The amazing story of how a young Jimmy Carter helped avert a nuclear disaster

[Uncle Joe]

Feb 21, 2023

Rachel Maddow tells the story of a young Navy lieutenant from Georgia named Jimmy who played a key role in helping prevent a nuclear catastrophe in 1952.

[John1956PA]

1. We Americans who consider this event are proud of Lieutenant James E. Carter.

Last edited Sat Oct 5, 2024, 08:06 PM - Edit history (1)

The task was physically demanding and life-threatening. The after-effects included testing positive for radiation in his system for a few weeks.

As a side note, Mr. Carter remained in fine physical shape even after his presidency. At one point (I think during his presidency) he threw the opening pitch in a major league game. It was a fastball strike.

[NNadir]

2. While it is true that Jimmy Carter went into the core of the reactor, it is an huge exaggeration to say he "prevented...

...a catastrophe." He was one of hundreds of people who worked on the NTX reactor, and hardly a leader of the program.

There really wasn't a risk of a "catastrophe," and to say there was is simply to display no knowledge whatsoever of nuclear technology.

It is worth noting that Jimmy Carter was in proximity to two melted reactors, the other being Three Mile Island, this when he was President of the United States.

It should give "nuclear catastrophe" scare mongers pause for thought to say that Jimmy Carter has lived to be 100 years ago, and in fact, lived decades longer than all of his siblings, and both of his parents. This is not, surely, because of exposure to radiation and may in fact be in spite of it. The Carter family displayed a genetic disposition to pancreatic cancer, and it would seem that Jimmy won the genetic lottery. Probably his father and mother were both for the genetic mutation represented a dominant oncogene, as were three of his siblings, which statistically would have broken like this - not that it did - OO, Oo, Oo, oo, where the capital refers to the dominant gene and where Jimmy himself was oo.

I wrote about Carter's history with the clean up in this space sometime ago:

President Carter is among roughly 350,000 "liquidators" involved in nuclear reactor "clean ups."

In his interview, he did not claim to have saved the world.

This Stanford under graduate student's term paper describes Carter's experience there: Carter at Chalk River

A CNN piece around the time of Fukushima, when Carter was 86 years old, directly quoted the former President on this experience: Jimmy Carter's exposure to nuclear danger

"We were fairly well instructed then on what nuclear power was, but for about six months after that I had radioactivity in my urine," President Carter, now 86, told me during an interview for my new book in Plains in 2008. "They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now. It was in the early stages and they didn't know."

Despite the fears he had to overcome, Carter admits he was animated at the opportunity to put his top-secret training to use in the cleanup of the reactor, located along the Ottawa River northwest of Ottawa.

"It was a very exciting time for me when the Chalk River plant melted down," he continued in the same interview. "I was one of the few people in the world who had clearance to go into a nuclear power plant," he said.

"There were 23 of us and I was in charge. I took my crew up there on the train..."

..."It was the early 1950s ... I had only seconds that I could be in the reactor myself. We all went out on the tennis court, and they had an exact duplicate of the reactor on the tennis court. We would run out there with our wrenches and we'd check off so many bolts and nuts and they'd put them back on.

And finally when we went down into the reactor itself, which was extremely radioactive, then we would dash in there as quickly as we could and take off as many bolts as we could, the same bolts we had just been practicing on. Each time our men managed to remove a bolt or fitting from the core, the equivalent piece was removed on the mock-up..."

(Later President Carter, while President, would walk through the Three Mile Island Reactor while the situation was, excuse the pun, fluid, much to the consternation of the Secret Service.).

I mention this as an indication of how difficult it is to ascertain the "true numbers" associated with the exposure to radioactivity at Chernobyl. President Carter is the oldest of four siblings, and is the only one of them who is still alive. The other three, Ruth Carter Stapleton, Gloria Carter, and "Billy" Carter all died, Ruth in her 50's, from the same disease, pancreatic cancer.

As an advocate of nuclear energy, I could point to this anecdotal evidence about President Carter and make the specious claim that being exposed to a nuclear meltdown, two in Carter's case, the big bogeyman at Three Mile Island included, is a potential way to protect people with a clear familial history of pancreatic cancer, for them to avoid dying from the disease. This of course would be exceedingly misleading, since we really don't know what effect, if any, his participation in the clean ups had on his pancreas cells. It might be that is other three siblings inherited a different set of genes from their parents than he did.

On the other hand, if President Carter were to die at the age of 100, a nuclear opponent could easily claim that he would have lived to 110 if he hadn't cleaned up Chalk River and toured Three Mile Island while its core was melting. Some of them are indeed this stupid.

He went into the reactor core for a short time and loosened a few bolts. So did the people in his command, and many others.

We don't serve ourselves by Trumpian scale exaggerations. Embracing the truth is a better idea.

For the record, given that we are currently living with extreme global heating, which is killing the entire planet, I have argued and will continue to argue that nuclear energy is the last best hope we have to save what is left to save and restore that which can be restored. The "nuclear disaster" selective attention mentality - which is based on fear and ignorance - kills people and is killing the planet

[Uncle Joe]

3. What would've been the result if nothing had been done by anyone? n/t

[NNadir]

4. The radionuclides in the core would have decayed until the radiation level was much lower.

In defense of the choices made in the now dubious approach that was enacted, the human "liquidator" approach also applied at Chernobyl, much less was understood about nuclear power at that time than is understood now.

Radiation paranoia, an outgrowth of the fear of nuclear war, has allowed far more dangerous practices, one of which is the massive death toll associated with air pollution and the other is the extreme global heating leading to extreme weather and the collapse of ecosystems around the world.

The NRX was a small research reactor. After repair, it was brought back on line and operated for more than 4 decades.

[Uncle Joe]

5. How long would it take for the radionuclides in the core to decay to safe levels, and how large of an area

was contaminated?

[NNadir]

6. The major radioactivity of failed fuels is associated with short lived nuclides.

I remarked on this some time back in connection with the elevation of worry about what could happen at the Ukrainian Reactor being in danger of being shelled by the Russians, and is still a big deal to many people whose fear that something nuclear might happen, and which takes attention away from the fact that actual deaths are taking place because of fossil fuel based weapons of mass destruction that were funded by fossil fuel sales to antinuke Germany:

Some comments on the war situation with Chernobyl as well as the operable nuclear plants in Ukraine.

In it, I referred to a Master's thesis on the decay properties of used nuclear fuels, an excellent Master's thesis, one of the best I've ever read:

For the first 24-48 hours after shutdown there is major decay of short lived nuclides like Np-239 & U-239. These produce a lot of heat, and thus can and do cause fuel to melt in solid phase fuels.

The issue is not volatilization of the actinides, which have low vapor pressures, but rather cesium iodide, strontium oxides and iodides etc.

Iodine is the most dangerous fission product.

One can learn about fuel properties after shutdown by reading Dr. Kristina Yancey (Spencer's) 2013 Master's Thesis:

https://catalog.library.tamu.edu/Record/in00003477980

See figures 20 and 21 on pages 58 and 59, respectively.

If the containment is breached, and the pumps are destroyed by the barbarians, the result may be more like Fukushima than Chernobyl. Chernobyl was worse because the graphite core burned. These reactors, I would guess, but do not know, are VVERs They will have a negative void coefficient in a Loss of Cooling event.

The Russians have descended into pure savagery if they are doing this. A deliberate Fukushima as I am prone to point out, will pale in comparison to climate change however.

The figures from the thesis to which I refer at these which refer to the decay of the shorter lived (and thus highly radioactive) isotopes and the longer lived isotopes:



The caption:

Figure 20. Total heat load of all the spent fuel from operating reactors for each of the
reference times used in the Spent Fuel Database, shown with a logarithmic vertical axis.

The caption:

Figure 21. Composition of the total heat load of all the spent fuel from operating reactors after (a) 0 years and after (b) 20 years.

The thesis contains similar representations of the decay rates with respect to radiotoxicity with ingestion but of course, neither Jimmy Carter nor any of the other hundreds of liquidators in 1952 ate the fuel.

I would question what you mean by "safe." Obviously going into the reactor core was safe for Jimmy Carter; he lived to be a hundred, something I'm sure not to do. Of course, he went in only for a very short time, like all the others. There is no doubt that it would have been "safer" for him and everyone else if they waited a year or so before going in. The thing was, I guess - I wasn't born yet - that they were in a rush to do something, since they wanted to get the reactor going again, which they did within two years of the melting event.

There weren't a hell of a lot of nuclear reactors in 1952, and I'm sure that the scientists and engineers involved in nuclear research wanted to keep those that could be kept going on line.

The contaminated area was fairly small, as evidenced by the fact that the reactor was repaired and restarted and operated for more than 4 decades.