Rehabilitating nuclear

Libya dominates the news agenda as the fight for democracy continues on Europe’s doorstep. Japan, meanwhile, struggles with the aftermath of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that killed 11,000 people and left thousands without shelter. The aspect that piques the interest of journalists in Britain is the nuclear crisis concerning Japan's damaged reactors, with the environmental impact reaching our shores. Minute levels of radioactive iodine have been detected in Scotland, which is believed to have originated at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The radioactivity does not pose a threat to human health, but it is an invisible danger, and this heightens public fear and uncertainty. Despite the exceptional nature of the earthquake and the outdated design of Fukushima, there has been a nuclear power backlash outside of Japan, even where the circumstances that lead to this situation could not be replicated. In Germany for example, 200,000 people in four major cities demonstrated against nuclear power. President Merkel's decision to temporarily shut down 7 plants for precautionary inspection was not enough to ease concerns, with the Green Party gaining a conservative stronghold in recent local elections.

The challenge of rehabiliating nuclear power's image, damaged as it is, is not unprecedented. The nuclear age began with the detonation of two nuclear bombs over Japan in 1945; the first demonstration of nuclear power was the wholesale destruction of cities. Hiroshima and then Nagasaki were gutted by firestorms, and their inhabitants killed or scarred by intense thermal radiation, images of which were used for American propaganda. Ten years later, nuclear technology was applied for a peaceful: generating electricity for people’s homes. However, its destructive connotations posed a public-relations problem for a company developing Cold War nuclear technlogies like the atomic submarine and the atomic powered airplane, such as General Dynamics, the US defence contractor. To address this problem they hired Swiss graphic designer Erik Nitsche to design their exhibit for the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955. Nitsche had to contend with the secrecy cloaking General Dynamic’s projects, so he created as the centrepiece of the exhibit a series of six international posters named ‘Atoms for peace’.

In his essay 'Erik Nitsche: The Reluctant Modernist', Steven Heller writes:
Each poster identified a particular aspect of General Dynamics’ research. The most well-known of the series, representing ‘hydrodynamics,’ was a painting of a nautilus shell with the artist’s conception of the Nautilus submarine shooting out of its chamber. It was an indelible logo in its day. Set against a gradated gray background, the shell was a virtual cornucopia of progress. The submarine was not seen as a killing machine, but rather the offspring of progress poised to help the world.

Nitsche translated 'Atoms for Peace' into six different languages: English, Russian, German, French, Hindi and Japanese. This can be seen as an important step in associating with nuclear power a sense of social progress that went beyond Cold War political differences. Nitsche included a biblical quote from Isaiah: "They shall beat swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." According to Heller, Isaiah’s testament stood dramatically, albeit ironically, as a backdrop to a model of the hull of the Nautilus submarine. So to explain away the irony of juxtaposing a message of peace with the world’s most powerful warship, Nitsche added a quotation from an Easter message given by Pope Pius XII to the effect that the Nautilus is at last putting nuclear force to the service and not the destruction of men.

During the next 5 years Nitsche would expand the 'Atoms for Peace' poster series with six more, followed by his 'Exploring the Universe' series and 11 posters for General Dynamic's subcompanies.

Times have changed since 1955, and the question of nuclear power's safety has less to do with Hiroshima than Sellafield, Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. The idea of a Dr Strangelove scenario occuring today is improbable, particularly as the US and Russia are no longer enemies and are reducing their nuclear arsenals, although some rouge states aspire to become nuclear states. For the nuclear plant accidents of the past people have long memories, and places that were once relatively obscure now evoke by their names alone their undesired nuclear heritage (even if, as is the case with Sellafield, the place name has been changed). Hopefully, Fukushima will not rank amongst these. However, addressing people's concerns about nuclear safety is a challenge to which governments will have to rise. As the Arab Spring protests push up the price of oil, the question of how we will meet our energy needs in the future in an affordable and sustainable way will be asked more frequently. Fossil fuels are also dirty. Renewable sources may be prohibitively expensive and unreliable for decades. It is likely that nuclear power will, at least in the short term, play a big part in achieving energy security.

In defence of Professor Cox

Writing in his news blog for The Telegraph, Brendan O’ Neill criticises Professor Brian Cox for espousing a “drab, down-to-earth belief that there isn’t much point to life” in his television series Wonders of the Universe. The idea of humanity as an “insignificant...cosmological accident” supposedly “chimes brilliantly with today’s rather downbeat view of humanity”. This charge is coupled with a similar criticism of Carl Sagan, for whom Cox expresses admiration in the latest episode ‘Falling’. According to O’ Neill “They see in the never-ending chasm of space, not worlds we should aspire to know and possibly conquer and colonise, but a big black challenge to the idea of human historic purpose.”

This is utter garbage.

In describing Einstein’s theory of gravity, and its incomplete nature, Cox speaks of the “beautiful place... on the border between the known and the unknown. That is the true wonder of the universe, there’s so much more left of it to explore.” This succinctly sums up Cox’s belief in the purpose of our existence and its trajectory. The question of our significance comes not from whether we are here by accident or design but how we meet our potential as intelligent beings. Our short existence and isolation on a cosmological scale should humble us, as well as promote the idea of how rare and precious our existence is, and the folly of damaging the planet that sustains our existence.

When Carl Sagan produced his television series Cosmos in 1980 he had cause to be downbeat about humanity. He expressed dismay for the Cold War arms race and the spectre of nuclear war that had brought global civilisation to “the edge of failure”. Even so he was optimistic that a fundamental change could occur to remove this threat, finding precedent for great social progress stretching back to the virtual abolition of slavery world-wide, and continuing today with increasing rights and freedoms for women. He summarised thus: “A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet.” It was for this reason that Sagan campaigned for the cameras of the Voyager 1 spacecraft to be pointed back towards earth, to take a picture of a pale blue dot from the edge of the solar system.

An objective criticism of Professor Cox and his series, albeit small, would perhaps be a tendency to portray prevailing theories, such as the heat death of the universe, as certainties. O’ Neill, however, seems more content to mock Cox’s appearance, including his “peverse....toothy grin” as “he tells us that one day the galaxy of Andromeda will collide with our own galaxy, creating a “beautiful collision of staaaars”, which, er, will bring about the heat death of our planet”, unwittingly revealing his own lack of scientific understanding in the process. His article is inaccurate and unfair, and firmly rooted in personal animosity, ignoring another explanation for the popularity of Professor Brian Cox like Carl Sagan before him: he’s intelligent, enthusiastic and a great communicator.