Chernobyl

A thunderstorm knocked out our power Sunday night. In spite of knowing better, we kept mindlessly flipping light switches. Electricity is ingrained into our lifestyle. Its not easily given up. As long as we live with electricity, we must live with power plants. And as long as we must have power plants, we must choose between:

• coal, which scars the landscape and produces acid rain
• oil, which rely on scarce oil from unstable regions
• natural gas, which has the same issues as oil but at least burns cleanly
• solar, which take up lots of real estate don’t come close to offering enough capacity
• wind, which have the same issues as solar and only work in few locations
• hydroelectric, which drastically affect the flow of rivers and the life that depends on them, and
• nuclear, which is usually safe. Except when its not, in which case it becomes a monster.

Like it was one morning twenty years ago.

It was twenty years ago that an early-morning emergency drill backfired at Chernobyl, causing Reactor Number 4 to explode and release deadly radioactive steam and debris across the landscape. To paraphrase the late, Nobel-Prize winning physicist Andrei Sakhrov, we still don’t quite have a handle on the powerful forces we have brought into existence.

Twenty years have passed. Chernobyl will be a wasteland for many hundreds more. How have we progressed since? When we reach for the light switch, we expect something on the other end to be pushing out electrons. Is it worth another Chernobyl to keep our beloved elecricity? Are we willing to live in a world without electricity? If not, what’s next?

[I’m currently reading The Truth About Chernobyl by Gregori Medvedev, former chief engineer at Chernobyl. It brings back the same fear I felt in 1986 when I heard the scary news of the plant explosion. Also, see my earlier post on Three Mile Island.]