N.Y. Times: Examining "What Ifs" of Nuclear Power

[Peter Genzer <genzer@BNL.GOV>]

Article in today's NY Times. Interesting mention of one of the women's 

"cesium poisoning" episode following a trip to Chernobyl.



http://nytimes.com/2004/09/08/arts/television/08lunc.html



Pete



September 8, 2004



Filmmakers Examining the 'What Ifs' of Nuclear Power

By NANCY RAMSEY



Cesium-137 is not your usual topic for a Midtown Manhattan lunch. But 

if you sit down with Maryann De Leo and Rory Kennedy, who have 

completed documentaries on the effects on children of the Chernobyl 

nuclear accident in 1986 (Ms. De Leo) and the Indian Point power plant 

in Buchanan, N.Y. (Ms. Kennedy), it is not long before the subject 

comes up. (Cesium-137 is radioactive waste, an isotope produced when 

uranium or plutonium undergoes fission.)



  The women, who had not met before, quickly dispensed with the social 

niceties. Ms. Kennedy complimented Ms. De Leo on her film, which she 

said she found heartbreaking, then took 15 seconds to show a photo of 

her second daughter, born six weeks earlier. Ms. De Leo invited Ms. 

Kennedy to a reception her brother Dominic was organizing in honor of 

the films, which will be broadcast back-to-back by HBO tomorrow night.



  Ms. De Leo said she too had proposed films to HBO about Indian Point 

and AIDS, a subject Ms. Kennedy tackled with "Pandemic: Facing AIDS," a 

five-part series for HBO last year. But Ms. Kennedy, being a Kennedy - 

she is Robert F. Kennedy's youngest daughter, born after his death - 

was able to secure outside funds more readily.



  Menus in hand, the women quickly and nearly simultaneously dismissed 

tuna as a possible choice: "Mercury, " they said.



  Ms. De Leo's film "Chernobyl Heart," which won the 2003 Academy Award 

for best documentary short, is not easy to talk about or watch. It 

takes the viewer into children's hospitals in Belarus and Ukraine and 

into the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the reactor. According to 

the United Nations, birth defects in Belarus have increased 250 percent 

since the accident, and the lives of the children in the film are 

tragic.



  One girl, Julia, was born with her brain outside her skull; another 

child, 4, is the size of a 4-month-old.



  "I had to show enough of the kids with deformities, but if I showed 

too many, nobody would want to watch," Ms. De Leo said.



  Ms. Kennedy's "Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable" takes a less 

emotional approach. It features interviews with the plant's detractors 

(including her brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chief prosecutor for 

Riverkeeper, an environmental- protection group) and a few defenders. 

Ms. Kennedy, who narrates the film, begins with questions: what if 

American Airlines Flight 11, navigating along the Hudson valley on 

Sept. 11, had banked left and hit Indian Point, rather than continuing 

south to the World Trade Center? Is enough being done to protect 

Americans from terrorists at home?



  Both women offered a quick and categorical no when asked if they 

considered their films anti-nuclear power.



  "I don't believe in making didactic films," said Ms. De Leo, born in 

Brooklyn, one of six children of a sanitation worker. Her television 

documentary work has taken her to Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, 

Afghanistan, Angola, Korea and Iraq.



  The idea for "Chernobyl Heart" was planted when a friend visiting from 

Spain suggested that Ms. De Leo see a United Nations photography 

exhibition about the children of Chernobyl. "It was the most shocking 

thing he'd ever seen," she said. "I had really forgotten about 

Chernobyl. I hadn't thought about birth defects there, and at the time 

I was working on a film about Bellevue," the Manhattan hospital.



  But in 2002 Ms. De Leo went to Belarus. She would return two more 

times, at one point requiring treatment for cesium poisoning herself.



  "Indian Point has much more cesium than Chernobyl had," Ms. Kennedy 

interjected. "Being in New York City on 9/11, and in the aftermath, 

there was a lot of concern about where the next terrorist attack would 

be - Indian Point, bridges and tunnels, waterways, chemical plants. 

There was a disproportionate amount of fear, some of it grounded, some 

not. I went into this project with the question, is Indian Point 

something we need to fear?"



  Ms. De Leo asked her about Indian Point's safety record ("horrible," 

Ms. Kennedy said); both agreed on the impossibility of evacuating 

millions in the event of an accident. Ms. Kennedy talked about the 

inability of guards to protect the plant adequately because of the 

stress and long hours detailed in the film. Located on the Hudson, the 

"exterior is screaming 'hit me,' " she said. "It's extremely vulnerable 

by water."



In the film Mr. Kennedy contends that the pools of water holding spent 

fuel rods, which contain more than 1,400 tons of spent nuclear fuel, 

are most vulnerable. His claims are followed by an interview with a 

scientist from the Union of Concerned Scientists, who details a 

potential terrorist attack, beginning with an explosive charge 

interfering with the rods' coolants and ending with the release of 

cesium-137 into the air.



In the film such criticisms are countered by representatives of the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a federal agency, and the Nuclear Energy 

Institute, a trade association, who describe the robust structures 

housing the reactors, the stepped-up security after 9/11 and the 

extreme unlikelihood of an attack of the magnitude Ms. Kennedy 

suggests.



  Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy Nuclear Northeast, which owns the 

two plants at Indian Point, is not interviewed in the film but defended 

the business in a phone interview. "There has never been an event at 

Indian Point causing dangerous releases of radioactivity," he said. 

"The plants are heavily regulated by the N.R.C." Since 9/11, he added, 

the commission has limited the number of hours a guard is allowed to 

work, and Entergy "has spent well over $30 million on enhancing 

security at Indian Point."



  Those outside the industry also propose nuclear energy as a viable 

power source, given the environmental hazards of burning fossil fuels 

and the political ramifications of relying on Middle East oil. A recent 

interdisciplinary study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

concluded that "the nuclear option should be retained precisely because 

it is an important carbon-free source of power."



  Spencer R. Weart, a historian at the American Institute of Physics and 

author of "Nuclear Fear: A History of Images" (Harvard University 

Press, 1988) offers a context for examining the nuclear option - and, 

perhaps, for watching these films.



  "All industrial systems are liable to accidents, and we have to ask 

ourselves, where is the most likely damage over the long term?" he said 

in a telephone interview. "Every energy source has its problems. 

Bangladesh has been in the news because of the terrible flooding there. 

This is what will happen increasingly with global warming. The longtime 

consequences of burning fossil fuels are more severe than nuclear 

power. Let's say I'm less a proponent of nuclear power than an opponent 

of coal and oil."



  Listening to such arguments, Ms. Kennedy nodded and said, "I would 

have said that before I made this film."



  Scientists also have strong views about the fairness of comparing the 

Chernobyl disaster to what could happen in this country "Chernobyl was 

a terrible tragedy," Robert A. Bari, a physicist at the Brookhaven 

National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., said in a phone conversation. "It 

happened because they operated the reactor out of its specifications. 

And Indian Point has a very, very different design than the Chernobyl 

reactor."



  For Ms. Kennedy and Ms. De Leo, who are passionate about their 

subjects, such arguments have little resonance. Ms. De Leo recalled a 

warning a Russian scientist made to Americans, imploring them to shut 

down nuclear plants.



  Ms. Kennedy said, "You can't throw numbers and statistics at children 

born with brains outside their heads." Such debates would not be 

resolved at a two-and-a-half-hour lunch. Running late for a 3 p.m. 

meeting, she added, "I don't think there is another side to the 

conversation."







Peter A. Genzer

Principal Media & Communications Specialist

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Phone: 631 344-3174

Fax: 631 344-3368

E-mail: genzer@bnl.gov

Web: www.bnl.gov



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