alternatehistory.com

It stands out on a highway
Like a creature from another time.
It inspires the babies' questions,
"What's that?"
For their mothers as they ride.
But no one stopped to think about the babies
Or how they would survive,
And we almost lost Detroit this time.

-"We Almost Lost Detroit" by Gil Scott Heron


Imagine: Detroit as a vast, abandoned wasteland…

Okay, so it already is, but even more so than OTL!

The partial meltdown of the Fermi 1 plant near Detroit, Michigan occurred in OTL on October 5, 1966. Without getting too technical, Fermi 1 was an experimental breeder reactor. In addition to producing power, breeder reactors make nuclear fuel. Fermi 1 used liquid sodium as a coolant (unlike most atomic plants, which are water-cooled reactors). The partial meltdown of OTL occurred when a small piece of metal broke off inside the reactor, which blocked the sodium coolant, and caused several fuel rods to melt. Fortunately, the plant operators were able to shut down the reactor and no radiation was released to the environment (though the reactor was never reactivated). [1]

But what if the reactor had gone into full meltdown?

The meltdown of Fermi-1 near Detroit was considered on this very site 2 years ago (Half of the posters have since been banned. Sad!):

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/dbwi-we-didnt-lose-detroit.389257/

The premise of this scenario is covered in We Almost Lost Detroit by John G. Fuller. Cool book, but it has its issues, as explained by @asnys:

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/what-have-you-been-reading-lately-and-what-are-you-currently-perusing.144429/page-206#post-14976353

asnys said:

Finished We Almost Lost Detroit, by John G. Fuller. Published in the 70s, this is the story of Enrico Fermi Unit 1, the world's first commercial fast breeder reactor, and the partial meltdown it suffered in 1966. Fuller uses this as a lens to look at the history of fission energy in the US in general, with heavy emphasis on accidents. This is a very anti-nuclear book, as you might expect from the title, but I read it because a) I was hoping it might still be a useful history of Enrico Fermi Unit 1, and b) I do try to occasionally expose myself to other viewpoints. Also, frankly, I'm decidedly opposed to fast breeder technology myself - at least of the sodium-cooled type used at Enrico Fermi - so I'm open to the idea that this plant was a horrible mistake.

On a technical level, unfortunately, the book doesn't really measure up. First, there are a lot of technical mistakes. Fuller seems to think that if you so much as drop a fuel assembly, everything within a thirty mile radius dies. He also seriously misunderstands a lot of stuff - for example, he cites one report as saying that the 95% confidence interval on the rate of accidents is more than one per 500 reactor-years. That does not mean the one per 500 reactor-years is a credible estimate - but Fuller treats it as one anyway. There's a lot of stuff like this, but he gets enough of the basics right that a reader who's not familiar with the technology won't realize the mistakes he's making.

So, I think there's a lot of stuff wrong. No surprise. But how is it as a book?

Well, it never really explains how this technology works. Which is just as well, given the above. But if the reader doesn't understand how a fast breeder works, they can't really understand any of this, except that Fuller keeps waving improbable damage figures in front of them. Similarly, he never really engages with the actual arguments of pro-nuclear figures that appear in the book. He basically says, "they think their reactors are safe, but there have been all these accidents. They're clearly wrong." He never actually engages with their counter-argument. Frankly, this whole issue is far more complicated than he presents it as, and, I suspect, than he even understands. There are good reasons to be opposed to fission power - I am ultimately a supporter of the technology, but reasonable, well-informed people can and do disagree. But Fuller fails to articulate those reasons because he doesn't seem to really understand how it works.

Other than that, well, it's well-written. I burned through it in two days. So it has that going for it.

So, yeah, I didn't like it.

Click to expand...

So based on that, I’m taking Fuller’s predictions about what could have happened with a big grain of salt (and a potassium iodide pill). Despite the book’s flaws, it’s important to note that Fuller wrote his book more than 10 years before Chernobyl, so I think it’s fair to say that he was not entirely wrong about the potential dangers of nuclear power. Even UAW leader Walter Reuther believed the threat was serious enough to challenge the construction of the plant before it was built.

I did not rely on Fuller’s book alone. One source was a series of articles about the incident written by reporter Chester Bulgier of the Detroit News in November 1968, 2 years after the accident. Another major source was a technical report about the effects of a meltdown at the Fermi plant from the University of Michigan in 1957 [2]. There was also a rebuttal to Fuller's book entitled We Did Not Almost Lose Detroit, which was written a Detroit Edison employee named Earl M. Page (of course, working for an electric company that operates a nuclear power plant might just make one a wee bit biased in the other direction).

As a disclaimer, I’m neither a nuclear physicist nor an anti-nuclear activist. If operated safely, nuclear plants are generally better for the environment and human health than coal-fired plants and produce more energy than wind or solar power. Today’s nuclear power plants are far safer than the early plants (partly because of what has been learned from mistakes made in the 50s and 60s). Unlike Fuller, I’m more interested in exploring the social and political effects of a nuclear meltdown. But I’ve tried to take a “hard science” approach to the accident and to document the realistic effects of a full meltdown.

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NOTES:

[1] A good recent summary of the 1966 Fermi accident was published by the Detroit Free Press: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/10/09/detroit-fermi-accident-nuclear-plant/91434816/

[2] https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/5163