Yemen is an American ally and an official partner in the “war on terror,” but the ideology of al-Qaeda has made inroads in some of the rural areas. In October 2000, two young men loaded a bomb into a small skiff and motored out to the edge of the warship USS Cole docked in the harbor of Aden. The resulting explosion tore a giant gash in the hull and killed seventeen American sailors. This was followed up by attacks on the few oil installations inside the country. Osama bin Laden, whose ancestors came from Yemen, made a taped speech welcoming the carnage. The government jailed dozens of suspects and was embarrassed when twenty-three of them escaped by digging a tunnel from the basement of their prison to a nearby mosque. Another set of al-Qaeda bombs went off at a shrine to the queen of Sheba in July 2007, killing seven tourists and two local people.
Most Yemenis were horrified by the bombings, and some diplomats privately accused the government of reaching a private understanding with al-Qaeda—no crackdown in exchange for no attacks against the fragile government—and of treating the terror group like any other desert family that must be flattered and appeased. It was in this environment that Mustafa Bahran announced his plans to take the country nuclear with the aid of a Western company.
There are many in Yemen who consider the idea a bad joke and Bahran a delusional egomaniac. But Yemen is not the only Islamic country that has agitated for a nuclear future. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and—most spectacularly—Iran all have stated their desire to plug their grids into a uranium reactor, creating a “me too” effect across the region. The president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was reelected in 2006 at least partly on a promise to deliver nuclear energy to light the rural settlements, desalinate more seawater for agriculture, and ease the frequent and embarrassing blackouts in the capital. “This is no longer election propaganda,” he said. “This is serious.”
He was speaking the language of “nuclear renaissance,” the catch-phrase used by atomic energy advocates to signal the start of a new dawn of plant building. That even a place such as Yemen has linked its national aspirations to uranium must be regarded as a bellwether for an industry that is ready at long last to shake off sinister images. There is a growing suspicion that the soft old protocols of the toothless Kyoto Treaty will be a matter of history within twenty years, if not ten, and that a forced emergency reduction in carbon emissions will make nuclear energy indispensable because of a simple matter of physics: The fission of uranium emits no greenhouse gases. What was considered the epitome of filth twenty years ago is suddenly looking clean. Several leading environmentalists have reversed their longtime stance against the technology and come out in favor of the thing they once reviled. Such a selling point has become a central message for advocates of nuclear power, many of whom have called for a doubling of the international fleet of nuclear reactors in the name of the oncoming fight against global warming. China has gone even further. With a skyrocketing population and some of the dirtiest coal-burning plants in the world, it has plans to quadruple its own fleet to handle the crushing demand for power. Its state mining companies are combing the Sahara for uranium reserves.
This new confidence in a technology considered dead and buried raises the same questions that were pertinent in the 1950s during the Atoms for Peace campaign that spread reactors around the world. How do you dispose of the waste? How do you keep the plant from being a military target? How do you make sure the plutonium by-product isn’t being secretly taken elsewhere and packed into the core of a bomb? Can global security really be guaranteed with so much uranium stacking up in the developing world?
Security has a localized definition, too, and in Yemen that translates as the survival of a politically moderate government that cannot deliver the goods to its people. Nowhere is that on starker display than in Yemen. The intractable poverty and the amateurish (though effective) attacks from rural bands of al-Qaeda sympathizers recently prompted the journal Foreign Policy to name Yemen the twenty-fourth most likely country in the world to be torn apart by “violent internal conflict” and “societal deterioration.” Most diplomatic observers are convinced that Yemen will be a failed state within fifteen years.
Oddly enough, this is a major rationale behind Bahran’s nuclear gambit. It is one more truce in a nation with a long history of making truces. President Saleh has been in high office since 1978 and has reversed earlier pledges to step down. The strategy for easing the unhappiness in the villages involves bringing more power—electrical, not actual—to the people, thus creating the perception that the entrenched leadership has done something tangible. Bread and circuses now come in the shape of a cooling tower. “If I don’t have electricity to make energy,” says Mustafa Bahran, “I will not survive.”
He likes to tell people that if all of the employees at the Yemen Ministry of Electricity were assigned a stationary bicycle with wheels connected to a turbine, they would generate more power in a day than the nation now produces in a week. The current output is now about 770 megawatts, which would be considered adequate coverage for a city the size of El Paso, and Yemen has twenty-eight times the number of people as El Paso. Lights and television are still considered exotic in large parts of the desert interior, and the population there has an average family size of eight. Nuclear power is the only possible catch-up scenario, says Bahran, who assures the skeptical there is no reason to be worried about hazardous waste or security from terrorists.
“I am making a revolution in electricity,” he tells me, pacing. And, “I am very, very particular about safety. The waste will not stay in Yemen. The company will take the waste. There will be no reason for panic.” The reactor would be owned and operated by a Western company, which would guarantee the security of the uranium fuel assemblies and make sure that all the material was accounted for. The Yemeni military would be responsible for safeguarding the arrival of the fuel rods once they passed into territorial waters, as well as the departure of the spent rods and the plutonium. Even an armed attack on the facility would be harmless, Bahran told me. “You will have a substantial component of the army surrounding that plant. Not even a bee can go through the perimeter. Suppose the fundamentalists take over this country. They would find very little spent fuel in the reactor. They will see only one batch.”
Not everyone in Yemen shares his buoyancy.
“This is growth without means,” said Abdullah al-Faqih, a professor of political science at the University of Sana’a. “You need a lot of money to do this, and there are a lot of risks. Even talking about nuclear power is not good for us. If we insist on this, we will lose foreign support. It’s giving the world a signal, and it will send the opposite message—it will actually drive away investment.” Another observer in Sana’a was blunt: “This is a country that cannot even clean up the plastic bags on the side of the road. How can we expect to handle nuclear waste?”
I sat for lunch one day with a man named Ali Nessar Shoueb in his home, which is above a ground-level floor where he keeps a herd of fifteen donkeys. He studies chemistry at the University of Sana’a, but was home on a summer break. We ate flat bread, rice, and chicken while reclining on green floor cushions. In the next room, Arabic cartoons were playing on a television mounted high on the wall. Behind the TV was a Beretta pistol, hanging by the trigger guard from a nail pounded into the mud wall.
Over tea, Shoueb told me the recent al-Qaeda bombings had been disastrous for him, as they had driven tourists away from his town of Thula, a picturesque medieval trading village at the base of a sandstone pillar.
I asked what he thought of the plan to bring nuclear power into Yemen. He told me it would certainly help ease the task of hauling in the weekly supply of water his family and his livestock required—about 530 gallons, by tanker truck. Nuclear energy could help desalinate the water from the Red Sea and make everything cheaper for him. “We need more light and more water,” he said. “I think it’s a good idea.”
He paused. “But I would want it in the village in back of me. Actuall
y, ten villages away.”
There was a bust of Homer Simpson in the lobby of the headquarters of the World Nuclear Association in London.
The joke may have been lost on some visitors, but for those who watch The Simpsons, it was a clever bit of self-effacement. Homer is the oafish patriarch of the cartoon family, and his profession is a standing gag: He works in the control room of the local nuclear power plant.
“Can you imagine a bigger idiot?” one staff member asked me. “He’s the public face of the industry, so we thought we’d put him out front.”
This kind of swagger is now possible for the first time in decades. China and India have developed an enormous thirst for electricity, and the demand for global kilowatt-hours is expected to double in the next three decades. Plans for nearly two hundred new reactors are under way in nations all around the globe—including more than a dozen in the United States, where construction has been static since the early 1980s. A new generation of reactor developed in Germany—the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor—uses fuel pellets the size of tennis balls and can operate at double the temperature of older models. It is the design currently favored by China, which has plans to build thirty of them. This design is also being promoted as the perfect “entry-level” reactor for beginner nuclear states such as Yemen. At the end of 2006, President George W. Bush negotiated an agreement to sell large quantities of enriched uranium to India. Critics called this a flagrant violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, which the weaponized state of India has never signed, but Bush emphasized instead the need for the world to develop “clean and safe energy.” All of this has spread euphoria inside the nuclear trade, and a renewed sense of mission. Up until recently, petroleum was where all the action was in the energy business. The nuclear guys were considered the dullards, parishioners of a dying church. No more.
“Uranium can quite literally save the world,” said John Ritch, the director of the World Nuclear Association. “This is a remarkable mineral, and humanity has found reliable ways to turn it to the betterment of everyone. It is surrounded with myth and fear, but it is also surrounded by constructiveness.”
Ritch told me his ideal outcome would be 8,000 nuclear reactors operating within this century, up from the current worldwide level of 440. “We have only begun to tap the world’s uranium reserves, and the use of uranium generates a minuscule amount of waste that, with scientific assurance, can be dealt with safely,” he told me a later e-mail. “There is no doubt that bad actors can abuse nuclear technology. But those bad actors will be there in any case, and we must target our efforts on thwarting them, whether in North Korea or elsewhere. Meanwhile, we have built a high wall between the peaceful and illicit uses of nuclear power. Today, we can expand the use of nuclear power twenty-fold without increasing nuclear danger a bit,” he added.
His office looks out onto St. James’s Square, a small park ringed by some of the most blue-chip properties in London. The address signifies peerage, clout, and prelapsarian money. The Queen Mother spent her girlhood years in the Georgian town house across the street. At the far end is Chatham House, now a foreign policy institute, but once the home of prime ministers Chatham and Pitt. The world headquarters of Rio Tinto—the stalwart of the old price-fixing Uranium Club—is at No. 6. Down the block at No. 1 are the executive offices of British Petroleum. On the east end is the town house occupied by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was doing the logistical planning for the D-day invasion in the spring of 1944, twelve years before he would initiate the Atoms for Peace program. The World Nuclear Association itself occupies the most modernist building on the square, a rectangle of metal and glass. Once called the Uranium Institute, the organization changed its name several years ago to the more universal-sounding World Nuclear Association.
Even this name isn’t perfect, said Steve Kidd, the genial head of public relations. He believes it has unsavory connotations.
“If you say ‘World Nuclear,’ the next thing you would think of is a bomb,” he told me. “Nuclear power was a mislabeling. It should have been called ‘fission power.’” The pronuclear author William Tucker has argued for another moniker: “terrestrial energy,” because uranium is, after all, a product of the earth.
This echoes a frequent lament among those in the business—that of a persistent image problem around the word nuclear. The term literally means the “manipulation of the nucleus.” But history has given it a range of unflattering images: glowing green stuff, genetic mutations, Hiroshima, global warfare, meltdowns, death. Perhaps the signal event was the near-catastrophe in 1979 at the Three Mile Island plant near the capital of Pennsylvania. A series of mistakes by poorly trained technicians (at one point, a blinking light on a control panel was covered up by a yellow maintenance tag) caused half of the uranium fuel to melt and a large bubble to form inside the reactor shell. There was no such shield at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union, the scene of a much worse disaster in 1986. A botched test of a turbine generator caused a steam explosion and a melting of the fuel rods. The graphite started to burn, and fifty-six firefighters who rushed into the atomic volcano paid with their lives. A cloud of radiation drifted as far as Norway.
The extent of the fatalities from such incidents is still being argued about today (the pronuclear side counts only the Chernobyl firefighters; its opponents estimate thousands more from thyroid cancers), but the net effect was to galvanize the environmental objections to nuclear power and make the regulatory and approval process even more lengthy for putting new reactors online in the United States. The average wait time is still about seven years. This lag is a matter of some frustration at the World Nuclear Association.
“I don’t have a lot of regard for environmentalists,” Kidd told me. “They pounced on nuclear power thirty years ago as an easy target. Now it turns out they should have focused on the automobile. They don’t like big cities or big organizations, or working long hours. They want to ban cheap flights for my holiday. They want to take us back to the Stone Age. They are silly people who want to stop development.”
One of the manifest ironies of the “nuclear renaissance,” though, is that it relies on an image of atomic power as a green technology—a clean alternative to the coal-burning plants that have long been the world’s electrical mainstay. Coal is a particularly dirty and dangerous fuel in China, where an estimated five thousand miners die in accidents every year. That nation is now pouring up to about 26 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, creating pollution so thick that in the worst areas people must drive with their lights on during the daytime. Yet China must also feed an overdrive economy, expanding 10 percent each year. An aggressive nuclear strategy has been the obvious answer. Unlike harnessing the wind or the sun, uranium power is here right now and ready to go. And a single ton of raw uranium provides the same electricity as twenty thousand tons of black coal.
“One of the fundamental imperatives in the world is to harness the source of this cheap energy,” Kidd told me. “I have no doubt we’ll have three thousand reactors, and I’ve heard projections of ten thousand.”
The American energy policy crafted in secret during Bush’s first term was generous to nuclear power, allocating up to $13 billion in subsidies and tax credits to the industry, with the aim of starting a burst of reactor construction within the decade. The green argument has swayed some historical opponents, among them U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who told a congressional committee, “I have a different view of nuclear than I did twenty years ago. I think it has to be on the table.” The editorial page of the New York Times, once skeptical, said: “There is good reason to give nuclear power a fresh look. It can diversify our sources of energy with a fuel—uranium—that is both abundant and inexpensive.” A cofounder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, used to deliver rants against what he called “nuclear holocaust,” but he has now come out in support and is a paid consultant to the industry.
The most surprising
defector, however, is James Lovelock, who is most famous for his “Gaia hypothesis,” which says that Earth is a living organism that breathes. He has since joined a lobbying group with a name that would have seemed out of a Saturday Night Live skit of twenty years ago—Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy—and has come out loaded for bear. “Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies, and the media,” he wrote in the London Independent.
All of this has been excellent ammunition for the new promoters of uranium, who find their clearest expressions, once more, within the vocabulary of apocalypse.
“The fact of this planetary crisis should no longer be a matter of psychological or political denial,” John Ritch said in a 2006 speech. “For our best Earth-system scientists now warn, with ever increasing certainty, that greenhouse gas emissions, if continued at the present massive scale, will yield consequences that are—quite literally—apocalyptic: increasingly radical temperature changes, a worldwide upsurge in violent weather events, widespread drought, flooding, wildfires, famine, species extinction, rising sea levels, mass migration, and epidemic disease that will leave no country untouched.”
The fresh excitement about nuclear power sent the price of uranium rocketing upward. In the spring of 2007, utilities found themselves paying up to $132 a pound for spot deliveries, a price that would have seemed like fantasy just a decade ago, when uranium cost a tenth of that. Uranium became a viable commodity for the first time since the 1920s radium boom at St. Joachimsthal, as several New York hedge funds acquired quantities of yellowcake and kept them in storage, betting that the price would go up even further. The run-up was aggravated by heavy rains at the Ranger mine that shut down production for a week and heightened the impression of a gap between a stagnant supply and voracious global demand.
Tom Zoellner Page 31
