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

Chernobyl
In 1986 after the nuclear power plant blew up at Chernobyl, I immediately (April 28th) sent telexes to two Russian friends Sergei Kapitza, and Eugeny Velikhov, and also to Professor Alexandrov, President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, describing my skills and volunteered to go and help. Professor Alexandrov asked for my reactor safety report and I referred him to Sergei to whom I had already sent a copy. My offer of help was not immediately accepted. On my 60th birthday, April 29th 1986 I was on four different US TV programs explaining the situation and had many phone calls from the press starting with a call from Australia at 8 am and one from the NY Times correspondent in Moscow at 2 pm. The NY Times correspondent could not get information from Moscow and was told that I knew more than anyone! This was only the beginning. I was on the phone or giving talks continuously for a month. DOE had learned a little from the TMI accident and set up a committee to filter information so that it was not erroneously reported in the press. Alan Sessoms, at that time in the Department of State, was on this committee, and it just took a phone call to get put on his list of reliable persons. On the first day I mentioned, both in my telexes to the USSR and on the McNeil-Lehrer show on NBS the importance of looking for iodine and if present the need for restricting milk consumption. This appeal to the USSR was not immediately accepted because of the Soviet desire for secrecy. Adnan Shihab-Eldin called me from Kuwait and asked when the radioactive cloud would reach Kuwait. I checked with scientists at Livermore National Laboratory who had the best program for calculation of air dispersion available at the time. They said the plume would reach Kuwait when the wind changed on May 2nd. Adnan was therefore ready for it. He pumped volumes of air through filter paper and collected and measures the particulate radioactive iodine. It remains, I believe, the only good overseas measurement in the quadrant of the world SE of Chernobyl. These data were the fodder for the PhD thesis of Dr. Ameenah Farhan, who became Chairman of the physics department of the University of Kuwait in 1993 and by 2006 was deputy dean of the University of Kuwait. She is a very good and reliable physicist.

The newspapers were a little better at describing the Chernobyl accident than describing the TMI accident. But even the New York Times printed a number of incorrect stories. I was sent, by my friend Dr Adnan Shihab-Eldin, then director of the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) a precise story in 3 typewritten pages, of a visit to the power plant 2 days after the accident by a friend who was the Middle Eastern correspondent for Pravda who was on leave in his home town of Kiev. It rang true to me. It still does. But the NY Times would not print it because they “could not verify the source”, although I provided his name and phone number. They could not verify the source of most of the junk they printed.

A few years later the Japanese criticality accident occurred. Again, the New York Times (NYT) got the facts wrong.. They quoted the correct digits for the maximum off site dose, but were off by a factor of 1000. They quoted 2 Rems per hour not 2 mRems per hour (actual number from memory - not to be quoted). They had by this change converted a nuisance into a disaster. Fortunately I had specifically called Dr Kazuhisa Mori, head of the Japanese Atomic Industrial Forum in Japan the night before. Dr Mori was very enthusiastic about nuclear power although both his parents were killed at Hiroshima. Dr Mori knew the numbers and when the National Public Radio news man telephoned me at 7.30 in the morning I was able to prevent him repeating the NYT mistake. It was good that NPR knew to call an “expert”. But why did NYT not do so? Was that part of “all the news fit to print”? Do the Harvard emergency plans include endeavoring to be sure that the media publish the correct information? Of course I am not talking censorship here. They can publish, in addition to correct information, any garbage they wish. I think that it should be a priority for the press and other media but at the moment I do not find it to be so.
The problem of accurate communication on radiation matters persists long after an accident. Poor communication, sometimes even to the extent of propagation of junk science, persists about asbestos hazards 60 years after the major exposures which occurred in the ships and shipyards of WWII and just afterwards. It exists to a lesser extent on other matters also. Recently in a small way I was able to help our local building manager when the attic of the Lyman laboratory was being renovated and mercury was suspected. The more they cleaned, the higher seemed the mercury levels. I called the manufacturer of the measuring equipment and he admitted that at low concentrations the readings were adversely affected by solvents - such as had been used for cleaning. The more they cleaned, the greater the false reading!
The Soviet response to the Chernobyl accident was in many ways more tragic than the accident itself. While the evacuation of Pripyat, while a day late, was carried out well and soon enough, the secrecy in the USSR prevented the authorities from carrying out what is the most important action. They should have impounded all milk within a hundred miles or so and stopped the drinking of fresh milk. As I look back at my records of letters, I found one to Bob Budnitz in Berkeley in 1971. We both were beginning to think from first principles about reactor safety and consequences of an accident. In that one page letter I outlined what had to be done, a letter with which Bob agreed. Although volumes have been written on what to do, the one page letter summarized the essential points. All the rest is detail. Leonid Ilyin, deputy Minister of Health in the USSR knew this too. He had written a paper, translated into English about 1983, explaining this, and describing in appreciative detail the British reaction to the Windscale reactor accident in 1957. That, or another, paper also compared the residual risks to risks of air pollution containing numbers that almost certainly came from my book! But Dr. Ilyin did not speak up and stop the drinking of milk. Other people who knew about the radioactive iodine deposition were Dr. Izrael who was head of the Institute of hydrometeorology in Leningrad and whose staff made the first rapid radioactivity survey on May 27 and 28th, Evgeny Velikhov of the Kurchatov Institute and Gorbachev’s Science advisor, and Sergei Kapitza. They probably knew earlier, but on the morning of May 29th they had no excuse: Each of them received phone calls from worried friends in the west saying effectively: “Impound the Milk.” Any one of these individuals in the USSR could have broken the wall of silence and saved a thousand children from thyroid cancer. I cannot and do not blame them for their silence I have never had to live in their society of secrecy where stepping out of line might mean exile to Siberia or worse. In the west we felt powerless. My own personal views were reinforced. An open society is crucial for ensuring safety.
The Soviets agreed to describe all that they knew about the accident at a special meeting at IAEA in Vienna. The IAEA is an organization of about180 countries and if each sent two delegates to the meeting the lecture room would be filled. The US was allotted 12 places. There were more than 12 bureaucrats in Washington who wanted an expenses paid trip to Vienna, with no chance for people like me. So I persuaded Adnan Shihab-Eldin to invite me as a consultant to the Kuwait delegation. I deliberately joked about this with Ambassador Kennedy who thought, as I expected, that this was inappropriate and he wangled an additional place on the US delegation. But when we got to the lecture room I was not given a seat in the main lecture room but had to watch on TV from another room. At the lunch break I saw my old college friend John Maddox, editor of Nature, and explained the situation “You are writing a report on the meeting for Nature (370) ” he said “and here is your press pass”. With my new pass, which let me in to the main lecture room, I asked Ambassador Kennedy for an interview. He laughed and rectified the situation. I was then properly admitted to the American delegation. Also that night, McNeil and Lehrer, by long distance telephone, asked me to join Hans Blix (Director General of IAEA) on a direct link up to their TV program to discuss the report.
I tried to parlay my knowledge and experience on Chernobyl, nuclear radiation and Russians into a DOE grant to study the effects. Edmund Crouch and I wrote a detailed proposal. But DOE preferred then to work through an established laboratory. Moreover I was not a part of the “Radiation Club” and insiders got the funds. Evgeny Velikhov invited me, in February 1987, to attend the conference on a “Nuclear Free World” . At the ballet performance at the Bolshoi to which the participants were invited, I asked when could I visit Chernobyl. I did so later in the week and was one of the first foreigners to do so.. I wrote about this in “Chernobyl after the Accident”.(389) Then in December 1987 I arranged, with the help of Sergei Kapitza and his connections with Moscow TV, a visit by an independent US film producer. This film “Back to Chernobyl” appeared on .National Public Radio in 1988.. I was one of the 300,000 or so awarded a medal in 1987 as one of the "liquidators". I have written extensively since about the accident (475, 485, 501, 532, 580, 581, 614, 624).
One of the features about the Soviet Union in those days was that it was a good source of excellent jokes. They produced an abundance. “What is the difference between Communism and Capitalism?” On receiving no reply the answer came. “With Capitalism Man exploits Man. With Communism it is the other way around.” After Chernobyl the rule became: “When there is an accident you first reward the guilty; you punish the innocent and decorate the uninvolved”.

This last tends to be a universal rule. The Russian pilot who shot down a Korean Airline plane off Kamchatka was decorated. The Israeli pilot who bombed the Iraqi research reactor was decorated. The UK Health and Safety person who made a mess of the response to the poisoning of a Russian ex-diplomat by Polonium 210 was decorated. But sometimes authorities exploit mishaps for sensible ends. When a German youth flew a small plane into Russia and landed in Red Square, he had been tracked and not shot down. But he was not forced to land. I was told by Anna Kapitza that Gorbachov took the opportunity to fire 40 hard line Red Army or Air Force generals for their incompetence!

Safety Committees
In 1991-1992 I was asked to chair an advisory committee for the government of the Republic of China, on the operation and safety of the nuclear power plants in Taiwan. The suggestion that I be the Chairman was prompted by Paul Lochak but actually came from Lee Yuan-Tse, born in Taiwan, but who shared the Nobel prize for work with Dudley Hershbach when he was at Harvard. He went back to Taiwan about 1990 as president of Academica Sinica. I had a more expansive view than the rest of the committee and I think Lee Yuan-Tse expected that would be the case. Probably that was why he wanted me to be Chairman. I wanted to be sure that our report addressed every issue that the anti-nuclear scientists in Taiwan raised. I had a little problem in persuading our immediate employers, the staff of the Minister of Economic Affairs that it was a good idea. The rest of the committee was lukewarm. But I had already discussed this with Yuan Lee and we both felt that it was important. So we invited the anti-nuclear people to talk to us. The most important anti nuclear activist refused, but we addressed (mostly in an appendix) his publicly stated concerns anyway. The committee was composed of two Japanese nuclear engineers, a Belgian and a French nuclear expert, and a mainland born Chinese in addition to myself. We went over all the safety indicators proposed by the US Institute of Nuclear Power Operators, INPO.
At the time Taiwan had three nuclear power plants with two reactors each. There are two Westinghouse PWRs at Kentung in the SW corner of the island, 2 GE BWR reactors in Kaoshiung in the north and 2 more Westinghouse reactors in the north. They were planning, but as of 2008 still have not finished , two more. I called around to find out what previous reviews had said, and had a list of 400 or so questions that they had raised and asked what was the resolution of each of the issues. I was told that the station in Kentung in the SW was troublesome. I was also anticipating that the Chinese reverence for age and authority might be inimical to a safety culture. I remember the final press conference where we presented the report (500EXTRA) . “It is important,” I said, “that there be a culture of safety among everyone in the nuclear industry which exceeds that in society as a whole.” As an example, I cited the safety in the conference room where we were meeting the press. There was no cover on the light switch at the entrance and it was all too easy to get an electric shock. “Unless everyone in the industry is automatically safer than this, the reactors will not be safe as they could be.” I personally practice a cautious approach to hazards. When I stay in a hotel of 5 stories or more I always walk down the emergency stairs to be sure that I know where they are if an emergency arises. My children used to laugh at me. After 9/11 they laugh no more.
Our committee agreed to my surprise, that the Taiwanese ran their power plants more safely than the US does, according to the INPO criteria. We asked tough questions at Kentung and found that the Superintendent of the station had changed since my information. I was impressed by the way he managed his staff. He assembled the top 20 or so to answer our questions. As we asked a tough question he picked a member of his staff. “Mr X is the expert on that one.” we got a straight forward answer. He had also solved an interesting hydro-mechanical turbulence issue which had resulted in earlier years in 5 to 10 unnecessary turbine trips a year.
We were less impressed by the management of the Kaoshiung plant. We went inside the containment of one of the BWRs. We saw one of the security guards smoking a cigarette while going his rounds. There is inevitably a lot of inflammable material around, and fire is an initiating event that can lead to common mode failure, this is potentially very serious. We said nothing till our final report. Six months later the superintendent of the plant was replaced .
In discussions of nuclear power I made a special visit to see Andrei Sahkarov in 1979 to ascertain his views. They are described elsewhere in a separate section on Russian Scientists. Elena Bonner decided to honor the memory of Andrei after his death in 1990 by an International Conference with the theme being the two major interests of Andrei in his last years: the rule of law in Russia and Eastern Europe and the effects of Chernobyl on the future of nuclear power. I was deeply honored by being asked to organize the second part. In 1990 we had a planning meeting in Moscow, and in May 1991 held the conference. About that time an Argonne laboratory physicist born in Minsk called to ask my help. His mentor in Minsk, Professor Stanislaw Suskevic wanted help in training people in Belorussia. His problems were a little like a provincial university in Farnce. All the best people went to Moscow. So after the planning meeting I was asked by the physicist Dr Stanislaw Suskevich, who was by then VP of the University of Belorussia in Minsk and VP of the Belarussian Supreme Soviet to meet him in Minsk. I did so. Suskevich had political obligations in the Belorussian Supreme Soviet in May 1991 and could not come to the International Sahkarov conference but sent a younger colleague, Dr Alexander Lutsko. Lutsko asked to be allowed to use the Sakharov name for the Sakharov College of Radioecology in Minsk, Belarus, which has become the International Sakharov Environmental University. Elena Bonner readily granted that request. In August 1991 the Soviet Union was crumbling and Suskevich became acting Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus. In October I received a bizarre FAX from Minsk. It was the text, with accompanying English translation, of a request to the Supreme Soviet by the Chairman (Stanislaw Suskevich) to form a college of Radioecology. It was signed by such persons as the head of the Orthodox church in Minsk, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Minsk, the head of a new NGO “Children of Chernobyl” and had a space for the signature of “Richard Wilson, Chairman of the International Advisory Committee.” I thought for a few minutes, signed and sent it back. I remained Chairman for 10 years, until 2002 and remain an honorary member, and was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2001.
While my expenses in Belarus have always been paid by the University, I have had to pay for my fare from personal sources, and I have taken it as a duty to find international funding for those activities that we thought important. I got a UNESCO grant for them in 1992 by calling at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on my way to the first meeting of the International Advisory Committee in January 1992. I wrote the first draft of the successful proposal which I handed to Lutsko and was sent in by Lutsko almost unaltered. I also got some funding from Soros until the new President, Lukashenko, decided to tax all foreign gifts so Soros declined to supprt us further.

.

That January was hectic in many ways and I missed an important family duty. In December 1990, we had a call from Alison that Winnie was getting worse and had to go to the retirement home that we had picked out the previous year. Geoffrey and I both remember the frustration that we felt at the time We had asked her physician, the post office manager, the bank manager and others, to telephone Geoffrey or me at any hour of day or night if there was need and NOT to call Alison. But he called Alison first! Geoffrey coped by phone with the arrangements and winnie went without problem to the nursing home near Banbury. But then went to England, as previously planned, in mid January to empty her apartment. I could have gone a few days earlier but could not do so at that time, because I had the prior arrangement to go to Minsk, but Andrée spent 2 or 3 days helping Geoffrey pack up.
I flew to Paris, called on UNESCO, met with the head of FRAMATOME and Paul Lochak and then on to Minsk. I had no visa for travel to Russia and decided to avoid Russia itself, so flew to Warsaw and took the night train to Minsk which left at 1 am. It was probably in Paris that I found that I could not find my “high energy physics” diary with all my telephone numbers. It had fallen out of my pocket in the mens’ room of the Fermilab lodging house “Aspen East” a day or two earlier. A call to FERMILAB got someone who found it, and at the appropriate date there was the phone number of Stanislaw Suskevich. I waited 3 hours in Warsaw at the railroad station with all waiting rooms closed, sitting on a cold floor. I was tired and feeling a little unwell as I borded the train at 1 am. As a train buff I had hoped to be awake at 4 in the morning as the wheels were changed under the car at Brest Litovsk as we passed from standard gauge track to the Russian broad guage but I was not feeling well so slept through it. I had the ‘flu. I was allowed into Belarus without a visa because I knew the head of state! (Stanislaw Suskevich).
On arrival at Minsk at 11 am it was 30 degrees below zero. At that temperature it is irrelevant whether one says Fahrenheit or Celsius! But it was a fine day and it was OK in the sun. But I had no rubles or kppeks and there was no place to change money! But a friendly Russian gave me 3 kopeks for the telephone coin box I called Suskevich and half an hour later Alexander Lutsko picked me up. We stayed in a hotel on the main street which had been the communist party hotel just across the from the University. I remember walking across to the University the next morning with Elena Bonner for our first meeting She was recognized by a passing Russian who asked her what she thought of the political situation. But there was a shortage of food. The food distribution in the USSR had been organized by the Communist part, who had bought at fixed prices from the peasants. Now that system had broken down and in te towns food was more expensive. But I was taken to a Sauna where I believe I got rid of my ‘flu. The photograph on my website was taken by Stanislaw Suskevich himself when I handed him my camera. He briefly described the meeting a month before when he had invited Yeltsin of Russia and Kravchuk of Ukraine to meet and found the new Union of Independent states That night he had two soldiers guarding his modest 2 bedroom apartment. What were you afraid of I asked. “Gorbachev.” was the prompt reply. This story has always amused me when I think of the numerous secret service guards in the USA
On leaving Minsk I needed a reservation on the night train to Warsaw. But even the head of state could not arrange it! So a young lecturer, whose name temporarily escapes me, came with on a local to Brest Litovsk, 10 minutes after the fast Paris train. He gave me instructions. When you get there look lost and don say a work in Russian. Just say “Paris, Paris!” That was easy. A lady came out from the booking office who spoke French. “When do you want to go?” “As soon as possible” I replied. There is a train in half an hour”. So I went rapidly through the passport control, and boarded the train in an ordinary compartment. It was the Paris express that I had wanted to travel in which had arrived in Brest Litovsk an hour before and had just had the wheels changed. There were 5 Belorussian ladies there - somewhat stout, or as we rudely say “Potato fed”. At the first large town in Poland, they all got out, passed their baggage, mainly sacks of food, through the window to each other. I offered my “bungee cords” as a contribution to their endeavor. These peasants were taking food to sell in Poland for hard currency. Indeed Russian peasants understood the free market system very fast. Interestingly, Andrei Sakharov had argued that the USSR should break apart and come back together in a voluntary, and more powerful and benevolent, union. Suskevich was trying to do this. He got the leaders of the republics to agree to an accord that any visa for on country of the former USSR would be valid for any other. This has now changed and when I have to travel both to Belarus and Russia I need 2 visas. But I have violated this more than once. I have entered Belarus, without a visa, on the train from Moscow, and come into Moscow from Armenia without a visa. Although this has confused the newly benevolent authorities I have had no real problems.
I did not forget my meeting, in 1974, with Bill Anders at the meeting in Denver. Nor did he. I later talked to him when he was Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and he invited me to visit him in Norway when he was ambassador. At that meeting he introduced me to the Norwegian nuclear people. I stayed in the Ambassador’s residence which occupies a site in a city block. Apparently it was built by Alfred Nobel for his daughter as a wedding present. Bill was out having dinner with the King when I arrived. The reader may recall that in 1948 I had gone with a group from the Oxford University Scout Club to a Rover Scout meet in Sjak, in Norway. The Crown Prince had come to visit each group’s camp site, and had eaten supper with us. Now the Crown prince was King. I told Bill Anders that in 1948 the Crown Prince had dinner with our small group which was the inverse of Bill having dinner with the King! A couple of years later Bill and I talked, together with his deputy Bertram Wolfe, when he was running GE Nuclear in San Jose. Then Bill was asked to run General Dynamics, which he took from being a large company losing money to a smaller, profitable company. After a few years he retired to a house on Orcas Island in Puget Sound. I asked him several times to support me in briefs of amicus curiae on nuclear matters with the Atlantic Legal Foundation and also was very strong in his support of the Goshute Indians. He told me that when I next visited Seattle he would pick me up at the airport and he would fly me to his house. The opportunity came 10 years later in 2007 when the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME) awarded me the Dixy Lee Ray award. Bill was in Seattle, and we drove out to hiis island. Bill and his wife Valerie introduced Andrée and me to several of their friends. I was described as the major specific supporter of nuclear power. He also praised me for my patience and persistence in this, and said that he did not have the patience. Two of Bill and Valerie’s 5 children became fighter pilots. A third son would have also become a fighter pilot but he has the same problem as I displayed in Worthy Down when I was 16. His stomach would not let him. Allo three of them joined Bill in a museum of WWII aircraft in Bellingham, and on November 5^th we flew across to the special opening day at Bellingham. Bill has a four seater De Havilland Beaver monoplane, (often used by the Canadian Forest Service for fire fighting). It was a fifteen minute ride and I am glad to say that my stomach treated Bill better than the hapless pilot at Worthy Down some 60years before.