An Interview with Carol Rainey by Louis Martinelli.

Whitewater River Letter (Summer/Fall 2009), Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 23-27

Question: Wendell Berry, in his foreword to your book One Hundred Miles from Home, called it "almost biblical...a book of revelation." I can't recall any higher praise he's given another book. Was it your intention to write something this deep and large? Do you see One Hundred Miles from Home as a religious or spiritual book, as Berry suggests?

Carol Rainey: Back in the 1980s when I first realized the magnitude of the nuclear danger--over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, enough to blow up the earth many times--I had a kind of religious crisis. What did it mean that we were in danger of destroying creation? Was this how life on earth was "supposed" to end? I began to connect with several religious pacifist groups who were committed to "doing somethng," if only calling attention to the danger, to wake people up, to bring about changes in policies. And the world-wide anti-nuclear movement did have some effect. In 2000, when Bush said that nuclear weapons were "back on the table," I felt some of the same ugency and fear I had felt back in the 1980's, and the same need to do something. In the 80s I was concerend about nuclear weapons on the macro-level; this time it was on the micro-level--how the building of bombs in the Ohio River valley contaminated our landscape and lives. I suppose any action which is motivated by a desire to protect the earth is religious.

Question: Besides the obvious reason--you live in Cincinnati, Ohio--why did you choose to write about nuclear contamination in the Ohio River Valley?

Carol Rainey: As I said, in the 1980s I was thinking about the danger of all the nuclear weapons to the planet, but I had no real awareness then how dangerous the building of nuclear weapons was. When I learned what happened at Fernald and Piketon--the two nuclear weapons plants closest to me--I was shocked to realize the danger of radioactive contamination was so near. In the 80s I had been operating on an abstract level, but now the danger was very immediate and personal. I learned about the sickness of real people, lies of local officials, radioactive fish in the Scioto River, the contamination of the Great Miami Aquifer. One of the insidious things about radiaion is its invisilbity--one of the reasons workers and plant neighbors weren't worried in the early days, and one of the reasons people still are not as concerned about the nuclear danger as they should be. What I learned from all the research, though, was that the effects of radiation exposure are permanent; some of the radioactive waste will be in this region forever. Perhaps that is another reason working on the book raised religious questions for me. The low-level waste which is at Fernald will be there 6 billion years. That means we're talking about eternity in a way. We have done thngs which could conceivably damage the planet for as long as it exists.

Question: Why did the government concentrate the nuclear industy--at least in the 1950's and 60's--in the Ohio River Valley? How did Cincinnati come to be the industry hub?

Carol Rainey: A number of reasons. Though the government said it wanted the plants inland for national security purposes, this may not have been entirely true. The two plutonium production plants--in Hanford, Washington and Savannah River, South Carolina--were near the coasts. It may have been that the politicians in Ohio and Kentucky lobbied so heaviliy for them (Truman's vice president was from Paducah, Kentucky, one of the sites) in order to create jobs. It may have been that the government knew that the region was politically conservative and not apt to raise a lot of questions about what the military was doing. In the beginning this was the case, but later on, fortunately, the people of the area did speak up, and loudly. Another reason the plants were located here may have been that they needed to be near rivers, since enormous quantities of water were needed both for the operation of the plants and the disposal of waste. In the beginning the government guaranteed that all waste would be processed before it was put into the rivers, but this turned out not to be true. Some of the waste got into the steams from accidents and from illegal waste disposal methods.

Question: What was the impact on people's health after the waste got into the streams?

Carol Rainey: One of the difficult issues in talking about the health effects of nuclear waste is that they are incredibly difficult to measure. This is one reason workers and residents have not had much success in court cases. Even in the successful lawsuit by Fernald's neighbors, attorneys were not allowed to cite health effects as one of the reasons for damages. There are a number of reasons measuement is so hard. First, in many cases we don't know exactly what substances workers were exposed to. Records were kept badly in the early years, and in some cases destroyed. Second, we don't know if a synergestic effect of radioactive materials and chemicals could have caused illnesses. Third the government has maintanied in most of the nuclear court cases that most American cancers are caused by diet and smoking. (John Gofman, though, has done research showing there is a high probability of lung cancers when smokers are exposed to radioactive substances; that is, the two dangers reinforce each other.) Fourth, it's hard to say why some people are directly affected by exposures and others apparently not, though some biologists believe if there is genetic damage to cells from low-level radiation exposure, illnesses may not show up for generations. In short, nuclear biology is sitll in its early stages. Back in the 1950s the Atomic Energy Commission had a certain threshold for "safe" radiation exposure, and through the years the level has been geting lower and lower. Many scientists today think there is no safe level. We just don't know the health effects. Unfortunately many of the workers who were endangered in the early years of the Cold War--when there was minimal worker protection and much carelessness in the operation of the plants--are now dead. And even though the EPA is monitoring all the sites I talk about in the book, it's not clear at this point how much of the data is going to be made available to the public. The Bush adminisitration did in scary thing in closing the EPA libraries to public access, although that policy has, thankfully, been changed and they are open again. We were told secrecy was necessary for national security purposes, but the secrecy also allowed the government to get away with doing a lot of things which put workers and the natural environment at risk.

Question: Your description of the damage to land, property and the rural community life surrounding Jefferson Proving Ground in southern Indiana is chilling--like the military's practice bombing of a chruch the government had acquired through eminent domain.

Carol Rainey: Yes, the environmental destruction at all the sites--especially the rich farmland in southern Indiana near Jefferson, and the farms in close proximity to Fernald--is chilling. Rural community life in southern Indiana was destroyed when the weapons testing ground was built. Not surprisingly today there are economic problems in the Madison area; the community has had a hard time recreating itself.

At Jefferson and Fernald, I found evidence that there were some holdouts--people who didn't want to relinguish their farms to the government. There were probably also holdouts at the other sites. I came across one story about a nuclear site in the South where two elderly people with rifles tried to prevent the government bulldozers from coming in. They were not only arrested, but were put in mental institutions. But it makes you wonder, now, who were the crazy ones.

Question: Which takes me back to that terrible, ironic image of a church in Indiana the American military bombed in order to perfect the destruction of enemy property. Robert J. Lifton, the American psychiatrist and author, has written about what he calls "gunism"--the belief hat no weapon is too destructive if its purpose is to defend one's home or one's country.

Carol Rainey: I haven't done a lot of reading on the psychology of nuclear weapons production--though Dr. Strangelove was part of my heritage when I was growing up. I do know that Hiroshima evoked a mixed reaction--some people were horrified, some proud that we now had the most destructive bomb on earth. The obsession with the superbomb is connected with machismo in its most irrational and dangerous form. When Adlai Sevenson said in the 50's that we should stop building the H-bomb, he was called soft.

Up until very recently any political leader who advocated nuclear disarmament was open to the same charge. Now Henry Kissinger,of all people, is saying that nuclear wepaons should be abolished. Things are changing. The dangers and lunacy are becoming more apparent to everyone.

Question: What would you say to those who maintain the development of nuclear weapons and the development of so-called peaceful nuclear energy plants are two entirely different realities? What is the relevance of your research to this argument?

Carol Rainey: The weapons plants came first. People in the government only began the aggressive promotion of nuclear power plants in the 60's when they realized there was a weapons surplus, and when they didn't want to shut down the uranium enrichment plants in case those plants were needed in the future for nuclear weapons production. The nuclear power plants which were built were poorly designed; there were cost overruns, shutdowns and accidents. After Three Mile Island, no new plants were constructed.

For the last ten years the nuclear industry has been promoting a "nuclear renaissance," wanting to build a new generaton of nuclear power plants which it says are safe, cheap and preferable to coal--and thus environmentally "clean." There are several ways to respond to these arguments.

First, there are no guarantees that the new plants are safe. All the industry has are computer models. Private investors aren't convinced of their safety, which means the only way the plants could come into being would be through taxpayer subsidy, that is, the public would be asked to take the risks which private industry will not. Second, a recent study has shown that even the most sophisticated of the new models is not "airplane" safe,"--that is, it could still be the target of an attack. Third, we have a gigantic safety problem with the high-level waste which already exists from nuclear power plants still in operation, and which is stored in adjacent cooling ponds. We still don't know what to do with this waste. The plans for storage at Yucca Mountain have been scrapped. It the waste stays where it is, in reinforced containers, it still makes people nervous. Chicago,which has several nuclear power plants, is starting to worry about the rising water level of Lake Michigan. People in New England near the power plants on the coast are worried about the rising sea level there. Money for nuclear research ought to be directed toward solving the unsafe waste problems we already have, not on buiding new plants and generating more waste.

Beyond isues of safety, it's not true that nuclear is "clean." The mining and processing of uranium is very energy-inefficient and very polluting. The gaseous diffusion enrichment plant at Paducah, Kentucky--which I write about in my book--at one time required as much coal-generated energy per day as New York City. Its electic bill is still $17 million a month.

To have any impact at all on climate change there would have to be thousands of new nuclear power plants built immediately throughout the world, costing trillions of dollars and run perfectly with no accidents or mistakes. Given the state of the global economy it simply isn't feasible to make an investment in something still so risky. Alternative energy sources--wind, solar, geothermal--are much safer and much cheaper. Because we are still paying for the cleanup and monitoring of the old nuclear weapons sites, we will be paying for the nuclear industry's mistakes for a long time.

Question: I find myself pulled back to that line from William Blake, written over a century ago: "Energy is delight." What you've been describing is anything but delightful. What is a better direction than nuclear power to meet our short and long term energy needs?

Carol Rainey: For Blake energy is kind of a mystical term for the life-force of the universe. That's something quite different from the current political use of the word, which is, narrowly, what we need to run our cars and appliances. What should we do? We can cut back on our use of cars and appliances, for one thing, so we don't need so much artificially generated energy. Nuclear fuels have been a disaster. Coal has been a disaster. It looks like Obama's new Energy Secretary is going to spearhead research and development in solar, wind and the geothermal sources, which is a good sign. Some nuclear scientists are working on the development of nuclear fusion. It's the opposite of what we have now. Proponents like it because it uses sea-water rather than uranium, and would be less environmentally destructive. However scientists have been working on fusion for 40 years and still haven't been able to get it to work, so it's not really something we can rely on The history of the fissionable nuclear industry has made me personally leery of nuclear sicnence. My fears may be irrational, but I prefer the idea of a more modesty run planet, which uses safe renewal energy sources and is based on respect for the life-force itself. It Blake were alive today, I think he would be horrified by how far we have come from the essential rhythm of things.

Back to One Hundred Miles From Home info
Back to Cyndell Press