a ray of hope, a shining light
It’s golden hour and the last sunlight is drenching the trees around our little treehouse. I just ran to the shops and on the way, had an overwhelming urge to listen to what is maybe the Alan Parsons Project’s weirdest song, certainly one that has stayed with me these forty years: Ammonia Avenue. Eric Woolfson wrote it after visiting the ICI petrochemical plant in Billingham, in the UK. It’s a hymn to science and progress, of sorts: “And who are we to criticize or scorn the things they do?” It might have been reading Lydia Kiesling’s excellent Mobility that brought it to mind, or driving past enormous industrial facilities dropping C back at college. But it was probably gazing into the heart of a nuclear reactor.
It’s a small General Atomics training reactor, the only one in the world operated by undergraduates. In the chemistry lobby where we met for a tour there is a small museum exhibit. This includes one of the hunting decoy ducks removed from the cooling pond in 2012 because the NRC found them unprofessional (“I tend to agree,” said our guide) and a chipped piece of orange Fiestaware beside the clicking Geiger counter it was setting off.
The reactor itself is in a small brick building behind the chemistry building. It looks like a garage. You enter via a hallway with a glass window looking into the reactor room, which looks like a weirdly industrial small indoor swimming pool. In the control room we met the operators on duty. There are the deadly serious panels from the 60s and 90s and 2020s tracking the reactor behavior, and there are the Homer Simpson mousepads and the joke tchotchkes like a switch labeled “Fission” and “Fusion.” Our tour guides and the operators all had jewel colored hair and facial piercings and badges with their pronouns beside the dosimeters above their hearts.
In the reactor hall we leaned on the railings and gazed thirty feet into the aluminium-lined pool. Long control rods descend into a squat dark cylinder with dozens of narrower cylinders running through it like wires through a cable: the graphite containment, the uranium fuel rods. The core. It’s cooled by a closed loop of water that runs into a heat exchanger where city water takes away the excess heat. If the system lost electricity, the control rods of boron silicate, a neutron poison, would drop into the core via gravity and stop the reaction. That’s the theory, anyway. The operators can also drop the control rods by hitting the big red SCRAM button.
Our tour guide turned off the lights and we saw a miracle, Cherenkov radiation, generated by neutrons moving faster than the speed of light in water and creating a visual equivalent to a sonic boom. It is the most beautiful blue you can possibly imagine, like Yves Klein blue but made of light. It’s like gazing into the unknowable quantum essence of the universe. And then the operators hit the scram button and the core lost criticality and the blue faded away.
That night I read Serhii Plokhy’s Atoms and Ashes, a followup to his excellent Chernobyl that looks at all six of the major nuclear accidents and their causes. I’m a Gen Xer still astonished to have outlived the Soviet Union. I grew up almost equally terrified of atoms for war and for peace. But the idea of powering our cities with magical hot rocks is arguably no worse than doing so with necromantically resurrected dead dinosaurs. How do you weigh six major atomic catastrophes against the ongoing invisible disaster of climate change? How do you reconcile all of that with the knowledge that nearly everyone who got us into this predicament was acting in good faith? I honestly have no idea.
