Citizen Science #23 by Jamie Zvirzdin
Energy Demystified: Assessing Real, Perceived Risks of Nuclear Energy
I struggled to write this month’s article on nuclear energy, and here’s why: I don’t like risk. Any risk. But the truth is this: To live is to risk. We can absolutely mitigate danger, harm or loss whenever possible, but we cannot eradicate risk. And to assess the risk of nuclear energy accurately, we must recognize the difference between perceived risk and actual risk, without repeating the mistakes of the past.
I clearly remember stories of how, when and why people have been hurt. Like any good human who wants our species to survive, I take great pains to avoid making those same mistakes. I remember learning in school how the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In June 2023, when I visited the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center with my family, I stood frozen before the Enola Gay, the Boeing bomber aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb. I stopped and stared at this grim symbol of what humans are capable of unleashing. How can we safely and productively harness nuclear energy when this is what we did with it?
We even continued testing bombs after the war was over, causing additional environmental damage and human suffering. When my husband and I lived in the Marshall Islands, from 2011 to 2013, I heard firsthand the story of my friend Katner Tima, who was 10 years old when the United States conducted the Castle Bravo nuclear test on Bikini Atoll. The swimming suit we flippantly call “the bikini” was named after the explosion reaction of this bomb, which was detonated on March 1, 1954. I helped Tima publish his story, in which he described how the sun seemed to rise in the west that day, the roar from the explosion was unlike anything he’d ever heard, and the wind, which normally blows from the east, made the coconut trees blow backward.
