Plokhy rejected the distinction between “atoms for war” and “atoms for peace”. “Let’s look at the technologies of the 21st century… We don’t have unlimited capability, so we have to think about investing money in the industries that can fight climate change without creating the sort of risk to the environment that nuclear creates.” “I don’t think it makes much sense to invest in the technology of the 20th century,” he argued. He criticised Germany for shutting down its nuclear reactors – any environmental damage from their construction was already done – but said that now is the time to look at renewables. Design flaws contributed to the Chernobyl disaster, but even the best-designed reactor can be overwhelmed by an unforeseen event: war, as in Ukraine, or a tsunami, as at Fukushima. Plokhy acknowledged the value of nuclear in limiting climate change but maintains his reservations, partly because of the cost of waste disposal. The UK energy strategy released in April envisages the building of up to eight new reactors, even though the Hinkley Point C power plant now under construction is £3bn over budget and delayed by more than a year. Having fallen from favour after the blasts at Fukushima, Japan in 2011, nuclear power is becoming popular again – as a way of reducing both Europe’s energy dependence on Russia and carbon emissions. Kyshtym only became public knowledge in 1989, even though it was second only to Chernobyl in the amount of radiation released. Two of the accidents – Chernobyl and the 1957 explosion at Kyshtym – happened in what was then the Soviet Union. “No one really loves to deliver bad news,” he told me during an interview at his publisher’s in London.
For Plokhy, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard and the author of several best-selling books, the common theme of secrecy connects each catastrophe.
His new book, Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima, is a history of the nuclear age, told through analysis of six of its worst disasters.
Ukraine is the country of Chernobyl, and Serhii Plokhy is the pre-eminent historian of that disaster. That it has not become another Chernobyl was more down to chance than intention. Russian planes bombed it from the air, damaging buildings around one of the reactors. But it was never designed to withstand the attack visited upon it on 3 March, eight days into the war in Ukraine. From across the Kakhovka reservoir, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – the largest in Europe – looks like a fortress, its six reactors squatting like watchtowers along the shore.
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