Too High A Price

In March, 1979, there was a partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was living in New York City at the time -- much closer to Pennsylvania than I wanted to be. I chewed my fingernails to the quick, listening to the news as thousands of people were evacuated. In May, I went with a group of people to march in front of the White House. In our youthful ignorance, we hoped our presence in Washington D.C. would help convince President Carter to rethink U.S. energy policy. There was a bit of marching, but mainly, we waited around, hoping that Jimmy Carter would come out to talk to us. He didn't. We yawned and stretched and traded naive platitudes, waiting to hear speeches by Bella Abzug and Jerry Brown. We carried placards reading No More Harrisburgs! No More Hiroshimas!

In late April, 1986, I was living in Sendai, Japan. One morning, I woke up to hear there had been a fire at a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, the USSR. It was a beautiful spring day and the late cherry blossoms were still in full flower. Walking with friends through the park, I could hardly believe that halfway around the world, people were being evacuated by the tens of thousands and fire-fighters were sacrificing their lives in a terrible losing battle.

One of my friends at the time was Li, a Chinese PhD student at Sendai's Tohoku University. Li was an engineer who hoped to design nuclear power plants some day. He laughed at my exclamations of dismay when I learned this. "They are designed to be safe!" he assured me. "Only the brightest, most skillful people are chosen for this occupation."

Li was one of the most capable people I've ever known. He was widely read and knew all sorts of things I didn't. He could make great meals from the fewest possible ingredients, his Japanese was formidable, and he was amazingly coordinated. Once, he'd offered to lend another friend a bicycle so that the three of us could cycle around Sendai together. I assumed he'd have to make two trips until I spotted him cycling down the narrow street in front of my apartment, one arm casually balancing another bicycle on his shoulder. When I expressed surprise that he could do this, he blinked and frowned. "You mean you can't?"

Li's confidence was infectious. If a smart guy like him was designing nuclear power plants, I couldn't help think they had to be safe.

Shortly after this, the English school where I taught organized a debate. All of us teachers were strongly encouraged to take part. As a few of our students were nuclear engineers, someone suggested that the safety issues of nuclear power plants would be a good debate topic. One brave man volunteered to argue the 'for' side; I took the 'against'.

This was before the internet was widely used, and I didn't have much to go on. I remembered a handful of details about Three Mile Island -- they went into my speech. I subscribed to the overseas Guardian and they had done a good article on Chernobyl; much of that got dumbed down and written into my debate as well, along with a very good letter to the editor about the Windscale nuclear accident in the U.K., back in 1957. My debate partner knew 99.9% more than I did about nuclear energy, but of course my English was better and I have missionaries in my background -- missionaries who liked rhetoric. I won the debate.

My opponent took it well. He had argued fervently that the design of Chernobyl was old and outdated, that a different type of core was used in Japan, making meltdowns virtually impossible. He insisted that nuclear power was much cheaper and safer than fossil fuel-based energy sources, and much better than iffy new technologies such as solar energy or wind turbines. He made good points, but he got stuck on what to do with spent nuclear fuel; he had good answers, but in the heat of the moment, he could not produce them. I, on the other hand, was in great form that day. When I finished my speech with the line, "It's too high a price," there was a good round of applause and I knew I'd hit pay dirt. "You are a good talker!" my opponent conceded graciously as we shook hands afterwards.

It was obvious that he knew way more than I did, and deep inside, I knew I'd won by default -- that it would have been quite a different story if we'd had the debate in Japanese, not English. But I was still proud of my victory.

I was living with my family in Abiko, Chiba Prefecture, when the Tokaimura nuclear accident occurred on September 30, 1999. On my way home from work in Tokyo, I noticed that the trains were backed up. Fellow passengers began to mutter that someone must have committed suicide by jumping onto the tracks. When we got to the station, we heard the news: that untrained workers had unwittingly caused a chain reaction at a small uranium reprocessing facility in nearby Ibaraki Prefecture. We were encouraged to go straight home and close doors and windows -- but many of us had already been out all day.

When I first heard the news about the devastating earthquake and tsunami, I never once thought about Fukushima's nuclear power plant. Quite honestly, I had forgotten it was there, even though I remember seeing it every time I took the train to Fukushima. I remember driving past it when I was four months pregnant with my youngest daughter too.

When I heard that there were some concerns that the earthquake had damaged the reactors, I felt a twinge of fear, but I tried to reassure myself. Smarter, better educated people than I had said nuclear power was safe. That it was wiser to stick with a proven energy source than to develop new ones. They had said this so forcefully, with so much confidence and obvious conviction, that part of me believed it had to be so. A bigger part believed that nuclear energy was dangerous, short-sighted, and not in the best interests of humanity, but maybe that prejudice was inspired by my own paranoia and lack of real knowledge.

It turns out that I was right. And I wish to God I wasn't.