A Safer Place for the Next Chernobyl

The lady was of Russian descent and had returned to my lung clinic seeking advice about a small nodule in her chest that we had been keeping an eye on for the last year. She used to smoke menthols so the threat of lung cancer colored our conversation with a series of what ifs. The nodule had grown on the most recent CT scan. I recommended a biopsy, but I came to expect that she would resist. 

One of the more interesting side effects of practicing medicine for a while is recognizing when doctor think creeps into my everyday approach to problem solving. Before any diagnostic is obtained or any procedure is offered, physicians engage in a ritual of obtaining consent from the patient for what’s proposed. This entails explaining the reason the intervention is being offered, the benefits of the information obtained from the interrogation, but also the risks. Part of the ritual that often gets short shrift is offering alternatives, one of which, doing nothing, appeals to those in denial, those who’ve had enough interventions and don’t want any more (usually the terminally ill), and those who think the risks aren’t worth it. My patient initially chose to do nothing, but I was able to convince her to at least continue monitoring the lesion with subsequent CT scans. 

While at work this past weekend, one of my trainees brought in some cupcakes to celebrate the end of internship. I spotted the box from across the room. There was a red velvet cupcake with a vanilla frost that swirled heavenward. Another one was topped decadently with an Oreo cookie as if this was the last week humanity had left on Earth. But the one that called to me most was a moist Nutella cupcake, topped with hazelnuts and a raspberry so red it might have glowed in the dark. It had me on speed dial. I hovered over the box and mulled over the possibility of choosing one, but immediately my mind went into RBA mode: risks, benefits, alternatives. 

The risks of devouring the Nutella dream were obvious. Twenty years from now I would look back at this moment and declare it to be the instant my pancreas revolted and I got diabetes. There was the obvious psychological downside, too. If I indulged now, I reasoned, I would only be cowering to that sweet toothed demon inside of me. The benefit of devouring the cupcake would be nothing less than dopamine-mediated bliss, albeit a short-lived gustatory indulgence quickly succeeded by an unhealthy spasm of regret. I had one alternative. I could walk away. This choice, abstinence, would in turn birth two new possibilities. I would pat myself on the back and forget about the cupcake, suppressing the experience for eternity. Or I would reward my denial with a consolation prize: a small bit of dark chocolate sitting in the refrigerator at home to be used for similar small victories over my pleasure-seeking neural pathways. 

I don’t know where in Russia my patient was from. I thought about her provincial origin only because I had recently watched the HBO drama Chernobyl. It faithfully recreates the terrible disaster that befell the workers and community of Pripyat, Ukraine one fateful night in 1986. My patient’s risk of lung cancer may have been higher if she had lived within a certain radius of the disaster, but I had forgotten to ask her about this.  

The series was a mesmerizing reproduction of the foibles of creating nuclear energy. The truth of how many people died as a result of bad engineering and human error is hard to say, but one of the highest estimates that I’ve seen numbers in the thousands. The 3 mile island disaster in Pennsylvania in 1979 had already soured the American public’s mood for nuclear energy, but it is worth noting that about 20% of the energy produced in this country today still is churned out by atomic plants. And it is worth stating in these climate calamity days when every new report about the halving of the world’s species as a result of human activity, the rising of surface and sea temperatures, and the resultant shortening of human life spans, that there is an advanced technology that produces energy without churning carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the air. Nuclear energy currently accounts for 60% of the emission-free energy that the US produces. 

But with each new nuclear disaster, Fukushima being the latest, the public and by extension those in elected office, become leerier of nuclear energy. Why is public sentiment so disproportionate against nuclear when oil and gas have caused and will continue to cause more deaths (of all flora and fauna, Homo sapiens included) than nuclear ever has? France, which produces 75% of its energy from nuclear, is the world’s largest net exporter of energy, reaping in 3 billion euros yearly. That’s a strong economic argument for why we should reconsider nuclear in this country. 

However, people will always remember the disasters, not merely for the number of lives lost and the ensuing environmental catastrophe, but because of long-standing fears and negative stigma associated with nuclear energy. We live in an age now that requires us to reexamine the merits of all non-carbon based fuel sources. 

Is there a safe place to produce nuclear energy? This question hits at the heart of public discomfort with this fuel source. If we could find a place to continue evolving nuclear technology without threat to flora and fauna, perhaps we could more easily embrace it. Perhaps the moon is such a place. It seems far-fetched, but so was the idea of space tourism just ten years ago. Recently the International Space Station stated it would begin accepting private citizens. Space X and Blue Origin will make near space more accessible to private touring. As the cost of getting to the moon decreases, which I expect to decrease precipitously when we construct a moon elevator, industries will look to the moon as a source of minerals and possibly even water. Nuclear facilities on the far side of the moon would not only fuel moon colonies and industries, but the excess energy could be transported back to Earth. Toxic spent fuel could be discharged to the far reaches of the solar system via solar sails. And if a disaster were to occur, the absence of living things on the lunar surface would allay our fears. 

As someone who is deeply concerned by the harm our species has wrought on mothership Earth, I think we have to perform a risk/benefit/alternative analysis for all possible energy sources. We shouldn’t exclude nuclear because of past design-related and human error. Technologies need time to evolve. We have to acknowledge that the toll of fossil fuels far outweighs the risks of nuclear. Yes, we have to ramp up solar and wind too, which are the least harmful, but without significant government backing, these technologies remain vastly underutilized. Nobody wants another Chernobyl, Fukushima, or 3 Mile Island, but the reality of our fast-moving climate catastrophe driven by fuels that have far broader and deeper effects on all species requires us to reconsider where alternative energy sources should be produced.