J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves tested the plutonium bomb, code-named Trinity, at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. It was the precursor of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. They did not have to test the uranium bomb, dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, because there was no doubt that it would work. Later, the U.S. government would list the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bomb blasts as “tests,” which, in a ghoulish sense, they were, especially since they were not needed to end the war. Such “tests” would continue.
The tests in the Pacific Ocean were part of a Cold War arms race with the Soviets. Eisenhower gave his “Atoms for Peace” speech at the United Nations on December 8, 1953, which was pure propaganda. Uranium mining, milling, processing, and enrichment were to be expanded, but the difficulty lay in how to sell it to the American people. In short, they put a smiley face on all things nuclear. This was at a time when the first “civilian” atomic reactor had not yet fired up in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, under the direction of Hyman Rickover. Most of the uranium in this country had been feeding the arms race for years, and even decades, before the commercial industry significantly entered the picture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then the uranium supply started to shift over to fuel those reactors.
Castle Bravo was the code name for the first of a series of hydrogen bomb tests that the United States carried out at locations such as the Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. The Bravo test did not proceed as planned. One of the bomb’s designers, Edward Teller, and other scientists miscalculated the yield of this explosion. They expected a five-megaton blast. Instead, there was a fifteen-megaton blast. It is still the worst incident of radiological contamination in the history of U.S. nuclear weapons testing. A Japanese tuna-fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon #5, was unfortunately not very far away. It was initially outside the zone that had been declared off-limits, but later the United States redrew the zone. The boat was well within danger. Over time, around half of the crew of twenty-three died of their radiation exposures. One of the deaths occurred within a matter of months, and it led to an antinuclear groundswell in Japan, including a petition drive with tens of millions of signatures protesting against atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb tests. A million signatures came from the Hiroshima area alone. The United States was concerned. There were fears that even the Soviet Union or Communist China could take advantage of the situation, in a bid to win the loyalty of postwar Japan.
A part of the U.S. response to shore up the Atoms for Peace campaign was to deploy the CIA in Japan. Lewis Strauss, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and his agency took a lead role in downplaying the significance of the radioactive seafood contamination in Japan. Matsutaro Shoriki, a former “Class A” war criminal suspect and then media mogul known as Japan’s Citizen Kane, controlled one of the largest newspapers and one of the largest television stations in Japan. He had high ambitions for political office and helped found the Liberal Democratic Party, which went on to rule Japan for half a century. In 2006, it was found that he had been working with the CIA. One of his assignments was to sell nuclear power to the Japanese people, and he did it with a passion. Among the first companies to take advantage of the situation was a company Shoriki worked for. General Dynamics had entered the nuclear business early, but General Electric was not far behind.
And so Japan’s infamous “nuclear village” with its Plutonium Boy mascot was born. A complex of the nuclear power industry, electric utility companies, political leaders, government promotional and regulatory agencies, public relations firms, academics, labor unions, and local officials, it grew over time into one of the most powerful political and economic forces in Japan. Through well-funded propaganda campaigns often targeted at children, it maintained the “nuclear safety myth” until it was forever shattered by the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe.
There have been a total of about 140 commercial atomic reactors in the United States, 100 of which are still running. There are also more than twenty reactors in Canada. Atomic Japan is third only to the United States and France with its fifty-eight reactors. (Japan had fifty-four commercial reactors, before the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe wrecked four of them.) Japan also has a problem-plagued experimental fast-breeder reactor, Monju, named after the bodhisattva Manjusri in an attempt to win pro-nuclear favor from Fukui Prefecture’s Buddhists. Fukui alone has a remarkable number of reactors—fourteen on a short stretch of coastline, the most of any prefecture in Japan. A remarkable testament to the antinuclear movement and people of Japan is that only two reactors have been restarted since the country’s nuclear plants were taken offline for safety checks and upgrades, refueling, and/or maintenance repairs after the beginning of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, and those—at Oi, in Fukui—only for a limited time. Meanwhile, there are numerous reactors in the United States that are vulnerable to near-term, permanent shutdown. We need to shut the reactors down before they melt down.
The history of nuclear accidents in the United States and Japan demonstrates some remarkable parallels.
Worker overexposure: In 1981, three hundred workers were exposed to excessive levels of radiation after a fuel rod ruptured at the Tsuruga Nuclear Power Plant in Fukui Prefecture. This was reminiscent of an incident in the 1970s when a mixed-oxide plutonium (MOX) fuel rod broke at an experimental reactor at Big Rock Point in Michigan, releasing a large quantity of hazardous radioactivity. A similar incident occurred in 2009 at one of the largest nuclear power plants in North America—the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station on the Great Lakes in Canada. Hundreds of workers wearing no respiratory protection were exposed to alpha-particle radiation when they were grinding through contaminated pipes. There are currently nine reactors on the site, and its owner, Ontario Power Generation, is also proposing to place a “low- to intermediate-level” radioactive waste dump for all of Ontario’s twenty reactors less than a mile from Lake Huron. In addition, half a dozen nearby communities, mostly populated by Bruce workers, have volunteered to host a high-level radioactive waste dump for all of Canada. These proposals endanger the Great Lakes, which contain 20 percent of the world’s surface freshwater, providing drinking water to 40 million people in North America.
Sodium fires: Monju suffered a major fire in 1995. There was widespread public outrage when it emerged that the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, the semigovernmental agency then running Monju, had tried to cover up the extent of the accident and damage. The cover-up included falsifying reports and editing videotape taken immediately after the accident, as well as issuing a gag order on employees. Fermi Unit 1 in Monroe County, Michigan, famous for the partial meltdown of its reactor core on October 5, 1966, also suffered a sodium fire, as well as tritium leaks, in 2008. What is remarkable is that it had permanently shut down in 1972. These Fermi 1 accidents were decommissioning accidents. The meltdown was covered up for nearly a decade until the publication of John G. Fuller’s book We Almost Lost Detroit.