Atoms and Ashes by Serhii Plokhy

Author:Serhii Plokhy [Plokhy, Serhii]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781324021049
Google: OimozgEACAAJ
Published: 2022-05-15T02:13:49.479338+00:00

V

THE STAR OF APOCALYPSE

Chernobyl

Few people were more worried about the impact that the Three Mile Island accident might have on the nuclear industry than the seventy-six-year-old president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Anatolii Aleksandrov. A physicist by training, he was also the director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy and a founding father of the Soviet nuclear project. In the Three Mile Island accident Aleksandrov saw a major threat to the nuclear industry. He had to act in order to eliminate the unexpected hazard from America.1

On April 10, 1979, one day after Dick Thornburgh lifted the evacuation order for pregnant women and children, ending the Three Mile Island crisis, Aleksandrov published an article in the leading Soviet newspaper Izvestiia attacking the Western media for presenting what he called the “slight unpleasant consequences” of the TMI accident “in extraordinarily exaggerated form.” Aleksandrov characterized American media coverage of the accident as an attack on the nuclear industry by its competitors, the oil and gas corporations that also influenced the US government. He argued for continuing development of the nuclear industry, predicting the depletion of oil and gas deposits within the next twenty to fifty years. With deposits of uranium ore also under threat of depletion, Aleksandrov pushed for the development of fast breeder reactors, which generate more fissile material than they consume.

In order to make the nuclear industry more attractive to the Soviet leadership and public, Aleksandrov highlighted a research project under development at his institute: nuclear reactors that could produce heat for apartments and public buildings. “They are so safe that it will be possible to locate them directly in residential districts,” wrote the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Those reactors would not be cheap, he admitted, but they would run on a fuel less expensive than coal and would not pollute the environment. That was not all. Aleksandrov proposed to move on from nuclear to thermonuclear reactors, which could be used to regulate the climate. As far as he was concerned, the future of nuclear energy and the benefits to be derived from it were truly unlimited.2

Aleksandrov’s article was the immediate response of the Soviet nuclear lobby to the Three Mile Island accident, which threatened to tip the scales in the Kremlin away from nuclear power and toward the oil and gas industry. That industry was earning hard currency for the country in European markets newly opened by détente. Cold War rivalry aside, the leaders of the Soviet nuclear industry were at one with their American counterparts in trying to reduce the negative political fallout of the TMI accident as much as possible. The captains of the Soviet nuclear industry turned out to be more successful in that regard than the Americans. Aleksandrov’s characterization of the TMI incident as little more than a bump on the road to nuclear progress soon became the standard line of the Soviet media.

A week after Aleksandrov’s article, Gennadii Gerasimov, an influential Soviet foreign affairs commentator who would later coin the term

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