Exactly 39 years ago, on April 26, 1986, the world awoke to a nuclear horror. But those were the days of the old Soviet Union where secrecy reigned, so it took some time for the world to realise that the unthinkable had happened at a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, which was then under Soviet control.
An explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant spread a radioactive cloud over large parts of the Soviet Union, now the territories of Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Nearly 8.4 million people in the three countries were exposed to high doses of radiation.
The world remembers this dark chapter on the International Chernobyl Disaster Remembrance Day on April 26 every year. On December 8, 2016, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution designating April 26 as International Chernobyl Disaster Remembrance Day. In its resolution, the General Assembly recognised that decades after the disaster there remain persistent serious long-term consequences and that the affected communities and territories are experiencing continuing related needs.
The UN launched the International Chernobyl Research and Information Network (ICRIN) to provide support to international, national and public programs targeted at the sustainable development of these territories, in 2009.
Chernobyl, which looms closer than ever in the public consciousness due to HBO’s hit series of the same name which pierced through the incident in devastating detail, is now in an even more perilous state. It is now located in the middle of a war zone, prone to drone attacks. In fact, a drone armed with a warhead hit the protective outer shell of the nuclear plant in March, punching a hole in the structure and briefly starting a fire. Apart from Chernobyl, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is Europe’s biggest, has occasionally been hit by drones during the war without causing any significant damage.
Today, in spite of the horrors experienced in the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima plants, nuclear power is literally back on the grid as it is actually more environmentally-friendly than coal and fossil fuel. Nuclear capacity is forecast to grow from 395 GW in 2024 to 494 GW by 2035, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company. While nuclear power accounted for around nine percent of global electricity generation, countries with aging reactors have pursued lifetime extensions, while others have aggressively expanded their nuclear fleets, especially in Asia. This is primarily because scientists have scaled them down and made them much safer.
The Small Modular Reactor (SMR) has become a cause célèbre in the energy world, with many countries lining up to order them. Sri Lanka too has received offers from some countries to adopt this technology and a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) too visited the island to explore these and other issues such as the medical use of nuclear substances. But at more than US$ 1 billion per SMR, it is definitely not affordable for most countries.
Coincidentally, the countries with the most number of operational nuclear power plants happen to be the five Declared Nuclear Powers, which is another metric altogether. There are at least four other nuclear-armed countries that do not really want to make a song and dance about it as it goes against the principles of the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The declared nuclear powers alone have around 12,000 or so active nuclear warheads which can destroy the Earth and wipe out life several times over.
Unfortunately, only a thin line separates ‘peaceful’ nuclear research and military nuclear research, especially if Uranium enrichment is included. It is no secret that many Global South countries are trying to develop nuclear weapons in the context of rising geopolitical tensions. In this respect, we hope the current talks between Iran and the US on the former’s nuclear development program will bear fruit, with the caveat that Iran should be permitted to conduct nuclear energy research subject to IAEA inspections and audits, with full 24 hour CCTV monitoring.
The idea that nuclear weapons somehow assure peace among nations (‘nuclear deterrence’) is a misleading one as we are sitting on an unstable geopolitical volcano. When one nuclear weapon is unleashed by a given country, there is no telling when it will stop. Nuclear warfare will actually lead to what is called “Mutually Assured Destruction”, ironically shortened to MAD.
After all, Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. This is an acknowledgement that human civilisation as we know it will end with a nuclear war and the long Nuclear Winter that follows.
Yet, nuclear power may save us from Armageddon in another way – unlimited energy, just the way the Sun produces it. This is called Nuclear Fusion – the process by which two light atomic nuclei combine to form a single heavier one while releasing massive amounts of energy. The nuclear reaction that most experimental nuclear fusion reactors aim to make viable is the fusion of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium (with a nucleus of one proton and one neutron) and tritium (one proton and two neutrons). Part of what makes fusion such a promising source of energy is the fact that deuterium is easily extracted from ordinary seawater. The IAEA estimates that enough deuterium can be extracted from one litre of water to provide as much energy as the combustion of 300 litres of oil. Scientists are getting closer to the holy grail of nuclear fusion every passing day. If we can replicate the power of the Sun right here on Earth, we would have come full circle.
