Physics is Fun Memoires of Richard Wilson Version of September 25th 2009

Atlantic Legal Foundation
About 1980 I got to know Fred Seitz, a very distinguished physicist who had worked with Wigner and coauthored with him the classic paper on how radiation damage could open up a new fruitful field of scientific enquiry. Seitz had built up the physics department at the University of Illinois, and served a period as President of the US Academy of Sciences. He, with Miro Todorovich of NY University had started Scientists and Engineers for Secure Energy (SE2) to support nuclear energy. I was asked to join and did. As the list of public hearings shows, I represented SE2 in Congressional hearings especially just after the Chernobyl accident. SE2 wanted to support the opening of the Shoreham Nuclear Power plant which, particularly after Chernobyl, was opposed by the Governor of New York State, and eventually shut down after a few billion dollars had been spent, as described elsewhere. Fred Seitz looked around and persuaded a public interest law foundation, the Atlantic Legal Foundation to support us. We tried by various means to allow the Shoreham nuclear power plant to operate and not let the state shut it down. But we failed, as described later. In 1987 Fred asked me to join the Science Advisory Board of the Atlantic Legal Foundation (ALF). The Atlantic Legal Foundation is a public interest law foundation intervening in lawsuits in the what they perceive to be the public interest. In many ways it is a “right wing” organization, and I became the “token liberal”. But on scientific issues I believe that I have been able to help to ensure that good science prevails and that “junk science” is excluded from the court room. In particular I continue to argue that there is an extremely important distinction between being cautious, using such rules as the ill defined “Precautionary Principle” and assigning blame and monetary damages (871) . In addition to the publication, I have intermittently maintain a webpage http://soundscience.info or http://physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/soundscience/ALF_science.html originally as a webpage for ALF but now as my own.
Many scientists and many others want to keep away from legal bickerings. But that is where a lot of the action is. When I was chairman of the physics department I instructed the secretary to keep records as if she was to testify in court about the matter. “But we don’t want to go into court”. “Of course not” I agreed. “If you keep good records you will not have to.” A similar rule applies in technology. A good technologist must think carefully about all aspects of the technology, including potential weak points, and have good explanations ready. The explanations must be in technical detail for the expert and in simpler but accurate, language for the non specialist. He should avoid at all costs the terrible mistake of talking down to the critics.
My real work with ALF began with the landmark Daubert case before the US Supreme Court which set forth some criteria (often erroneously called rules) for scientific evidence that is admissible in a court room. Normally in a court room a witness can only testify to facts that he has personally seen. An expert witness has more latitude to describe the background of the case. But how much latitude? There are numerous cases of scientists who will testify for one side or another who are less than precise - some would say less than honest - in their discussion. Lawyers, judges and juries are often swayed by non-scientific and even factually incorrect arguments. Immense sums of money can now be involved. For example when the cases involving electromagnetic fields were before the courts the electric power industry was already being forced, for self preservation, to spend a billion dollars a year rerouting power lines and putting them underground. It was easy to project that they would soon be spending more than the budget for the US basic research program. Even for continuing their work in an ivory tower, scientists had to be involved. But few have been.
I have helped to draft over a dozen briefs of“amicus curiae”, (friend of the court) in cases where so-called“expert” witnesses have misapplied science in the courtroom. In particular I drafted briefs in a trilogy of cases before the US Supreme Court: Daubert, Joiner and Kumho tire, which altered the standard rules governing expert witnesses. The first one (Daubert) came about when a drug manufacturer was sued for billions of dollars by about a hundred plaintiffs for making an anti-nausea drug, bendectin, which helped pregnant women overcome morning sickness. Some of these women had miscarriages, which is not uncommon. Although numbers were not precise, about 10% of pregnancies were terminated in this way. An American habit is to blame someone else for one’s misfortunes, particular if he or she has a deep pocket and can be sued. In spite of a claimed belief in religion, fewer and fewer people are willing to admit that a misfortune is an “act of God” and look instead for some one with a deep pocket to use. . Daubert sued.for damages and a hundred others followed suit.
In Daubert, the Appeals Court judge had availed himself of an expert who pointed out the flimsy nature of the evidence that had been adduced. The US Supreme Court, realizing the fundamental nature of the decision that they had agreed to discuss, asked for briefs of “amicus curiae” from many interested organizations. The President of Atlantic Legal Foundation felt that this was a case where the scientists Fred Seitz had assembled could be of help. A hundred groups responded. I met with Martin Kaufman, senior counsel, and Loevinger, a former Judge who had studied the role of scientific evidence in the courts, and we drafted a brief in 2 to 3 hours. I had the job of lining up scientists who would agree. Within a week or so I got Nicolaas Bloembergen, Erminio Costa, Dudley Herschbach, Jerome Karle, Arthur Langer, Wassily Leontief, Richard S.Lindzen, William N. Lipscomb, Donald B. Louria, John B. Little, A. Alan Moghissi, Brooke T. Mossman, Robert Nolan, Arno A. Penzias, Frederick Seitz, A. Frederick Spilhaus, Dimitrios Trichopoulos to join me in the brief. This included six Nobel Laureates. A few other groups who submitted briefs completely misunderstood the issue. They claimed that rejecting testimony as inappropriate for a legal case involving a dispute between two parties would be like stifling Galileo. But ALF argued that was incorrect. Galileo was not involved with a dispute between two parties. He was stifled for saying truths that the Vatican authorities found uncomfortable. Linus Pauling refused to join with us for this erroneous reason. Tightening the rules of evidence would not stop any future Galileo from saying what he wanted outside the courtroom. The issue was, and is, whether the evidence is sufficient to affect a decision between two parties. The Supreme Court, while not completely agreeing with us, quoted our brief first of all. They were, in fact, wiser then we were. While agreeing that peer review is important they argued that it is one of many factors and neither necessary nor sufficient.
In Joiner, we again got a distinguished group of amici. We argued that animal data on carcinogenicity with no human data and no evidence of high exposure was inappropriate to bring before a jury. The Supreme court in this case emphasized that the evidence presented by the expert must be “reliable” and that the courts could hire their own experts to aid them in understanding. Kumho Tire was especially interesting. A Texas court of appeals had accepted the argument of an expert witness that when an admittedly bald tire had blown out and he could find no specific reason for the failure that it must have been due to bad manufacture. I was able to find the former tire expert of the Department of Transportation, who had written a book on the subject, to join three former Presidents of the National Academy of Engineering in our brief. I am glad to say that our brief succeeded.
Another, Covalt, before the California Supreme court, effectively stopped lawsuits about adverse health effects allegedly caused by electromagnetic fields. In our view the allegations were wrong. This is discussed below in a special section. This brief submitted on behalf of six Nobel Laureates were effective in stopping the nonsense. In May 2008 the ALF submitted an “amicus letter” requesting the California Supreme Court to review another crucial case about the limits of blame for deaths caused by asbestos. Alas we were a little late getting the letter in and that may be the reason that we have so far been ignored.
Asbestos is the name given to a group of naturally occurring minerals and was widely used starting in the late 19th century as a fire retardant. Indeed the very name came from the Greek "will not burn". It is now given by general unstated consent to a group of materials that are regulated in commerce. Each chemical exits in two forms: fibrous (asbestiform) and non fibrous. The fibrous form can produce toxic lung damage, asbestosis, lung cancer, and for some asbestos types, mesothelioma. The fibrous form has two subgroups that are distinguishable under electron microscopy. One causes amphiboles, the other, serpentine asbestos does not cause amphiboles. Amphibole asbestos was widely used in the shipyards and navies of the second world war. Chrysotile, a form of serpentine asbestos, has more recently been used in buildings although all types are now either banned or avoided as much as possible in commerce.
In 1986 The US Environmental Protection Agency issued guidelines for risk assessment. In their discussions they noted that there were not enough electron microscopes in the country to distinguish the different asbestos types in all situations. This was a factor in their explicit assumption that all asbestiform types had the same potency for causing cancer regardless of chemical type. These guidelines have been widely used to guide regulations, and in court cases used for claiming damages and in other public documents. In the intervening 18 years much information has surfaced that shows that the assumption of equality does not hold, especially for mesothelioma. In 2003 the U.S. EPA. acknowledged that the potencies can be different: “For mesothelioma the best estimate of the coefficient (potency) for chrysotile is only 0.0013 times that for amphibole and the possibility that pure chrysotile is non-potent for causing mesothelioma cannot be ruled out by the epidemiology data.”
Many scientists, public policy analysts and the courts have been slow to grasp the implications of this newer evidence. For example mesothelioma has a latency of 40+ years, and anyone contracting mesothelioma may have been exposed 40 or more years before but wants to blame someone now. Among men there is evidence that male mesothelioma incidence in the USA has quadrupled since 1940, and that is usually attributed to asbestos exposure - probably to amphibole asbestos exposure before 1970. Yet often a victim, searching for a deep pocket and unable to sue the US navy, blames a manufacturer o.f chrysotile. Assuming the above (EPA) statement of the science is correct, chrysotile would not normally even be considered a partial cause of mesothelioma. On the other hand, as I have pointed out in a paper involving amphiboles (877), a person exposed to amphibole asbestos, at the iron mines on Lake Superior, has a larger risk for mesothelioma than suggested by the 1986 calculation which was based on an average of all asbestos types.
These and other briefs are listed on the Atlantic Legal Foundation’s website and in the a page on my website to which there is direct access by the sound science website http://soundscience.info.
Real Environmental Issues
I have been accused of being an anti-environmentalist and in the 1970s got anonymous telephone calls attacking my position on nuclear power, and calling me a tool of industry. I had not even at that time accepted a free cup of coffee from any nuclear power company or utility! How was I to defend myself? One way is to recognize real environmental issues when they arise. In many cases I have done so and have acted thereon. I recognized in 1970 that burning of coal produced much more damage to the environment and public health than nuclear power and pointed this out in a brief letter to Physics Today entitled “Kilowatt Deaths” (145). I helped to enthuse colleagues at Harvard School of Public Health in their studies of this and was a coauthor of one (225), and editor of another (634), of 2 books on the subject. In 1991 As noted earlier, I was asked by the Chairman and Director of the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development to convene a conference on the effects of the Kuwait oil fires, and this developed, under the leadership of Dr John Evans, into a major effort studying the effect of the Iraqi aggression on the public health of Kuwaitis, which is likely to develop into a major ongoing study of health in Kuwait and possibilities for improvement. Interestingly this was a situation where my initial estimate of the consequences (50,000 delayed deaths due to air pollution) of the ongoing disaster were too pessimistic by a factor of one or two orders of magnitude. I imagined that the plume of the oil fires would be close to the ground and that everyone would be in the resulting fog. I had forgotten the rise of the plume due to the heat and the air pollution was only high on a very few days. Moreover the air pollution was reduced during the Iraqi occupation as there were fewer cars on the road.
Since 1990 I have been active in pointing out the dangers of arsenic in the environment, and have traveled to Inner Mongolia and Bangladesh to study these and help the local people. A few papers were written about this (613, 635, 806, 807, 873) but the people there were hard to work with. Then about 1997 my colleague Peter Rogers brought the problems of Bangladesh to my attention. After visiting at a conference in Dhaka in 1998, I saw over 150 victims of chronic arsenic poisoning. I came back and gave an emotional lecture at the school of public health. “If you are interested in international public health you must be involved with Bangladesh.” I was able to convince Charles (Charlie) Harvey, now at MIT, to address hydrochemistry and hydro geology, and David Christiani MD to address epidemiologically what arsenic actually does to people., I decided to address directly an intermediate step. How can one get pure water to the people of Bangladesh now? (888,890). In particular I am President of the Arsenic Foundation, which I set up in 2004 to be a conduit for tax free donations to help the people of SE Asia (particularly Bangladesh), in their effort to obtain arsenic free water. In addition to spending our own money to help, and spending time on the issue, I started and continue the arsenic website (http://arsenic.ws or http://physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/arsenic_project_introduction.html in an attempt to inform all who will about arsenic. As I tell colleagues it has “more than you ever wanted to know” about arsenic and the problems it causes.
After the USA invaded Iraq in 2003, I began a small program to help the University of Baghdad get back on its feet. I sponsored visits of Ministers and academics to Harvard. In 2006 this program is truncated by the violence in Baghdad and is reduced to attempts to bringing in graduate students who do not have, on paper, the qualifications to enter by the normal competition. This has not been successful. Harvard, and departments in other Universities have been reluctant to help in this, the major way that they can help. I was, and am, deeply disappointed.
Nuclear Power and other Energy Issues
Since 1970 I became involved with various aspects of energy policy. It began, as appropriate for a Professor at a University, when some students asked me to help them “stop the dangerous nuclear power”. I made a bargain with them. We would study the issues together in a special “reading course”. It did not take me long to realize that the problems of nuclear power are not problems of nuclear physics per se, but complex problems of engineering systems in a field where the energy density of the fuel is a million times higher than heretofore. This led to a role in explaining nuclear power and nuclear safety to the public.

In a sense it began 20 years before when I was a graduate student using radioactive sources and devising my own safety rules. My girl friend at the time, Margaret Leach, told me a story that horrified me. Physicians would take radium sources that were then used for radiation therapy, and leave them on a rolling table unshielded, in the corridor! My discussion with L.H. Gray in Hammersmith hospital, when I went to see him about calibration of my radiothorium source, had confirmed my consequent distrust of ordinary General Practitioners of the time (which L.H. Gray tried his best to improve). I noted with approval an action of my Professor at Oxford, Lord Cherwell.

In the House of Commons two bills passed in the same session. The first was to set a limit of 150 milliRem. per year for a radiation dose to the public, and the second to demand a compulsory X ray every year to detect tuberculosis which in postwar years was rampant. The ordinary film used for X rays at the time led to a radiation dose of 1,000 milliRem. When the bills reached the House of Lords, Cherwell in his usual low voice pointed out that they were inconsistent. The second bill was withdrawn and alternates were found. But I still had to have an X ray each time I entered the USA. I kept the X ray to give to Harvard University because, according to a law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had to have an X ray every year since I was a teacher. When I spent a summer in Stanford in 1959, I was asked again to have an X ray, to prove hat I did not have cancer before I started work at the “dangerous” nuclear facility. I wore my film badge. It went black! (Dose to the chest of about one to two Rems). Pief, the head of the lab, was informed and realized at once what his mischevous brother-in-law had done. He persuaded the Stanford lawyers to abandon their nonsensical requirement. I had always argued, in jest, that the reason that physics departments in the USA after the war had picnics, at which families and children came was to show the students that radiation had no effect on fertility. Pief expressed the matter more succinctly. When asked at a cofee break by a machine shop technician in Stanford whether radiation made one sterile, he replied, in my presence, : “Don’t count on it!”.
Nuclear power was just beginning to come into its own. Over 50 new plants were being built. In March 1971 I believe, Glen Seaborg, who was at that time President of the American Association for Advancement of Science made an appeal to the country’s scientists. “You have been receiving funds for your research from the AEC for many years. Now it has trouble explaining one of its primary missions, developing nuclear electric power, to the public. We need your help.” As far as I know only two people responded. Myself, to help, and Henry Kendall who hindered. My response to Glenn’s appeal was to write to him saying that I needed data on half a dozen issues which were raised among the public by nuclear energy. Effects of Radiation at low doses; accident probabilities; disposal of nuclear waste; diversion of material for nuclear weapons. Two days later I got a phone call. Not from a secretary but from Glenn himself. “Can I speak to Professor Wilson, please?” “The issues you raise are too complex for me to explain over the phone but can you come down to Washington and spend a few days with us?” Of course I did. In his office in Germantown, Glenn addressed the questions one by one. “Assistant Secretary xxx is the expert on this one,” and the Assistant Secretaries were called in one by one to answer my questions. “Now you know their telephone numbers, call them anytime”. I was hooked. My new career as a public explainer began then and there. My admiration for Glenn and his approach to life increased and he remained helpful to me always and always listened to any comment that I had. I have, incidentally, never found any other government servant who was so forthcoming. My first paper on the political problems of this technical situation appeared in Nature (137).
Henry Kendall meanwhile was going public with some misinformation. He complained that the AEC was being extremely secretive. In this case about a reactor safety report WASH 740. That was a study performed by BNL scientists, I believe, about the potential for extreme nuclear accidents. It had been performed as a result of an explicit request by the Joint Committee of Atomic Energy and had been presented to the AEC. Henry claimed that the report was being deliberately withheld. I called the appropriate assistant secretary and asked for a copy to be on my desk the following morning. It was, of course, on my desk by 9 am and I immediately telephoned Henry and informed him that he could borrow it whenever he wished. He never wanted it. Alas, that was typical of Henry and of the anti-nuclear power movement at the time. He preferred to make a public complaint rather than to understand and to influence the industry in a direct way. I tried to be ready to respond within minutes to an incorrect public complaint before it spread and festered. Henry had started the Union of Concerned Scientists and in its first years was to work to reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons. This worthy goal was not achieved. I commented at the time that Henry managed to stop many nuclear power reactors, but as far as I could tell he failed to stop a single bomb! He was like the drunk looking for his watch that he had dropped at night. A bystander tried to help and after 10 minutes, he said “I cannot find it either. Are you sure you dropped it here?” “No,” was the reply.” I dropped it further up the street but there is a street light here so that I can see what I am doing.”
I went out in 1973 to Vermont to support the operating permit for the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, with a “Limited Appearance” at the public hearing before the licensing board. I got a lift with Norman Rasmussen, then a nuclear physicist who had a few years earlier done a very fine piece of work, using a Ge(Li) detector, cataloging the energies of neutron capture gamma rays. He was in the nuclear engineering department at MIT, and was better placed than I to study reactors. A year later the AEC asked him to be Chairman of the Reactor Safety Committee that produced WASH-1400, the Rasmussen report. By that time I was comparing radiation doses and noted that the highest anticipated public dose from the power plant was comparable to the increase in cosmic ray dose as one went from the power plant to the top of the hill where the public hearing was being held. I proposed that we would all be safer if we adjourned the hearing and reconvened at the power plant. The State of Massachusetts, through its Attorney General, complained that the permitted site boundary dose of 10 mRem. per hour was too high. I immediately wrote to the Attorney General, with a copy to Harvard University, asking for relief from a Massachusetts law that required all teachers in the Commonwealth’s schools and colleagues to have a yearly X ray to ensure that they did not have TB. For me, the alternate of a skin test would not work because I am tuberculin positive. I was confident that the X ray dose was high because it was 1 Rem as recently as 1960. But Jacob Shapiro, Harvard’s radiation safety officer at the time, was ahead of me. He had already insisted that the University Health Services use the best practices. They shield the patient from radiation except at the exact location of the desired X ray image. They use sensitive film. Maybe they use an image intensifier screen. He measured the dose for a chest X ray at Harvard Medical services at 8 milliRems. This was 100 times smaller than I had measured at Stanford and just below my complaint level!
Having been born and brought up in London, and having endured London fogs for many years, I was aware that air pollution was not good. I was also aware that in Halifax and other Yorkshire towns, those who could afford to do so lived on top of the hills and came down by carriage or car. The poorer people lived near the “Dark Satanic Mills” of the hymn. The non conformist preachers used the prayer : “From Hell, Hull and Halifax, Good Lord deliver us”. My grandmother scrubbed her front door step twice a day. Whenever I took a bath a thin, and sometimes not so thin, black line marked the level that the water had reached in the bathtub. I was therefore emotionally prepared to compare the risks and dangers of air pollution with those of nuclear power. I was unwilling to make the same sort of vague statement that the nuclear industry were fond of making, such as: “nuclear power has killed nobody” whereas they had not yet made much electricity either. I tried to be quantitative, using the best estimate I could get for low levels of radiation and also for air pollution. The paper “Kilowatt Deaths” (145) comparing the number of anticipated deaths from electricity usage, that appeared in Physics Today in 1972 Leonard Hamilton, MD, of BNL told me that this little paper stimulated his more systematic studies at BNL. Others found these early papers stimulating. I was slowly moving into an intellectual vacuum now filled by the field of Risk Analysis.
Nuclear power plants under construction were designed to produce 900 to 1200 Mwe - twice as much as previous designs. The AEC had some criteria for the engineering design of the “Emergency Core Coolant System” (ECCS) that would coolant water in e event of a severe accident where the pressure in the reactor is lost and the water rapidly evaporates - technically a blow down. lost. A question arose about how well it would work? There were no direct data and calculations were necessary. In a letter to AEC, by that time chaired by James Schlesinger Jr, and in testimony to Congress’ Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) I suggested that they hold a public hearing and a issue a graded set of reports. For the expert, there should be a detailed multi volume study with all the engineering data should be made for the cognoscenti and a shorter report should be available for the public with careful detailed references to the detailed report. Alas this has never really hppened, not in the nuclear industry, and not in any other “dangerous” industry. The public hearing occurred and lasted 18 months in all. Environmentalists, led by Henry Kendall’s Union of Concerned Scientists, combined to oppose the criteria. A young economist, Daniel Ford, fresh out of Harvard, was their detailed organizer. Ford had just got a BA in economics from Harvard. He came round to my office a couple of times to get a private lecture on some of the issues. I remember calculating for him on the blackboard the maximum dose that people could get from Krypton 85. I asked him to meet one morning with my small class on energy policy, and explain the reason for the UCS intervention in the hearing. He over reached himself. A short while later when he was trying to get the AEC hearing board to accept him as a technical expert he said, incorrectly, that he had given 2 invited lectures in my class on heat transfer and water flow. But I was reading the hearing transcript and my letter pointing out the “error” was read into the record with no opposition. I noted a couple more “exaggerations” of his in the hearing record but forget now what they were.
Henry Kendall himself raised the ire of the AEC hearing board and hence the Chairman of the AEC, Jim Schlesinger. He proffered testimony to the board. When called he stated he could not come immediately because of the experimental schedule at SLAC. And then he asked for 2-3 days to pilot his private plane across the country. The board chairman ordered him to turn up or face contempt charges. Bill Wallenmeyer informed me that Jim Schlesinger’s anger was hurting the high energy physics program. According to Bill’s comment to me at the time, Jim Schlesinger cut $300,000 from the SLAC budget for this reason. I called Sid Drell, acting director of SLAC while Pief was on sabbatical leave, and suggested he take action to isolate SLAC itself from Henry’s inaction. I do not know what action Sid took but Henry Kendall turned up and gave his testimony. A few months later when my last SLAC experimental proposal, looking for parity violation in electron proton inelastic scattering by using longitudinally polarized electrons was rejected, one reason specifically stated in writing, was that there was this $300,000 budget cut. The experimental program of Taylor, Kendall and Freeman was not cut. This only intensified my frustration expressed earlier on my attempts to work at SLAC.
In 1972, I was asked by a local environmental group, the “Sheepscot Valley Conservation Society”, by a retired clergyman, Reverend Barth, to help them ensure that Central Maine Power, majority owner of Maine Yankee nuclear power plant, met all criteria. I suggested a public information meeting. Central Maine Power were reluctant. I called their outside lawyer, John Ritsher Esq., of Ropes and Gray in Boston and he said: “Ask Mr Barth to call the President of Central Maine Power (CMP) in 30 minutes.” Mr Barth made the call and the meeting took place. In that afternoon we toured the plant and in the evening sat down in Wiscasset. The meeting was almost a disaster. It was opened by the public relations director of CMP. He had got a poor degree in the classics but was a nephew of the President of CMP. He knew very little but talked platitudes for ½ hour and did not want to stop. An engineer from Yankee Atomic was sitting next to me. Leaning over he whispered “Now you know what we are up against”. Indeed, the industry public relations people were their worst enemies. But Jack Randazza, then plant superintendent saved the day. He had been a Maine lobster man, and had learned about nuclear power on Yankee Rowe and the Swiss PWR. After he had spoken he was asked many questions which he answered straightforwardly and well. Maine Yankee ran well for 20 years but 25 years later the heat exchanger of the power plant needed replacement This was the lowest ebb of the nuclear industry and rather than replace it, CMP shut the plant for ever.
This led to my first consulting job - consultant to the Attorney General’s office of the State of Maine in the discussion of CMPs request for an operating license for Maine Yankee. I charged $100 a day. I went beyond the formal review and discussed the low probability High Consequence events, beyond what the AEC had called the Maximum Credible Accident, both with the radiological group (3 people) in the capital (Augusta) and with the head Maine State police. The Police were well prepared with evacuation plans including using boats to evacuate from the bottom of the peninsula. They held a yearly exercise with the Strategic Air Command. The State police would try and steal a nuclear weapon from the SAC base, and the Air Force would try to stop them. I was told that the police won every year but am still unsure what that means in terms of safety.. I suggested that Maine formally enter the ECCS hearing on a limited basis. That hearing was covering crucial issues of interest to Maine and there would be an operating license hearing before the ECCS hearing was over. We went to Washington when one Oak Ridge scientist was testifying. It is obvious that if the power level is reduced, there would less demand on ECCS systems. At what level would the witness’ concerns be moot? He would not say, but we got from him a procedure to discuss the issue and the Maine Yankee people, using this procedure, accepted a license for 85% power until the AEC had ruled on Washington ECCS hearings. . This was granted till the ECCS hearing was finished and revised general criteria were issued. As far as I know, Maine Yankee was the only power plant and Maine the only state to take this cautious, yet positive, approach. Other states either accepted nuclear power without question or were in outright opposition. On one of these trips to Washington I called on Ralph Nader who had been talking against nuclear power. I expolained to him what a number of us academic atomic scientists were trying to do to ensure that the industry was responsible. I never got him to support nuclear power, but his rhetoric changed.
While this was going on, Hans Bethe gave a talk at Fermilab on a nuclear power future. He praised the idea of a breeder reactor. Some 15 years before Hans had thought carefully about the safety of liquid sodium reactors in the 1960s and “invented” the “Bethe-Tait“ accident whereby after a loss of sodium coolant the top of the reactor fuel assembly falls to the bottom with a velocity great enough to make a considerable reactor excursion. Until the 1980s this was the dominant safety worry. Fortunately this is avoided in modern designs, with metal fuel, by a natural shut down before the likely accident initiators can evaporate the sodium. In questions, I raised the obvious issues and suggested that Hans was not adequately cautious. His response was characteristic. The next day he telephoned me. “I have been asked by the AEC to form a small breeder reactor safety committee. Will you join it?”. The answer of course was “Yes”. A couple of years later Andree and I were invited to his 70^th birthday party at Cornell. Four or five people, including the Deputy Secretary of ERDA, talked about the status of the fields in which Hans had done so much. I felt deeply honored and this was the start of a deep personal friendship on these issues which lasted until his death.
I always consider Hans Bethe to be a true liberal. Many anti-nuclear people, including, alas, some of his colleagues at Cornell, thought he was not a moderate liberal scientist when he supported the development of nuclear electric power. Hans disagreed with the positions taken on nuclear power by the Union of Concerned Scientists from 1973 on. It is an interesting paradox that in the 1960s it was liberals, usually Democrats, who supported nuclear power development and Republicans who were reluctant. Now liberals, although mostly not liberal scientists, have rejected nuclear power and by default the globe may be warming somewhat faster! To many of us, the position of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1973, was incorrect and counterproductive. By taking a very public position against nuclear power UCS deflected attention from their important position of opposition to the arms race. Bethe remained consistent. While arguing for a strong control of, and reduction in the number of nuclear bombs, Bethe supported civilian uses of nuclear fission. His logical, and in my view liberal, position was made clear in the statement of which he was the architect: “Scientists’ Statement on Energy Policy” in 1975. I was proud to be a part of that statement signed by 21 scientists who had diverse positions in society and proud to join Hans at the press conference in the National Press club in Washington. I was reminded of this quite recently, and remembered that the Assistant Secretary for Reactor Safety Research in the old AEC, Dr Milton Shaw, shook our hands as we came in and thanked us for doing such a service to the industry. I wanted to at least appear balaned in my views, and noticing Ralph Nader in the audience, I immediately went up and shook his hand. Hans felt that there were, and are, legitimate concerns about nuclear power that had to be, and have to be, addressed, and was willing to address them. I believe that it was about this time that I made a special visit to Linus Pauling, then at Stanford, to persuade him NOT to oppose nuclear power. His comment was characteristic. “If Hans is spending time thinking about the safety, then I do not have to do so myself”. I believe that Linus never again said anything publicly against nuclear power.
In 1983 Charles Till at Argonne National Laboratory came up with the idea of the Integral Fast Reactor, which has the potential to reduce the proliferation worries of the Purex fuel cycle, both Hans and I served on the advisory committee. Hans was characteristically enthusiastic, and was meticulous about editing our draft reports to ensure the correct balance of optimism and reality. He was constantly emphasizing the importance of preventing proliferation. Health prevented Hans from coming to some of the later meetings, and in 1995 the IFR program was abandoned, hopefully only temporarily, but I still discussed with him all my thoughts on nuclear energy on my many visits to Cornell for colliding beam physics.
Some critics have argued that Hans had no input into problems such as nuclear waste. That is not true. In one of my many discussions in late 1997, Hans mentioned that an Indian tribe (the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes} wanted to store nuclear waste (temporarily) in their back yard. This would enable spent fuel to be stored with an even smaller risk than in the reactor complex. By January 13th 1998 I had formed Scientists for Secure Waste Storage - with 6 Nobel Laureates, 2 Ambassadors, an astronaut and a former Presidential Science advisor to support the tribe’s efforts in the long public hearing. There was, and is, opposition. Hans always wanted to know the progress. I had hoped to be able to tell him of even partial success. But it was just a week after Hans’ death that the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board recommended approval (although there are still many avenues open for opposition). But he also died before the successful “back door” attack on the tribe by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) which 2 years later had stopped the project and maybe killed it for ever. I do not believe that the republican establishment in Utah is against the project because it is unsafe, but because it is a group of uppity Indians trying to do business on their own. Maybe the Democratic administration we have in 2009 will eventually reverse the decisions of BLM and BIA.
Hans was a conciliator. In 1988 half a dozen liberal Nobel laureates were upset with the Union of Concerned Scientists for using their names in a position paper against nuclear power, and Emilio Segré was threatening legal action.. This came about because they had all been asked to support the UCS position against the nuclear bomb arms race. Hans name was also misused in the same position paper but Hans who calmed them down. Henry Kendall was unrepentant. He said it would be too expensive to send to their mailing list a correction. Yet that would have cost no more than the initial erroneous usurping of their names. I, fortunately, was not personally involved. I was asked to sign the position against the nuclear arms race but explicitly in a letter to Henry Kendall (which was not answered) said that cold only do so if UCS withdrew their opposition to nuclear power. I was concerned that my name might later be misused - as indeed it would have been. But I pointed out the errors in the UCS position paper in a detailed article in Nuclear News (405), urging nuclear industry people to address them directly. In 1997 at an energy conference held by the Global Foundation, it was my privilege to be Chairman at the final panel session on nuclear power. Hans and Edward Teller, who disagreed on military uses of nuclear energy, expressed complete agreement with each other on the need for nuclear power. I understand it was the first time their wives, who were present at the meeting, had talked to each other for 20 years.
In getting to know Hans, I was privileged to know the power, strength and support of his wife Rose (Ewald). Rose’s father was a Professor of Physics at Frankfurt where she and Hans first met. Although not cognizant of details of our technical discussions, she understood the principles of the physics. Rose and her parents understood the evils of fascism even better than Hans, and it was principally Rose who shared with us her deepest concerns about the trend of the US government policies since 2001. I had followed the terrible events of the 1930s from across the English Channel and share her concerns. Andree and I met Rose a couple of times since Hans death, going out of our way to meet her in May 2008.
I had hoped to get together an energy group at Harvard, and MIT in a coherent enough fashion that we could get big funding from the AEC. The obvious MIT group was the nuclear engineering department at MIT. I noted above that I was friendly with Norman Rasmussen and I discussed nuclear safety with him from 1971 on. Professor Rose was also in a personal way, interested in expanding the horizons beyond nuclear power. I met Professor Manson Benedict who was a regular advisor to the AEC and got from them the Fermi award. But MIT did not seem, at the time, to be expansive in the way that I envisaged so that we did not have to hunt for every penny. Fred Abernathy of the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard had just come back from a couple of years in Washington at the US National Science Foundation. So he and I went down to Washington, in about 1976, with a preliminary proposal which we gave to Ken Davies, then Deputy Secretary of the Department of Energy. It got nowhere.
Other institutions did better. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory was a National Laboratory and got a great deal of funding. MIT formed an “Energy Lab”, separate from the Nuclear Engineering Department and at that time with no connection that I could discern. This Energy Lab” was to be a conduit for federal funding. I hoped that if we at Harvard could not form a lab with good funds from the government, maybe we could join with MIT. But this never worked out. I. joined with them in preparing a big proposal, but when DOE funding was 20% less than requested it was the Harvard small 20% that was cut out. Alas, I was merely window dressing to help get funding - then to be discarded. One of our “stars” was Dr William (Bill) Shurcliff. He had been a writer for Professor Smythe on the famous Smythe report of 1945 on the atomic bomb program. He was the radiation safety officer at the CEA. Now as CEA collapsed he decided to write about solar energy and wrote a series of factual reports on solar heated houses. All produced by himself with no budget. By about 1978 he had the produced 50 or so versions of “Solar Heated Houses”. The AEC, now the DOE, had put in by that time well over $100,000 to no useful result. In contrast to Bill Shurcliff, of course, LBL was awarded a big contract that they did not immediately know what to do with.

1974 was my “right wing summer”. I was asked to give some lectures on energy at the “Edward Teller Center for Science, Technology and Political Thought” at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Several distinguished scientists were there: Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and Paul Dirac. I was particularly proud when Eugene Wigner commented about my discussion of air pollution in a very complimentary way . “You really know your facts. It is important to really know.” I had met Eugene before, but in the three weeks of the school I got to know him a lot better.

I realized later that Eugene was indeed very troubled by fuzzy thinking and even more by pretension. Although I have my share of both of these, I am fortunate that his wrath was never turned on me. I saw it in action for the first time some 17 years later, in 1994, at a summer school/conference in Boulder, Colorado. A lecturer was explaining his speculations about possible ways of using solar energy to produce hydrogen. Eugene was quiet until the end. Then came the bombshell. “Dr X, will you please return to your second slide?” “Dr X please look at the fourth chemical reaction on the list”. “Everyone” (meaning only Eugene) “knows that this reaction does not go.”
But it was not until a 3 week summer school and conference on energy futures for the world in Boulder, Colorado that I talked extensively with him. He was there with his friend Edward Teller, his sister Manci and his brother-in-law Paul Dirac. Eugene’s interplay with Teller was fascinating. Eugene gave several lectures about nuclear energy. He would make some point about which it was just possible to argue. Edward Teller would say “I disagree”. Eugene would stop and stand still, somewhat like a reproved naughty boy, but with a huge smile on his face as Edward made his disagreement clear. It was usually a trivial point that Edward made. It was often, perhaps always, for the sake of disagreeing, but they clearly both enjoyed this little game, which I saw repeated on other occasions.
I am not sure how and when I became aware of Eugene’s huge contributions to understanding and using nuclear fission. It was probably about 1947 - before I had ever met him. There was a cold winter in England and coal trains could not get to the power plants. Electricity was rationed. We all talked about the energy crisis and the future of nuclear energy. My graduate work had just begun, with Carl Collie and with Dr Hans (von) Halban who, with Joliot and Kowarski, had measured (in 1939) the number of neutrons in fission for the first time. Somewhat later, in 1950, I used the thermal neutron flux from the British Experimental Pile (BEPO) to try to measure neutron capture gamma rays. This was a graphite reactor, and physicists there talked about the “graphite disease” alternatively called the “Wigner effect” and described by Wigner as early as 1943. It is the fact that, in a low temperature graphite reactor, fast neutrons will knock a carbon atom off its lattice and that atom could not get back. This would then store energy. As Seitz and Wigner stated in a semi-popular article in Scientific American in 1956, “the amount of sword-of-Damocles energy stored in this way can reach up to hundreds of calories per mole. Obviously a sudden release of it could lead to unpleasant complications”. As a result of this calculation, Wigner stated (earlier) that “it would be unscientific to claim a useful life (for the Hanford reactor) of more than 100 days.” Fortunately the lattice is able to readily recover its original form by a controlled temperature rise and annealing. This was regularly done and graphite reactors last much more than 100 days and many have lasted many tens of years. I have never seen a detailed description of what went wrong in Windscale in 1958, but I assume the fire in the graphite reactor was caused by a failure to anneal the reactor according to Wigner’s procedure, and the Wigner disease took over. Radiation damage studies of all sorts are now common. Sometimes they provide information on the lattice. Seitz and Wigner ended their brief article by saying “it is gratifying that a phenomenon which originated as a pure nuisance promises to provide us useful information about the solid state in general.” But also radiation damage studies are done to be sure that the material in question can survive intensive radiation bombardment.
It was in 1950 also, that I learned of Eugene’s huge contribution to the design and construction of the Hanford reactors - an engineering achievement of considerable magnitude, which involved the scaling from Fermi’s zero energy reactor to a 250 Mwt water cooled reactor. Such a large jump in size usually takes many years and many intermediate steps. The actual time is on record and was about 100 days. But I remember Eugene’s description to me at the Colorado meeting 30 years after the achievement: “I told General Groves: give me 100 scientists and engineers and I will have that reactor for you in 3 months. I was wrong. It took 4 months and when it was finished there were 10,000 people on site. The second reactor took 6 months and the third took 8 months” (presumably because Eugene was not watching the details by that time). This comment, from memory, of Eugene’s was in the context of the length of time to build an electricity producing power reactor - in 1974 it was 4 years, and now often much more. As Eugene himself wrote sometime later: “However this is not the full story: present reactors are expected to perform definite functions for extended periods in addition to performing a chain reaction.”
The initial design of the Hanford reactors was due to Eugene Wigner although DuPont Corporation was in charge of construction. It was Wigner who persuaded everyone that a graphite reactor cooled with helium gas (now a type favored by several designers) was less appropriate than a reactor with water cooling channels. The design is fully discussed in a report of summer 1942 (top secret at the time) “On a Plant with Water Cooling” with authors Weinberg, Young, Christy, Pless, Wigner and Williams. Although he was the first named author, Alvin Weinberg always maintains that he did not design the Hanford reactor but “I sat beside the man who did”. The detail in that paper is extraordinary and is shown in the many tables. “Oxygen and Hydrogen Content of Circulating Water.” “Heat Exchanger Design”, including numbers in “engineering units”, such as BTU/ft2 deg 0F, that physicists use at home but hate to use in the laboratory and many more including a detailed materials list. I am told that several of the engineering drawings, such as those in the report, were made by Eugene personally and that he would pore over suppliers’ catalogs and personally determine delivery times.
Wigner was certainly well aware that there was a positive void coefficient in a water cooled reactor - boiling of water in a channel would increase the reactivity - and the report has a whole paragraph showing how the water reduced the reactivity constant from 1.10 to 1.07. Inversely, a sudden removal of the water would increase it by 0.03 which is more than the fraction of delayed neutrons which allow control of the reactor. But as laconically noted by Alvin Weinberg later “no one dared to think of the consequences of a complete failure of the cooling”. Later, of course, people did and all US reactors are designed with the requirement of keeping the “void coefficient” low. But the Russians did not, even though the water in the channels of the RBMK reactors was normally boiling under pressure. Not taking proper account of the positive void coefficient was one of the several Russian mistakes that, taken together, led to the Chernobyl accident. But Wigner’s natural uranium reactors at Hanford (which as noted above he had only expected to last 100 days) were replaced after 20 years to avoid this problem. In 1986 when the Chernobyl accident took place many scientists and engineers, myself included, thought at once of the Wigner disease, and of the 1956 Windscale accident where, according to statements at the time, there had been inadequate attention to the problem. But the temperature of the graphite at Chernobyl was high enough to anneal the graphite continuously and avoid that particular problem.
Wigner in his memoirs describes his relationship with DuPont. DuPont engineers were more conservative than he would have been. But in Alvin Weinberg’s words, DuPont “saved his bacon.” When the Hanford reactor first went to high power, it shut itself down after an hour or so. Eugene and other physicists were not aware that one of the xenon fission products had a high cross section for thermal neutrons. Fortunately DuPont had allowed more space in the reactor vessel than Eugene’s design and when this was filled with fuel rods to compensate the effect of “xenon poisoning”, the reactor worked well.
Other features of the week long school and conference in Colorado were particularly interesting. Data were presented by someone about the 50 odd power reactors then operating. I was able to add my recent conversations with William Webster, President of the New England Electric System, about the costs of electricity generated by nuclear fission. At that time the (small) Yankee Rowe was producing electricity at a busbar cost of 0.9 cents per kilowatt hour, and Connecticut Yankee at 0.55 cents per kWh (including some contribution to paying off the mortgage). I clearly remember Eugene’s pleasure, and indeed surprise that nuclear electricity had at last become cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels. He had always said very succinctly “if nuclear power is not economic, it makes little difference whether it is only slightly uneconomic; it will not be built if other sources of energy are cheaper”. I am sure that he would have been as chagrined as many of us at the recent great increase in cost, beyond inflation, to 1.9 cents per kWh (in year 2000) plus a much larger sum for paying interest on the costs of construction. Some of the increase is due to inflation, some to increased staff in response to regulation, some to an increase in interest rates and some due to a general increase in construction costs above normal inflation. But my estimates of these effects do not add up to the actual cost increase. Eugene would be better than I have been at understanding and explaining the difference.
Eugene rejected the projections, which were common in the early 1970s, that US energy use would continue to double every 10 years as it had in the recent past. He stated his view that energy use would reach a plateau very soon. He put this in writing 2 years later after a nuclear energy symposium in Louisiana. Eugene was right. By 1974 energy use in the USA had already reached that plateau at 10 kW per person. Energy intensity, in energy per unit of GNP has since fallen in approximately the same amount as GNP has risen, thus reverting to a long term trend rather than the 1950 - 1970 period. Eugene expressed in his view in a typical worldly manner. “It is wrong” he said to Andrée and myself at a large breakfast “for a single individual to consume too much of the world’s goods.” Another philosophical remark he often made was “the promise of future science is to furnish a unifying goal to mankind rather than merely the means to an easy life; to provide some of what the human soul needs in addition to bread alone.”
I had some trepidation in going to th conference in Boulder. I was invited to give some lectures on energy and the environment based upon my work - then just beginning - of comparing risks of energy systems. I had feared that there might be some huge mistakes and that I would be mercilessly criticized. Fortunately I was wrong. Eugene said afterwards “You seem to know your numbers. It is very important to really know and not merely believe.” It was there that we formulated a simple concept that when there is a lot of easily available stored energy, such as easily burnable fuel, (or indeed carbon atoms knocked off the lattice by fast neutrons) in one place and a lot of people in a nearby location there is potential for disaster. Of course this concept was not new; the good citizens of London used such a principle in 1848 when they forbad the shipment of petroleum fuels up the Thames closer than 30 miles from London Bridge (at Canvey Island) but Eugene thought it a useful guiding principle. With encouragement from Eugene and others I continued and expanded my work on risks and gave a copy of my most recent book “Risk-Benefit Analysis “ to Eugene’s daughter Martha and to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Many scientists think only about their work and their contributions. But Eugene put his work into the context of other people’s work and was often generous in crediting the work of others. This was clear in conversation, and as I read his memoirs in preparing this talk, I realize it was true of his writings. In his memoirs, for example, he spontaneously praised Seaborg and pointed out that he had completed the plutonium chemical separation plant ahead of schedule - a schedule many leading chemists thought was not possible. In his memoirs about the early days of nuclear fission research he referred to the French group under Hans von Halban and Frederic Joliot - a reference that many Americans omit. For me this interest in other peoples work was a great pleasure.
Eugene could, and did, write detailed papers as well as smaller papers. When I started thinking about nuclear reactor safety in 1973, I was surprised to find a small paper with K. Way, written in 1948, about the rate of decay of fission products. Eugene explained that there is a proportionality between the disintegration constant and the fifth power of the disintegration energy. As a result, the total radioactivity from the products of nuclear fission falls as the inverse 1.2th power of time. The paper shows that this is experimentally confirmed. This “trivial” fact is easy to remember and therefore easy to use -and I use it frequently when I think about nuclear safety.
Although I read Eugene’s book with Al Weinberg “The physical theory of nuclear chain reactors” when it came out in 1958, I only recently became aware of his many papers and his 37 patents on nuclear reactors. These were mostly written at the tail end of the second world war, in 1945, and the years following (1946 and 1947). Roy Glauber recently told me that these patents were partially a result of a fact that at the Chicago laboratory there was a patent officer specifically to help the patent process. Eugene studied many possible reactor designs. The materials testing reactor at Oak Ridge was one of his designs. After a lull of some 15 years, he reverted to a review of new ideas on nuclear reactors in 1969. During the present (1990-2008+) lull in activity in building of nuclear reactors, more and more scientists are asking, as Wigner did in 1947, what are the useful combinations of fuel, moderator and coolant? Those involved in the “Generation IV” program of new nuclear reactor types could well examine carefully Wigner’s memoranda of spring 1945 and his 37 detailed patents.
I do not always agree with scientists who are far brighter than myself. So it was with Eugene Wigner. He had a deep distrust of Russians and it seemed that he was in favor of fighting any war in which Russia was even remotely involved. Thus, he and Edward Teller, fully supported the Vietnamese war till the end. I did not; nor it turned out did his sister, Manci or his brother-in-law Paul Dirac. This led to an embarrassing discussion at breakfast at the Colorado meeting. Manci started to talk to my wife Andrée, (née Desirée DuMond) and myself. “How well do you know Eugene?” I explained that Eugene and I had discussed physics for over 20 years. “You must talk to him” continued Manci. “You must persuade him that we (the USA) have to get out of this wicked war”. Both Andrée and I chickened out and said, somewhat weakly but truthfully, that we did not know him that well. At that time Eugene was deeply troubled and believed that the Soviet Union had built many air raid shelters for the important elements of their population. This would enable them to survive a nuclear war whereas the United States could not. He spent much time advocating air raid shelters and even spent a year on engineering designs - surely a waste of his talents! Eugene was not alone in this. The Nobel Prize winning chemist, and a former AEC commissioner, Bill Libby, also made his own air raid shelter, but less thoroughly. The mind boggles a little at the single mindedness of this determined man - committing himself to tasks far below his skills in a cause he believed in, because no one else would do so. If I ever have to be in an air raid shelter again I would rather it be in one designed by Eugene than one designed by Bill.
I found myself disagreeing again when Eugene organized an afternoon session at a small conference organized by the Reverend Moon. He invited many distinguished people including several of my colleagues and me. We disliked the “Moonies” and did not want to go to any meeting sponsored by Reverend Moon. My colleagues who had not developed a personal relationship with Eugene just ignored the invitation. But my friendship with Eugene was enough that I could not ignore his gracious invitation and painstakingly explained to Eugene why I would not go. As with all such discussions with Eugene I learned a lot: I had to explain in an exchange of letters my reasons for not going. Eugene insisted that Rev. Moon was funding the conference but not influencing him in any way. Of course we all receive funds from organizations that we do not always like. Nonetheless I and others felt that the very existence of the conference would be used to advertize what we believed to be an organization that was perverting many Americans. I found out later that one of my “liberal” friends went to this meeting. That was Dr Fadhel Jamali, who in 1945 some 40 years before, had signed the UN charter on behalf of Iraq, and was thrown out of office, narrowly escaping death, in the revolution of 1958. But our circumstances were different. Fadhel was over eighty, in poor circumstances in Tunis and when someone would pay his fare to the US he could ignore a domestic American problem.
I was honored by being asked to visit Budapest on the 100th anniversary of Eugene’s birth and to talk at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. At that meeting we honored Eugene Wigner as a scientist and remembered him as a friend. I believed then and now that we honor him best not by agreeing with him all the time but taking his work, his ideas and his principles and subjecting each and every one of them to the scrutiny he wanted and he would give to the work of others. He was a giant in all these respects.
At a public lecture I gave in an associated public conference in Denver during this three week energy course I compared risks of energy. There I first met the Astronaut Bill Anders who had just been named an AEC commissioner and was later to become Chairman of the NRC. Also I met Dr Ross Adams VP of Air Products and Chemicals who liked my lecture and my whole approach. “We have a problem with vinyl chloride” he said. “We think we are doing the right thing but are having a hard time explaining it. Can yo help us?” I replied that I would look at it, but warned him that if I thought he was right he had made a friend. If I thought he was wrong he had made an enemy. He took the risk and this was the real start of my lucrative consulting career which expanded far beyond what I had done for the State of Maine or what I had done on the High Energy Physics Committees.
But to return to my attempts to get a strong group studying energy at Harvard and MIT, I succeeded with a smaller effort. I founded, in 1975 believe,together with Professor Allan Manne of the Economics Department, the Energy and Environment Policy Center which we located in an old undergraduate laboratory, at the end of the second floor of Jefferson Laboratory. We had an initial small grant from the Cabot foundation, and a couple of others. I organized a weekly lunch time energy seminar for the Cambridge area, and my secretary prepared a list of lectures in the area “the Cambridge Energy Calendar”. I had visited England in summer 1972, I believe, and gave some lectures. A young man, Dr Andrew (Andy) Van Horn, came up and asked if he could come and work with me as a research fellow. I found a small amount of money, and we worked on accidents in energy systems and in particular wrote about LNG safety. I wanted to work on energy efficiency and policies with Andy at Harvard but he preferred to go to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory where he joined Arthur Rosenfeld for awhile. But the thought of having a joint Harvard-MIT energy center, modeled perhaps on the CEA, to rival LBL in the field remained on my mind. After Andy left for brighter climes, I got a call from Richard Eden of Cambridge, suggesting that a bright student of his, Edmund Crouch, would like to join on energy work. Edmund stayed at Harvard in the Energy end Environmental Policy Center for 10 years or so and is in Cambridge MA still as the leading bright scientist in Cambridge Environmental Inc. We did a little more energy work together,but most importantly Edmund had all the bright ideas on our work on chemical carcinogens and risk analysis.
In 1979 it was found that many of the coolant and other pipes in US nuclear power plants were overly, and incorrectly, constrained by clamps and so on. New calculations showed that this made them more, rather than less, liable to failure in an earthquake. NRC ordered many plants, including Maine Yankee, to shutdown until they could prove that their plant was alright. It was easy to show that the shut down made only a very small difference in reducing overall risk, and may even have increased risk by the disturbance. The proper procedure would, in my view, have been to keep the plant running while the calculations were being done. As I was writing this to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident occurred.
The TMI accident started at 4 am on March 28, 1979. I heard about it at 11 am on that Wednesday morning. My former student Bob Budnitz, then Director of Research at NRC, telephoned me and described what he knew. He was calling a dozen friends of known competence in the hope that a reliable word be spread. I remember Bob describing the sequence of events. At 4.45 the coolant pumps were cavitating (banging) because they were pumping steam as well as water. Bob told me: “then at 5.45 they turned off the main coolant pump”. I roared into the phone with extreme surprise “They did what?” and Bob replying that he did not understand it either. Once the pump was off, even though it had been pumping a mixture of water and steam, it would not restart for another 8 hours or so. Up until that time the reactor could have been recovered. But that action of switching off the pumps doomed the reactor.
The reactor operators had completely failed to understand what was happening between 4.15 and 5.30 in the morning But Bob and I were conditioned to understand. In his PhD thesis work Bob had a small liquid deuterium target. The cryogenic engineers had told him repeatedly that it was full because their thermistors said so, Bob had to show them by electron scattering that there was no deuterium therein. I had previously had another like experience at Fermilab when the cryogenic engineers insisted, by looking at their solid state level detectors, that the target was full of hydrogen but I could show by looking at our data that muons were only scattering from the bottom of it. So we were both conditioned to understand at once the error made by the operators in thinking that the reactor vessel was full of water - when it was not. The indicators they had was the water was up to the top of the pressurizer. They had forgotten that a kettle of water boiling on the stove will still have water dripping from the outside when almost all had boiled away. The measured numbers of the pressure and temperature by 4.20 should have told them that the water was boiling. But that was not the worst mistake.
I called Leo Beranek, then head of Channel 5 TV and he suggested that I be on the 11 pm news. I called Bob Budnitz at home at 10.45 and got the latest news from NRC and was also able to get through by telephone to the TMI control room. Dr Ted Webster, radiation physicist at MGH, and I spent ½ hour without any commercial break describing what we knew and explaining the limits of any possible radiation release level on nuclear safety. I also was on a couple of other TV shows. I wrote to the newspaper about the lessons to be learned (223).
The Governor of Massachusetts asked me to be Chairman of a small panel to recommend what should be done at the state level. The real answer was that the Commonwealth should not make any appreciable changes in what it was already doing. Massachusetts already had an emergency preparedness group sitting in a bunker in Framingham. This bunker was designed during the cold war so that the group could still function in the event of a major nuclear attack. I was agreeably surprised to find that the emergency plans for a nuclear power accident were integrated with emergency plans for other hazards. They, correctly, considered a nuclear accident to be one of 20 or so severe accidents for which they had to be prepared. They integrated the plans mandated by the AEC with their own. This was far better than in most states where there was no comprehensive emergency plan, and a nuclear emergency plan would therefore never be exercised by smaller, more frequent, non-nuclear emergencies. I assume that everyone who reads this will agree that emergency plans should be practiced. Less obvious is the that they should be integrated as far as possible for various accidents. For example both evacuation for a nuclear power accident, which we hope will be infrequent or never, is similar to evacuation when there is an overturned freight car with toxic chemicals. The less frequent possibility can be exercised by the frequent possibility of other accidents if the plans are integrated.
It might be thought that the Massachusetts Emergency Preparedness Department would be first responders. But that does not seem to be the case in practice. My recent 2003-2008) interactions with the Framingham Emergency Planning Group ave not been as positive, but I note that it is the Framingham group who integrate and organize the medical and other teams at the time of the yearly Boston Marathon so they have close coordination with first responders and medical teams. While it is very unlikely that an actual terrorist scenario would ever follow what was exercised, the exercises enable the various players to work with, and trust, each other and learn each others weaknesses and automatically to compensate for them.
Our small committee reporting to the Governor of Massachusetts did take the opportunity of making two recommendations which although still technically sensible are still politically unpalatable. Noting that not a single US newspaper had been accurate in discussion of the accident and its implications, whereas NRC press releases were accurate, precise and brief, we suggested that when an major accident, of any type, occurred the Governor should ask the press to print any government press release verbatim, on any page they wished, and only then make whatever comment thereon they wished. In the Boston area for example there are probably well over a thousand physicians and scientists who understand radiation and its units. The press, instead of informing them kept them in the dark by feeding them garbage. When, in front of TV cameras, I reported the recommendations, including this one, to the Governor, I could see that ALL of the cameras turned off as I made this important recommendation. It never reached the news! Scientists have still a long way to go to get reliable technical information across. I still think that my description of what had happened at Three Mile Island, in an Appendix to the report, is superior to that of many others who are mesmerized by pictures of a partially melted core.
One of the worst features of the press coverage was the failure of most reporters to understand the units in which important parameters are measured. They would confuse the radiation dose in Rems or Oersteds with Radiation dose rate in Rems/hr or Rems per year. It is as if they could not tell whether they commuted 30 miles to work each day or commuted 30 miles per hour. One can easily tell those who have no technical understanding their misuse of units in this way. Scientists get confused between measures in the centimetre-gram-second (cgs) units and in the metre-kilogram–second (MKS) units. I tell my students to become comfortable with one set so that they can get a rapid understanding, but be able to translate accurately, with perhaps some delay. into another. What for example, is Planck’s constant in units of the Pole - Stone and Fortnight? An example we used to love as students is the unit of Beauty. 1000 ships were sent to rescue Helen of Troy. So the Helen is obviously a unit of Beauty. But it is not a practical unit. Most of us only know someone with a milliHelen who might launch one ship. And we all know a few where the microHelen is more appropriate.
A couple of years later, in 1992, Bob Marshak, then President of the American Physical Society asked me to be Chairman of a committee of the American Physical Society to study the "radionuclide release from severe accidents at nuclear power plants" (341). We had a good committee. As an executive assistant Professor Rose of MIT’s nuclear engineering department suggested Dr Kamal Araj who had just got his PhD at MIT. Kamal was excellent in this role.. He is a Palestinian, born in Beit Jala but had acquired American citizenship. Alas, after he left Harvard he ran into a number of problems all related to his personal behavior. He was arrogant and I remember that this was the first and only time the physics department chairman (me) got a complaint from a travel agent for insulting the staff of the agency. In that I could not help. Other people have had behavior problems, some described in these pages, but their physics was good enough that the world would ignore the bad behaviour. My work on TMI did not go unnoticed. I was asked by a small group in New York, Scientists Institute for Public Information (SIPI), whether I would be willing to have my life interrupted by reporters asking about radiation matters. I agreed and that led to a lot of work after the Chernobyl accident. For a month after the Chernobyl accident I seemed to be continuously on the phone.
After TMI I was asked by DOE to join the Health and Environment Research Advisory Committee (HERAC), which appointment lasted for 3 years, and also the Energy Board of the National Academy of Sciences which sponsored and organized energy studies. I stayed on this NAS board about 10 years until about 1991. I was agreeably surprized and extraordinarly pleased when my work about nuclear power was explicitly honored by the American Nuclear Society by a “Presidential Mention” at tyhe annual meeting in 2009.