  And his conclusion is, leaving Hitler aside, that Happer's opinion on the effects of the Paris agreement is probably closer to the mark than Nye's.

When I sat down to write this blog, I was all set to denounce the politicization of science, and then I thought of another book I read recently:  The Pope of Science, a biography of the famed Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.  Fermi was a scientist's scientist, in that he lived, breathed, and slept science, taking little or no interest in politics and dealing with it only when it directly affected his livelihood (as when he and his partly-Jewish wife decided to flee Fascist Italy as it turned toward Hitler's Germany in its anti-Semitism), or when politics made it necessary to pursue a particular line of inquiry so that the Germans wouldn't make a nuclear weapon before the Allies did and take over the world.  For that reason, Fermi willingly led a team funded by the U. S. government to build the world's first nuclear reactor in 1942, which was a necessary step in the development of nuclear weapons.  But once the war was over, he was glad to get back to basic physics, for the most part.

The fact is, science has always been political to some degree, going all the way back to Francis Bacon, who took what passed for science in the 1500s and put it to work for the betterment of mankind.  Some scientists who worked on the nuclear bomb opposed its use in war, and some scientists today, such as Happer, criticize the plans for gigantic economic disruptions that would take place if the Bill Nyes of the world became dictators of our industrial and economic policies.  At least today, the debates are carried out in the open on widely accessible media.  It's hard to believe, but the entire nuclear-weapon development program in World War II was carried out in near-total secrecy, in a fashion that would get witheringly criticized in view of today's standards of open debate about major publicly-funded projects.  And the outcome, namely nuclear weaponry, has posed a moral quandary ever since. 

But the Nye-Happer confrontation is a reminder that visuals can be deceptive, and there is always more to be learned about a technical subject than you see on TV.

Sources:  The CNN report and video of the Nye-Happer exchange can be viewed at http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/04/22/watch_bill_nye_blast_cnn_on_air_for_pitting_him_against_climate_change_skeptic.html.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Bill Nye, William Happer, and Enrico Fermi.  Dieter Helm's The Carbon Crunch:  How We're Getting Climate Change Wrong—and How To Fix It was published in 2012 by Yale University Press.  The Pope of Physics by Gino Segré and Bettina Hoerlin was published in 2016 by Henry Holt & Co.  I blogged on my encounter with William Happer and the dissing of his talk by a gathering of otherwise well-behaved scientists on Oct. 7, 2013 in "When Scientists Aren't Scientists."