Twenty years ago
Twenty years ago I was an environmental sciences major at UC Berkeley. In the spring of 1986, I was taking Energy & Resources 102 from John Holdren and Mark Christensen. I loved that class. We used John Harte’s Consider a Spherical Cow: A Course in Environmental Problem Solving, which was all about doing order-of-magnitude calculations to quantify environmental questions. It turned out to be one of my favorite textbooks. Although I don’t often have a need these days to do Spherical Cow‘s kind of back-of-the-envelope figuring, I still keep it on my shelf at work as a reminder that I can if I have to.
April 26, 1986, was a Saturday. The next class meeting was the following Tuesday. Professor Holdren strode into the lecture hall with a gleam in his eye. “I was going to put off covering pollution dispersion and atmospheric plume modeling for a few more weeks,” he said. “But considering current events, I decided to move it up a bit in the schedule. This is too good an opportunity to pass up.”
There had been a big release of radioactives at a nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, at a place called Chernobyl. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but it sounded bad.
We went over the existing information, which was from data on the amounts of radioactivity measured at Swedish rainfall gauges — the Soviet Union wasn’t saying much yet — and, based on some simple models and a lot of assumptions, came up with some estimates of how much radioactivity had probably been released at the reactor. The numbers we came up with were spooky and, in retrospect, pretty damn close to the mark.
Today, Chernobyl Reactor 4 is encased in a containment structure that was hastily thrown together at the time of the emergency. It’s not structurally stable, so the Ukrainians are working on surrounding it with a better, stronger containment unit. People who were living in the area at the time are still feeling the effects.
And despite the safety hazards, more reactors get built every year… because compared to oil and coal burning, nukes seem like the lesser evil. You might have to keep an eye on the wastes for 10,000 years, but at least nukes don’t add CO2 to the atmosphere. Funny, how one’s priorities shift when there are threats to little things like the global food supply.