‘Atoms for Peace’ Leaves Core Issues Unresolved

The phrase “atoms for peace” is as old as the Nuclear Age itself, so there’s something almost antique about the title of the latest installment of “The New Explorers” series--”Atoms for Peace.” Host-reporter Bill Kurtis likes to make heroes of scientists, and he aims to do that with the researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory in southeast Idaho.

Argonne’s scientists tell Kurtis they have solved the two key problems of nuclear power: reactor safety and radioactive waste storage. They talk about it with passionate fervor--and, given the political and economic realities stacked against them, it’s understandable. Under the guidance of physicist Walter Zinn, who developed the first breeder reactor in 1951, the Argonne facility became the home of nonmilitary nuclear uses.

Zinn and his colleagues saw breeder reactors, producing a steady stream of plutonium from uranium reactions, as the key to a limitless supply of electrical energy. But in one of many wrinkles in the complex political history of the Nuclear Age, Adm. Hyman Rickover’s nuclear-based submarine project in the 1950s settled on water-cooled nuclear reactors, not breeders, to power ships.

Kurtis rightly observes that Rickover’s highly publicized project convinced commercial energy ventures on the water-cooled model, starting a wave of nuclear power plants. However, between the huge waste deposits left by the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (where U.S. nuclear bombs were produced) and the waste and legacy of accidents and disasters left by power plants, public support for anything nuclear largely dried up by the mid-1980s.

Argonne is depicted here as the little, noble project that could, and that the press ignored. The program says that one test of the plant’s safety system worked, but as any scientist knows, one test is not enough. And claims that the reprocessed waste can be reused in the reactor until it is ash sound promising, but leave unanswered questions such as where the ash is deposited.

With Argonne’s 1993 de-funding, they’re still unanswered. Besides, the Cold War’s demise, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were public relations disasters that even the most passionate scientists couldn’t combat.

* “Atoms for Peace” airs at 8 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.