nuclear power – J R Vincent

The sun is setting as fishermen tend their vessels, boats hauled on to the beach by an old tractor. Elsewhere, the golden evening light falls on a small train, making its final departure from a station at the foot of a black lighthouse. To make it back to the engine shed, the miniature locomotive must run parallel to the shore, past buildings – made themselves from discarded railway carriages – black as pitch and squat against the prevailing winds. There is no shelter here, other than that afforded by a strange jumble of objects: the detritus of war, the adornments of artists, and rusted industrial objects dragged to, and left, in this forbidding place.

If you turned around, looked in a different direction, the scene that presented itself might appear different. Not of a decaying coastal community, but that of the American southwest. The barren looking ground, with sporadic low vegetation and an odd assortment of buildings, seems familiar from spaghetti westerns. On this day the lie is given away by the biting wind, the salty tang in the air. But lips still end up dry and chapped as if they had been baked in the New Mexico sun.

Turn once more, take up another viewpoint, and see the defining man-made element of this coast. Against the inking sky, grey forms are picked out by red aircraft-warning lights, the sodium glow of street lamps, and the brighter, whiter, spread of flood lights. Silhouetted cranes arc slowly around, steam – so much steam – rises from sundry vents, vehicles come and go. This view is heavy industry, Blade Runner, a dystopian compound at the edge of society. New Mexico or a barren coast are, actually, fitting locations. This is Dungeness, the site (and name) of a nuclear power station.
Dungeness, the shale peninsular on the Sussex/Kent coastal border, is ‘other’ in so many ways, that you can take out if what you will. I once drove across it – on a private road, all of the land here is now owned by French energy giant EDF – summoning those spaghetti westerns, listening to Sergio Leone’s theme from Once Upon a Time in the West. But of all the confounding things about Dungeness, it is the power station that has stayed with me.

“It’s just there, and I work here, then go home”, in the Britannia Inn, scarcely 200 yards away from the perimeter of the power station, the barman Maciek – Marek? Matek? Mark? How many times can you ask someone’s name? – was incurious. “The people that come here are tourists visiting for the train”. That miniature steam train. The Romney, Hythe, and Dymchurch Railway. Yet I could walk right up to the walls of the power station without restriction. Even lob pebbles at them. This clearly wasn’t a high security, top secret, location. There were signs to a visitors centre (appointments only). I was anything but incurious.
Until that point I’d thought of nuclear power in one of two ways. The first always brings to mind a musical refrain, not from a western, but Kraftwerk: Tschernobyl, Harrisburg, Sellafield, Fukushima. All listed in a revised version of the track Radioactivity, and all known as locations of nuclear disasters of varying scale. How could the barman not think about this, right next to his place of work? I assumed it must have been a deliberate ploy, a mental trick, because surely in communist-era Poland they had heard about Chernobyl. And what of the nearly 30 intervening years? No. Better to not think about it, especially if you spend your days next door.
But then, maybe he didn’t care. He was about my age – just turned 30 at the time – and I’d go so far as to say that if someone is under 40, the Simpsons is probably the prime source for all their nuclear knowledge. You’ll almost certainly be aware of the Springfield Nuclear Plant and its workers, including owner Mr Burns and Homer Simpson. Homer Simpson, the safety inspector. This was my second way of thinking about the nuclear industry.

Mr Burns’ power plant is a cottage industry. More or less, at least in comparison to the real thing. Owned by one man, run by a bunch of good-time boys that meet up in the tavern for beers after work, it might as well be a local garage. If something goes wrong, sure, there is a short term impact; maybe a three-eyed fish, a town-wide power cut, or… the death of a minor character, but it’s never anything too serious. If that’s your nuclear reference point, then why think about it too much?
But I doubted that EDF – unlike Mr Burns – would be employing any of the neighbourhood ducks, despite the power station being in the middle of a ready source of labour: an RSPB reserve. This is because Dungeness is serious, the ‘Magnox’ type reactor used in part of the site was originally developed solely for the purpose of creating the material needed for the UK’s nuclear arms programme – civilian power a bonus. When that reactor was officially retired, in 2006, it was the oldest operating nuclear power station in the world.
As I have come to learn, the retirement of a nuclear reactor is just half the story. The site will live on for decades, maybe hundreds of years, as it is decommissioned. Popular culture has left the atomic age behind – no radioactive-dust beauty treatments now – but the sites that are left behind following the end of power generation may never disappear. They leave behind an indistinct legacy: permanent, but liminal; costing billions a year for generations, but rarely mentioned in mainstream news; retaining the potential to cause mass panic whilst we largely ignore the gradual build-up of environmental pollution.
Maciek might have been uninterested in all this, but as I drove back across Romney Marsh towards the comfort of the rolling Sussex countryside, my own ‘nuclear winter’ was forming. A curiosity as just why and how something so world-altering, full of promise and menace, has slipped so far to the side-lines.

Lise Meitner is missing. Her name is not on the Monument to X-Ray and Radium Martyrs of all Nations in Hamburg, though the names of more than 350 other scientists and medics are. You won’t find her on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, she is not anywhere among those three million names. She is not listed as a Nobel Prize for Physics winner, or among the household name of science. There is no record of Lise Meitner in any of these places, when it might so easily have been in all of them.

She was born in 1878 in Vienna, to a lawyer father and a mother who had fled pogroms against Russian Jews. At that time, women were not permitted to study at the city’s university and the prospect of any of the Meitners’ five daughters receiving an education beyond the age of 14 was remote. Even after restrictions were relaxed, the Meitners were compelled to hire private tutors to help their daughters cram eight years of learning into just two, in the hope of passing the university entrance exam.

Meitner gained admission to the University of Vienna in 1901 and a PhD (in physics) by 1906, only the second woman in the five hundred year history of the university to do so. She again defied expectations when moving to study in Berlin, aged 29, where she would eventually come to work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI). She developed an international reputation in the field of atomic research, and became the first woman in Germany to become a professor. She also gained a reputation for meticulousness, for keeping a fastidiously well-ordered laboratory, and minimising exposure to dangerous radioactive materials. This, ultimately, would prevent her appearing on that roll-call of martyrs to their science.

You can perhaps see this tendency in photographs of her. In one, from 1913, she looks on with eyes darkened by the monochrome photography, black hair up and parted in the centre, a high collared dress. She looks modest, perhaps deferential. Meticulous. She is with her collaborator and colleague Otto Hahn; louche, confident, reading notes whilst leant back on a workbench.

Together Hahn and Meitner would unlock the process of nuclear fission – splitting the atom – in 1938. But on the cusp of their profound discovery Meitner was forced to flee persecution, just as her mother had fled Russia. Despite converting from Judaism to Christianity in 1908, and her status as a world leading scientist, by this time there was no future for anyone of Jewish descent in Germany. Crossing the border into the Netherlands with just ten Marks and scant belongings, she eventually made her way to Stockholm. In doing so she avoided becoming one of the sorrowful millions to die in the Nazi holocaust – another list of names that she would not appear on.

Even with her absence from the laboratory that had until recently born her name, Meitner was able to describe the process of the splitting of the atom from the chemical reports Hahn sent her from Berlin. Perhaps this distance, and a generosity in giving credit to others, meant that by 1945, when the Nobel Committee again convened to award prizes, Meitner’s name was missed out. Hahn was given the credit. Though she would work on, her name would fade from history.

But Lise Meitner can be found. Meitnerium, element 109, is named in her honour. Institutions are taking her name as her achievements are acknowledged. And her name can be found inscribed on a headstone in England, where she died in an old age no one could have expected her to see.

Tag: nuclear power

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On Lise Meitner