Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  This story of incorporation helps make sense of more recent moments when an ecological orientation has defied easy political categorization. The nature film March of the Penguins, released in 2005, took a classical leftist trope—the responsibility of the community for its most vulnerable members—and converted it into a seemingly apolitical morality tale. The film became a cult favorite among the Christian Right. Fears of childhood vaccination bring together clean-living new-agers and right-leaning libertarians, while feminists, fundamentalists, hippies, yuppies, physicians, and neoliberal politicians all unite in promoting breastfeeding.7 Republican property-owners and climate justice activists have forged an alliance against hydraulic fracturing and the Keystone XL Pipeline. These are not messy, inchoate moments of exception. Rather, ecological preoccupations with the vulnerability of species reproduction and bodily contamination traverse the contemporary political landscape, even as legislative and policy fights over climate change and energy strategy remain sharply divided along partisan lines. If the culture wars suggest polarity, the ecological age has been characterized by a transpartisan culture of suspicion that often indicts the state, creating bedfellows that only appear strange.

  Meanwhile, the state’s role under neoliberalism has pivoted from that of regulator to crisis manager. At the very moment that multiple ecological threats demanded a more aggressive regulatory regime, neoliberalism moved in the opposite direction. The dismantlement of the state as a regulatory body has gone hand in hand with its consolidation as an agent of emotional control and quasi-therapeutic manipulation. The roots of this lie in the Cold War culture of dissociation. Consolidating their authority at a time when psychiatry wielded great influence in the United States, civil defense planners cited extreme emotions within the population, like panic and hysteria, as national security risks. Indeed, panic prevention was a—if not the—primary goal of civil defense drills. Sociologist Jackie Orr describes this as the emergence of psychopower, which “works by multiplying the possible surfaces of contact between psychic processes and their regulation and by legitimating power itself as a kind of therapeutic activity.”8 Psychopower was exercised at Three Mile Island, where Richard Thornburg sought to reassert his command over the crisis by claiming to have contained a public panic. That claim displaced the actual radiological threat with the conjured threat of an out-of-control, emotionally overwrought population. First operationalized within Cold War civil defense, psychopower has lived on in the post–Cold War era. It can be seen in both an unending war on terror and a neoliberal war on the regulation of petrocapitalist corporations and invasive private industries.9 What has taken shape is a palliative, therapeutic mode of governance, one that we can expect to see more of moving forward, as the state appears inadequate to the task of enforcing the global structures required to combat the threat posed by rising carbon emissions.10

  The political settlement that followed the upheavals of the 1970s—the consolidation of the neoliberal state, the rise of a global capitalist class with little sense of national obligation, a meritocratic as opposed to egalitarian cultural politics, a wounded sense of national identity, and a succession of epidemiological and ecological crises—has left the United States ill prepared to deal with the challenge posed by anthropogenic climate change and the question of nuclear power’s role in the transition away from fossil fuels. Between 2000 and 2010, policymakers heralded a coming nuclear renaissance, predicting that nuclear power would be an essential component of the nation’s future energy mix. The Energy Act of 2005, passed amid rising oil prices and grim forecasts about climate change, included a range of financial incentives to encourage the private sector to build new reactors, and by early 2009, license applications for twenty-six new reactors had been filed with the NRC.11 Both John McCain and Barack Obama endorsed the expansion of nuclear power during their 2008 presidential campaigns, and in 2010, President Obama announced an $8 billion loan guarantee for the construction of a nuclear power plant in Georgia, the first new reactor to be built in close to three decades. Carol Browner of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy said that the Georgia reactors were “just the first of what we hope will be many new nuclear projects.”12

  Yet as of this writing, the vaunted nuclear renaissance has yet to materialize. While five new reactors are under construction, thirty-three aging reactors have been decommissioned.13 Three Mile Island is scheduled to close in 2019. What happened? Energy analysts cite several hindrances, including a lack of production capacity, high capital costs, and still-unresolved questions about nuclear waste disposal and reactor safety, questions brought into terrifying relief by the Fukushima-Daiichi accident in 2011.14 But the most powerful deterrent has been the recent boom in shale oil and natural gas, as the fossil fuel industry develops more invasive methods of resource extraction. From the bitumen (heavy crude oil) of the Alberta tar sands and deep-water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Colorado and mountaintop removal in Appalachia, the goal is to penetrate ever more deeply beneath the earth’s surface in willful defiance of earlier predictions that the oil supply is peaking and that petrocapitalism is on borrowed time. In this light, the command “drill, baby, drill” can be read as a manic defense. The cumulative result is what Naomi Klein has described as an “upping of the ante” as the industry moves from conventional fossil fuel sources to ever more dangerous, dirty versions, ushering in what Stephanie LeMenager has described as the age of “tough oil.”15

  At the time of this writing, then, investors appear more interested in shale oil and natural gas, while some of the most outspoken proponents of nuclear power are environmentalists, some of whom cut their political teeth on antinuclear organizing in the 1970s but who have since become convinced that nuclear power will be essential in the coming battle against catastrophic climate change. These include Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand, environmental writers Mark Lynas, Michael Shellenberger and Gwyneth Cravens, and figures like climatologist James Hansen and futurist James Lovelock, who in the 1960s advanced the Gaia hypothesis, which sees the earth as a self-regulating, homeostatic system. The feature-length documentary film Pandora’s Promise, released in 2013, stakes out this pronuclear, environmentalist position. In the film, one environmentalist after another describes how through the careful acquisition of knowledge, an early opposition to nuclear power gradually gave way to a conviction that the direness of the climate change threat meant that nothing—including nuclear energy—should be taken off the table. The power of the film resides in observing thoughtful people as they puzzle through a problem and arrive at different place from where they began. Simply put, there is something fascinating about watching a smart person change his or her mind.

  And yet the film’s “greening” of nuclear power is not new. It harks back to nuclear power’s early Cold War origins, both when it speculates that a new generation of reactors can transform the quality of life in the global South and when it aligns radiation with both nature and healing. One scene shows an older man at a beach in Brazil that has naturally high radiation levels that help him with his body pains. And the film’s basic premise is that public irrationality is the single largest obstacle to any nuclear revival. The film opens with shots of environmental writer Mark Lynas watching television news coverage of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster and telling himself to mobilize his internal resources to stave off panic—an injunction to viewers to “keep their heads.” And if there are any villains, it is those activists who remain wedded to a paranoid antinuclear position. They are steadily ridiculed throughout the film.16

  This turn to nuclear power as a remedy for runaway climate change is laden with irony. For one thing, the nuclear industry, like everything else, will be subjected to new pressures as a result of harsher climactic conditions. Reactors require large amounts of water for cooling, made ever more challenging in an age of megadroughts and water scarcity. And extreme heat places strai
n on reactors. During the European heat wave of 2003, nuclear plants throughout the continent were shut down, and France lost roughly a reactor year of power generation.17 But the deeper historical irony is that it was the advent of atomic power that anticipated the core contradiction of contemporary petrocapitalism, namely, that the energy regimes we rely on to reproduce certain modes of living in the short term can set in motion processes that threaten to radically transform those same modes over the long term. The rise of civilian nuclear power in the 1950s facilitated the birth of a high-energy society, but unresolved questions about radiological safety raised the possibility that a planetary and somatic price might be paid down the generational line. And the figure of the irradiated body that first surfaced during the radiation scare anticipated our own chemical embodiment in the twenty-first century. Every person who has lived in the United States since 1951 has been exposed not only to radioactive fallout, but to a host of synthetic and petroindustrial chemicals, the vast majority of which have never been tested by the EPA. Styrene, ethyl phenol, toluene, polychlorinated biphenyls, mercury, and phthalates: these are all commonly found in human fat, blood, semen, urine, placental tissue, amniotic fluid, and breast milk. As historian Michelle Murphy puts it, “In the twenty first century, humans are chemically transformed beings.”18 While the fear of nuclear catastrophe has been largely—though not entirely—supplanted by the fear of runaway climate change, it was the atomic age that prefigured petrocapitalism’s contemporary status as an unregulated experiment on both a geoplanetary and a bodily scale. When viewed through the lens of the commingled histories of the atomic age and the ecological age, the turn to nuclear power as a remedy for catastrophic climate change looks less like a viable solution and more like a Faustian choice between one form of intergenerational poison and another.

  Technological fixes are no substitute for politics. So what kind of politics will this vast geoplanetary experiment require in the twenty-first century? Three Mile Island provides a cautionary tale. Righteous anger over the contamination of landscapes and bodies will not be enough; there is no pristine community or chemically pure body to return to. The oceanographers and earth scientists who first monitored radioactive fallout in the late 1940s discovered that there is no baseline to fall back on. If the only goal is the removal of a contamination threat from any single community, the threat will simply be outsourced somewhere else, where environmental hazards often join class and race as indices of vulnerability. And while modern environmentalism’s turn to temporal questions is profound, it also will not be enough. There are multiple forms of violence bearing down on the most vulnerable populations in the here and now. For many communities both within the United States and throughout the globe, the extinction threat is neither new nor theoretical. The emergency that environmentalists project onto the future is already well underway for many, not just because of polluted air and toxic water, but also because of all that is knitted together with them: militarization and neoimperialism, racism and the carceral state, neoliberal labor regimes, and the ever-widening chasm between the one percent and the rest. Nor can it be assumed that the charge of intergenerational harm is always or necessarily aligned with social justice. One need only look at the advocates of economic austerity, who claim that belts must be tightened to protect future generations, to see that this charge cuts both ways. How can we sound the alarm over future harm while attending to the systemic violence bearing down on precarious lives in the present? Finding the answer will entail a collective repossession of the debt that was at once mined and repudiated at Three Mile Island: that of an ethically oriented, historically grounded, democratic socialist left.

  In 1976, when I was six years old, Stevie Wonder sang that his devotion to his beloved would always be there, just as surely as “the rosebuds know to bloom in early May” and “the seasons know exactly when to change.” Four decades on, I have to ask: Do the rosebuds still know when to bloom? Do the seasons still know when to change? I wonder what future winters and springs will bring, and whether they will resemble those that came before, or whether they will take new forms that I do not recognize. Writer Andrew Solomon once observed that there is “no such thing as reproduction,” by which he means that parents cannot replicate themselves in their offspring.19 This has always been true. But the ecological age is marked above all by a new awareness that reproduction’s predictive logic—its circles and cycles, its recurrences and repetitions, its rhythms and rhymes, its eternal returns—no longer applies to our world.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  In additions to the abbreviations used in the text, the following abbreviations are used in the notes.

  DCASC

  Dickinson College Archive and Special Collections

  DT

  Dick Thornburgh Papers

  JCPL

  Jimmy Carter Presidential Library

  LMOHI

  Lonna Malmsheimer Oral History Interviews

  NAII

  National Archives II

  SCPC

  Swarthmore College Peace Collection

  SHSM

  State Historical Society of Missouri

  TMIA

  Three Mile Island Alert Papers

  TMIC

  Three Mile Island Collection

  UPSC

  University of Pittsburgh Special Collections

  PREFACE

  1. Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Throughout this book, I use the terms accident, crisis, partial meltdown, or near-meltdown interchangeably to describe what occurred inside the Three Mile Island reactor in the spring of 1979. I have carefully considered my choice of terminology, having discovered in the course of my research that such choices mattered a great deal at the time: utility company spokespeople at first described what happened at the plant as an “incident,” while antinuclear activists would later describe it as a “catastrophe,” terms that advanced two divergent interpretations of what had occurred and indexed the considerable contestation surrounding the events in question. My choice to go with the seemingly neutral term accident invariably runs certain risks—either of minimizing the seriousness of what happened inside the containment building or of tacitly endorsing the industry’s own claim that accidents are rare aberrations that affirm the safety, reliability, and predictability of reactors during ostensibly normal operations. However, in the pages that follow, I attempt to use the term accident in the sense classically elaborated by Charles Perrow, who contends that within highly complex technological systems like nuclear power, accidents are not the exception, but rather the rule. See Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (New York: Basic, 1984).

  2. The authoritative study of the accident, one that provides a blow-by-blow account, is J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). While exhaustive in both its detailing of the accident and its explanation of its impact on commercial nuclear energy, the book does not explore the broader cultural and political implications of the partial meltdown. My analysis also relies heavily on the official report of the Kemeny Commission. See John Kemeny, Accident at Three Mile Island: The Need for Change, the Legacy of TMI (Oxford: Pergamon, 1979).

  3. On the place of the bombings in the history of oceanography, earth sciences, and modern environmentalism, see Jacob Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War: Disciples of Marine Science (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); Hamblin, Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); and Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Joseph Masco, “Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis,” Social Studies of Science 40, no. 1 (February 2010): 7–40. The debate over how to best periodize the Anthropoc
ene is extensive and evolving quickly. Atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen first popularized the term in 2002. See Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (January 3, 2002): 415, 23. For a useful recent overview of the debate, see Simon L. Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (March 12, 2015): 171–180; and a subsequent response, Dana Luciano, “The Inhuman Anthropocene,” Avidly: The Los Angeles Review of Books (March 22, 2015), http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2015/03/22/the-inhuman-anthropocene/. On how the concept of the Anthropocene undermines the distinction between human and natural histories, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222. Jedediah Purdy situates the contemporary debate about the Anthropocene within a longer history of the American environmental imagination. See Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Roy Scranton offers up a grimmer view of our current predicament in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (San Francisco: City Lights, 2015). Recently, scholars have taken aim at the Anthropocene for its universalist presumptions and in particular its totalizing claim that humanity writ large is to blame for the climate crisis. In this vein, Jason Moore proposes the alternative term capitalocene in Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015). See also Andreas Malm, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (April 1, 2014): 62–69; and Malm, “The Anthropocene Myth,” Jacobinmag.com, March 30, 2015, www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/. Donna Haraway proposes the “Chthulucene” in lieu of the Anthropocene as a way to designate an epoch shaped by human and nonhuman interaction. See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).