New France: French Encounter Native Americans and Discover Liberty

 France would not be the first country to enter a new region under the assumption that the indigenous population must be at some low level of culture and in need of introduction to the enlightened civilization of the invaders.  In particular, the French were determined to introduce their notions of an all-powerful God and an all-powerful king who set rules for how people must live to the indigenous peoples they encountered in New France—the Americans.  In their book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow provide a delightful account of this clash of cultures and point out that it was the French who would be reconsidering their notions of how to live.

“We will examine early missionary and travel accounts from New France—especially the Great Lakes region—since these were the accounts Rousseau himself was most familiar with, to get a sense of what its indigenous inhabitants did actually think of French society, and how they came to think of their own societies differently as a result.  We will argue that indigenous Americans did indeed develop a very strong critical view of their invaders’ institutions: a view which focused first on these institutions’ lack of freedom, and only later, as they became more familiar with European social arrangements, on equality. 

“One of the reasons that missionary and travel literature became so popular in Europe was precisely because it exposed its readers to this kind of criticism, along with providing a sense of social possibility: the knowledge that familiar ways were not the only ways, since—as these books showed—there were clearly societies in existence that did things very differently.  We will suggest there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples.  Because it was true.”

There is good documentation about this interaction because the Jesuit missionaries supplemented random travel reports with detailed records of their interaction with the Americans.  The authors claim “seventy-one volumes of missionary field reports” as available reference material.  What was most striking to the French was the Americans’ concept of liberty.  Consider this description from a missionary in 1642.

“They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whomsoever, except when they like.  They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs.  All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.” 

This view was certainly foreign to a Jesuit missionary and any French citizen.  Both state and church had established rigid hierarchies defining who could tell who what they had to do.  Trying to convince an American that his life would be better if he gave up his liberty and subjected himself to some otherworldly power was frustrating.

“…scandalized missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will.  This, for the Jesuits, was an outrage.  Such sinful conduct, they believed, was just the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted in natural dispositions, which they saw as inherently pernicious.  ‘The wicked liberty of the savages’, one insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’.  Even finding terms to translate concepts like ‘lord’, ‘commandment’ or ‘obedience’ into indigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining the underlying theological concepts, well-nigh impossible.” 

A system whereby each individual had the liberty to go one’s own way unless that person could be convinced to do otherwise by negotiation was recognized as working rather well for the Americans.  It forced missionaries and French administrators to ponder how such an approach could possibly function in a Christian kingdom.

One interesting aspect of the American societies was that having to negotiate for agreement on any particular issue developed a citizenry of capable speakers: people adept at making compelling arguments.  They were generally seen as more intelligent than the typical French person.  The authors report on the findings of Brother Gabriel Sagard. 

“Sagard was surprised and impressed by his hosts’ eloquence and powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public discussions of communal affairs; his hosts, in contrast, when they did get to see a group of Frenchmen gathered together, often remarked on the way they seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cutting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and overall (or so the subtext seemed to be) not showing themselves to be particularly bright.”

This unpleasant behavior by the French was seen as an extension of their basic selfishness.  The traditions of the Americans called for hospitality for all and a sharing of any wealth that might accumulate.

“People who tried to grab the stage, denying others the means to present their arguments, were acting in much the same way as those who grabbed the material means of subsistence and refused to share it; it is hard to avoid the impression that Americans saw the French as existing in a kind of Hobbesian state of ‘war of all against all’.”

The Americans also exhibited a different sense of justice which only added to the fascination Europeans would experience at learning of their ways.  Consider the comments of Father Lallemant on his dealings with the Wendat (Hurons) from 1644.

“I do not believe there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjugation of their wills to any power whatever—so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except insofar as each is pleased to submit to them.  There is no punishment that is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger…”

“After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good Father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective.  Actually, it worked surprisingly well.  Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation.  This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control.  ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’  If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance they might take’.”

It is important to note that the Jesuits recording their troubling encounters with native Americans were the intellectuals of that era; they were the best educated and the most trained in “classical rhetoric and techniques of disputation.”  Yet they had met their match with people who they considered savages.

“How could such rhetorical facility have come to those with no awareness of the works of Varro and Quintillian?  In considering the matter, the Jesuits almost always noted the openness with which public affairs were conducted.  So, Father Le Jeune, Superior of the Jesuits in Canada in the 1630s: ‘There are almost none of them incapable of conversing or reasoning very well, and in good terms, on matters within their knowledge.  The councils, held almost every day in the Villages, and on almost all matters, improve their capacity for talking.’  Or, in Lallemant’s words: ‘I can say in truth that, as regards intelligence, they are in nowise inferior to Europeans and to those who dwell in France.  I would never have believed that, without instruction, nature could have supplied a most ready and vigorous eloquence, which I have admired in many Hurons; or more clear-sightedness in public affairs, or a more discreet management in things to which they are accustomed.’  Some Jesuits went further, remarking—not without a trace of frustration—that New World savages seemed rather cleverer overall than the people they were used to dealing with at home (e.g. ‘they nearly all show more intelligence in their business, speeches, courtesies, intercourse, tricks, and subtleties, than do the shrewdest citizens and merchants in France’).”

The French intelligentsia of the seventeenth century believed that society and its actions were controlled by the laws of the Christian God and that the Church and the king who ruled in collusion with God had the right and the need to inflict punishment on that society in order to ensure that the laws would be followed.  Yet, they encountered those they considered savages who were their intellectual equals, and who believed they had developed the better society where individuals lived in greater freedom and had more satisfaction with their mode of existence.  And they had the nerve to criticize the French and other Europeans for their foolish way of living.

The Jesuits surely had some troubling times pondering this period, but they were not likely to lose their faith over it.  It would be a different matter almost a century later when the spirit of The Enlightenment swept through France and Europe and the foundations of society were being questioned. 

“In the years between 1703 and 1751…the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought.  What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom.  As it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values—organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves—they reacted in a variety of ways.” 

“Some like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright…In fact, the indigenous critique of European institutions was seen as so powerful that anyone objecting to existing intellectual and social arrangements would tend to deploy it as a weapon of choice: a game, as we’ve seen, played by pretty much every one of the great Enlightenment philosophers.”

These philosophizers were taking on a mighty task: undermining the power of both the Church and the kings that created and enforced the laws.

“Above all, though, all these appeals to the wisdom of ‘savages’ were still ways of challenging the arrogance of received authority: that medieval certainty which maintained that the judgements of the Church and the establishment it upheld, having embraced the correct version of Christianity, were necessarily superior to those of anyone else on earth.”

The philosophers had words at their disposal; the powers that be had salvation or hellfire, police, armies, and money at their disposal.  A backlash to the indigenous critique would create a history of the world in which the indigenous Americans were deemed irrelevant to inevitable progress based on increasingly sophisticated technology.  Complex societies would always require hierarchical organization with orders streaming down from the top.  The status quo would be protected. 

“Portraying history as a story of material progress, that framework recast indigenous critics as innocent children of nature, whose views on freedom were a mere side effect of their uncultivated way of life and could not possibly offer a serious challenge to contemporary social thought (which came increasingly to mean just European thought).”

“As a result, the same portrayers of world history who profess themselves as believers in freedom, democracy and women’s rights continue to treat historical epochs of relative freedom, democracy and women’s rights as so many ‘dark ages’.”

This story of the native Americans and their critique should convey to us the notion that the way we live today, essentially the way we have lived for centuries, is not the only way a functional society can be constructed.  The authors continuously raise the question as to why essentially all human societies have managed to get stuck in the same rut.  After many thousands of years of social experimentation why have we fallen into our current mode—our current trap if you prefer.  The Wendat told the French that they possessed more things than them, but they exceeded the French in “ease, comfort and time.”  Can we really claim that our society has provided us with increasing ease, comfort, and time—or are those things disappearing.  The authors relish reminding us that for most, we submit ourselves to indentured servitude, if not outright slavery, at least eight hours per day and for at least five days a week—yet we claim to be living in the land of the free.  We claim to live in a democracy, but our only influence on society comes when about half of us have the energy or knowledge to cast a vote.  And on those occasions, only about half of that half have taken the time to try and understand what they are voting for.  For many, the motivation is merely “What’s in it for me.”  Would the indigenous critique change any if the Wendat encountered our twenty-first century society?

John Maynard Keynes predicted that we would one day, not far off, have enough wealth that we could work little and spend more time enjoying “the good life.”  Keynes was correct.  That time came, but then it went on with wealth continuing to accumulate.  Meanwhile, we are left with neither the time nor the knowledge to even consider what a good life might entail.  Should the time ever present itself, thoughts toward gaining ease, comfort, and time might be a good starting point.

 

Early Humans and Their Societies: Who Are We Now?

 We are living in an era of great and rapid change.  A theme that arises regularly questions whether humans, shaped by evolution during a much earlier era, have innate tendencies that will not allow them to respond appropriately to the political, social, and environmental challenges which we currently face.  It behooves us to understand our own natures and separate what is innate from what is culturally acquired to proceed in in an orderly fashion.  David Graeber and David Wengrow, in their recent book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, provide us with an engaging and enlightening romp through recent archeological and anthropological research that provides new understanding as to who we were in past millennia, and perhaps helps us learn who we might be today or could be tomorrow.

Human history began about 6 million years when a primate branch split into what became today’s chimpanzees and what became Homo Sapiens.  Our path to the present was not direct.  Several branches diverged and eventually died off along the way.  A few, most notably the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, emerged from Africa and left records across the Eurasian continent.  We arose in Africa 200,000-300,000 years ago and emerged from that continent and spread throughout the world perhaps as long as 100,000 years in the past.  There is little record of what we were like until after the last period of glaciation receded. 

“Most of human history is irreparably lost to us.  Our species, Homo Sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening.  In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 BC.  Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period.  We have no way of knowing what most of them were.” 

This lack of knowledge did not hinder those who would take up limited eighteenth- and nineteenth-century information and construct histories for humanity.  The most common even today are variations on the original hypothesis of Rousseau from 1754. 

“Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of child-like innocence, in tiny bands.  These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason they were so small.  It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and the ‘state’—which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding we spend much of our lives filling in forms.”

There would be an alternate, Hobbesian version in which we also lived mostly in small bands, but within and between those bands the current humanitarian deficits of self-interest, self-aggrandizement, greed, and the struggle for dominance were already present.  Neither of these views were particularly flattering for humans.  At best, they were innocent sheep unable to control their future and locked in a system from which they could not escape; at worst, they created a hierarchy which could maintain stability through violence and its threat. 

This notion of small, isolated bands living in harmony seems a bit off to even the most casual observer.  It seems inconsistent with what we claim to know about human behavior, or even animal behavior.  All primates seem to know that they should avoid inbreeding by having one of the genders migrate out of the group to another.  It is not surprising that humans would have learned this as well, and quite early on.  This need for mixing people between groups should have generated some form of interaction to facilitate the process—so much for the isolated group.  One of the features of human nature is that to truly despise another individual, one must get to know them quite well.  Small groups with the equivalent of a few families would inevitably lead to animosities and generate a need to move individuals to other groups, leading to additional population churn.  Groups would have been in contact and unlikely to be in constant warfare over resources as some male anthropologists like to fantasize.

The authors bring their perspective to this issue.

“There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much.  And this appears to be just as true of present-day hunter-gatherers as anybody else.  Many seem to find the prospect of living their entire lives surrounded by close relatives so unpleasant that they will travel very long distances just to get away from them.  New work on the demography of modern hunter-gatherers—drawing statistical comparisons from a global sample of cases, ranging from the Hadza in Tanzania to the Australian Martu—shows that residential groups turn out to not be made up of biological kin at all; and the burgeoning field of human genomics is beginning to suggest a similar picture for ancient hunter-gatherers as well, all the way back to the Pleistocene.”

“…it turns out that primary biological kin actually make up less than 10 percent of the total membership of any given residential group.  Most participants are drawn from a much wider pool who do not share close genetic relationships, whose origins are scattered over very large territories, and who may not even have grown up speaking the same languages.” 

The standard theory of human evolution is highly biased by the focus on events in what we now call the Middle East and naively refer to as “the cradle of civilization.”  Archeological evidence indicates humans were collaborating in large numbers to produce structures and monuments in diverse locations many years before any so-called “agricultural revolution.”

“In Europe, between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago public works were already a feature of human habitation across an area reaching from Krakow to Kiev.  Along this transect of the glacial fringe, remains of impressive circular structures have been found that are clearly distinguishable from ordinary camp dwellings in their scale (the largest were over thirty-nine feet in diameter), permanence, aesthetic qualities and prominent locations in the Pleistocene landscape.  Each was erected on a framework made of mammoth tusks and bones, taken from many tens of these great animals, which were arranged in alternating sequences and patterns that go beyond the merely functional to produce structures that would have looked quite striking to our eyes, and magnificent indeed to people at the time.  Great wooden enclosures of up to 130 feet in length also existed, of which only the post-holes and sunken floors remain.”

It is likely that human hunter-gatherers did live in small groups on a seasonal basis if their hunting and gathering called for it, but at some time they could also gather into larger groups and participate in cooperative activities of a social or cultural nature.  This is a behavior that arises again and again in trying to unravel our deep history and is viewed by the authors as critical to understanding our nature.  It is reasonable to assume that small bands of people behave in a largely egalitarian fashion and large groups will require some sort of hierarchical organization for efficient cooperation on projects.  The obvious conclusion is that humans were quite comfortable moving in and out of such types of organization as the need or opportunity presented itself.

As time went on, what we might recognize as permanent sites of large numbers of people and refer to as cities would be established.  However, they could be organized in a much different way than we might expect.  It appears that humans can congregate in large numbers, maintain a diverse economy, and live in harmony without permanent political structures enforcing that harmony. 

“The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjoining regions were inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 BC, that is, for something in the order of eight centuries, which is considerably longer than most subsequent urban traditions.”

“They were the physical realization of an extended community that already existed long before its constituent units coalesced into large settlements.  Some tens of these settlements have now been documented.  The biggest currently known—Taljanky—extends over an area of 300 hectares, outspanning the earliest phases of the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia.  It presents no evidence of central administration or communal storage facilities.  Nor have any government buildings, fortifications or monumental architecture been found.”

“What we do find are houses; well over 1000 in the case of Taljanky.  Rectangular houses, sixteen or so feet wide and twice as long, built of wattle and daub on timber frames, with stone foundations.  With their attached gardens, these houses form such neat circular patterns that from bird’s-eye view, any mega-site resembles the inside of a tree trunk: great rings with spaces between…But in every known case, the central area is simply empty.”

In this region there was not just one of theses “cities,” there were a number of them, closely spaced.  They would have had to possess an economy that was greatly shared and must have lived peacefully for the configuration to exist for centuries.

“Just as surprising as their scale is the distribution of these massive settlements, which are all quite close to each other, at most six to nine miles apart.  Their total population—estimated in the many thousands per mega-site, and probably well over 10,000 in some cases—would therefore have had to draw resources from a common hinterland.”

No agricultural revolution was required to allow this population density to exist and flourish, and no king was required to manage it.

“This way of life was by no means ‘simple’.  As well as managing orchards, gardens, livestock and woodlands, the inhabitants of these cities imported salt in bulk from springs in the eastern Carpathians and the Black Sea littoral.  Flint extraction by the ton took place in the Dniestr valley, furnishing material for tools.  A household potting industry flourished, its products considered among the finest ceramics of the prehistoric world; and regular supplies of copper flowed in from the Balkans.  There is no firm consensus among archeologists about what sort of social arrangements all this required, but most would agree that the logistical challenges were daunting.”

An economy of this scale should have presented plenty of opportunities for individuals to accumulate significant wealth and use that wealth to acquire power.  But that didn’t seem to happen.  Within the records of cultures discussed by the authors, they discovered societies that were wise enough to create societal norms that precluded such an occurrence.  This suggests they had suffered from that tendency and found the means to insure it would never happen again. 

“A surplus was definitely produced, and with it, ample potential for some to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over others or battle for the spoils; but over eight centuries we find little evidence for warfare or the rise of social elites.”

“The true complexity of the mega-sites lies in the strategies they adopted to prevent such things.”

We have presented just a few of the examples the authors discuss.  Their book covers multiple eras, multiple continents, and many cultures.  This paragraph from the authors can serve as a brief summary of their findings on human evolution compared to the conventional wisdom.

“To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small egalitarian bands.  On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory.  Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality.  In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies.  And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.” 

The United States is less than three centuries old, yet it seems to be stumbling towards inevitable partisan conflict.  Pundits often claim the inevitability is built into our genes by eons of evolution.  They claim that once one group defines another as “the other” animosity will continue to grow because that is what we were designed to do.  Currently Democrats and Republicans are defining each other as “the other” and viewing the other as an existential threat.  It is claimed that evolution has forced us to protect our group against other groups and there is not much we can do about it.  These same people once claimed that humanity was designed for battle and war was an inherent part of our nature.  Consider these quotes from Edward O. Wilson. 

“Our bloody nature, it can now be argued in the context of modern biology, is ingrained because group-versus-group was a principle driving force that made us what we are.  In prehistory, group selection lifted the hominids that became territorial carnivores to heights of solidarity, to genius, to enterprise.  And to fear.  Each tribe knew with justification that if it was not armed and ready, its very existence was imperiled.

“It should not be thought that war, often accompanied by genocide, is a cultural artifact of a few societies.  Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species’ maturation.  Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture.”

What is encountered in the massive work of David Graeber and David Wengrow is not a humanity for whom “wars and genocide have been universal and eternal.”  Certainly, they existed, but we humans appear to have had a somewhat encouraging history where we mostly lived together peacefully and learned to collaborate on great and wondrous projects.  These authors might be more likely to argue that our faults lie not in our early evolution but in the most recent millennia when we developed cultures which ensured that there would be conflict and discrimination between peoples of different classes, races, and religions.  The impulses that drive us today could be derived from that recent evolution which we imposed upon ourselves, or they could be the result of cultural evolution rather than be genetic in nature.

Let us continue to be optimistic and believe that there are better angels within our nature; we merely need to learn how to release them.

 

Climate Change Fuels Risky Bet on Nuclear Power

 The realization, by the experts, that climate change is upon us, and that it is coming much faster than said experts had been predicting, has increased interest in nuclear power as a solution to our need for clean energy.  Clearly, nuclear reactor technology is a mature field and the energy it produces is not accompanied by carbon dioxide emissions, but it does produce dangerous, long-lived radioactive products—lots of them.  After the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the public support for the industry evaporated and most plans for new plants were canceled.  Economics also played a major role: nuclear power plants were subjected to rigorous environmental reviews, they were expensive, and always seemed to cost more and take longer to build than anticipated.  And electricity demand could be met more cheaply and quickly by fossil fuel plants.  Can the demand to respond to climate change cause a reconciliation between the public and nuclear power?  How useful might a reinvigoration of this technology be in countering global warming?

Bill Gates recently produced an optimistic take on possible responses to the changing climate: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need.  He makes the case that nuclear power must be a growing component of any clean energy plan.

“…it’s hard to foresee a future where we decarbonize our power grid affordably without using more nuclear power.  In 2018, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed nearly 1,000 scenarios for getting to zero in the United States; all the cheapest paths involved using a power source that’s clean and always available—that is, one like nuclear power.  Without a source like that, getting to zero-carbon electricity would cost a lot more.”

Resurrecting nuclear power as an option will require a revolution in the technology in order to make it seem safer, cheaper, and more quickly delivered.  Gates believes improved plant designs exist that can deliver what is needed.

“I’m very optimistic about the approach created by TerraPower, a company I founded in 2008, bringing together some of the best minds in nuclear physics and computer modeling to design a next generation nuclear reactor.” 

“TerraPower’s reactor could run on many different types of fuel, including the waste from other nuclear facilities.  The reactor would produce far less waste than today’s plants, would be fully automated—eliminating the possibility of human error—and could be built underground, protecting it from attack.  Finally, the design would be inherently safe, using some ingenious features to control the nuclear reaction; for example, the radioactive fuel is contained in pins that expand if they get too hot, which slows the nuclear reaction down and prevents overheating.  Accidents would literally be prevented by the laws of physics.”

It is difficult to be as sanguine as Gates about “fully automated” systems eliminating human error.  After all, the automated systems are created by humans and have been known to incorporate human error as a feature in their performance.  The measure of safety is not just eliminating any possibility of a runaway nuclear reaction, it is ensuring that there is no possibility that significant radioactive material can be introduced into the environment.  It is encouraging that he recognizes that a cheap, easily reproduced plant, implemented in large numbers, would be an obvious target for terrorists of any stripe. Perhaps more troubling is the use of old technology in his new design, technology that has been found too difficult to commercialize for nearly seventy years.

Gates came to an agreement with the state of Wyoming to build a demonstration plant, presumably at a retired coal plant.  This source provided a description of the proposed facility referred to as a Natrium Reactor.

“The demo project will feature a 345MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt-based energy storage system. The technology incorporated in the storage system is designed to increase the capacity to 500MW for more than five and half hours which will be enough to meet the electricity needs of approximately 400,000 households.”

Molten salt is used as coolant rather than water as in existing commercial designs.  This has the advantage of less moderation of the energy of the neutrons bouncing around, thus the term “fast reactor.” This produces a more desirable type of waste than water-cooled reactors which produce a lower energy neutron distribution. 

Andrew Cockburn provided an article in Harper’s Magazine intended to counter any notion of optimism about nuclear power.  It was titled Spent Fuel: The risky resurgence of nuclear power.  He details the history of molten salt technology and focuses on the tendency for companies and governments involved in nuclear power to lie about the risk of accidents, and when accidents do occur, to lie about the damage done.

The very first reactor to produce commercial electric power was placed in the then small remote town of Moorpark near Los Angeles.

“Dwight Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ program, unveiled in 1953, set the optimistic tone for nuclear power: ‘The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. The capability, already proved, is here today,’ and would ‘rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient, and economic usage.’ Four years later, Moorpark, a small town, northwest of Los Angeles, became the first American community to draw its electricity from a nuclear reactor. Moorpark’s power came from the Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory twenty miles away.”

“No such lyrical announcement marked the day in July 1959 when the plant’s coolant system failed and its uranium oxide fuel rods began melting down. With the reactor running out of control and set to explode, desperate operators deliberately released huge amounts of radioactive material into the air for nearly two weeks, making it almost certainly the most dangerous nuclear accident in U.S. history. The amount of iodine-131 alone spewed into the southern California atmosphere was two hundred and sixty times that released at Three Mile Island, which is generally regarded as the worst ever U.S. nuclear disaster. None of this was revealed to the public, who were told merely that a ‘technical’ fault had occurred, one that was ‘not an indication of unsafe reactor conditions’.”  

“As greater Los Angeles boomed in the following years, the area around the reactor site—originally chosen for its distance from population centers—was flooded with new residents. No one informed them of the astronomical levels of radioactive contaminants seeded deep in the soil.”

Cockburn provides some background on the liquid sodium technology.

“…such liquid sodium technology is by no means innovative. Nor, in an extensive history of experiments, has it ever proved popular—not least because liquid sodium explodes when it comes into contact with water, and burns when exposed to air. In addition, it is highly corrosive to metal, which is one reason the technology was rapidly abandoned by the U.S. Navy after a tryout in the Seawolf submarine in 1957. That system ‘was leaking before it even left the dock on its first voyage,’ recalls Foster Blair, a longtime senior engineer with the Navy’s reactor program. The Navy eventually encased the reactor in steel and dropped it into the sea 130 miles off the coast of Maryland, with the assurance that the container would not corrode while the contents were still radioactive. The main novelty of the Natrium reactor is a tank that stores molten salt, which can drive steam generators to produce extra power when demand surges. ‘Interesting idea,’ Blair commented. ‘But from an engineering standpoint one that has some real potential problems, namely the corrosion of the high-temperature salt in just about any metal container over any period of time’.”

“In a March 2021 report for the Union of Concerned Scientists, the physicist Edwin Lyman likewise concluded that there was little evidence that reactor designs like Natrium’s would be safer than water-cooled models. ‘When I read about many of the current proposals,’ Blair said, ‘it is almost as if they are unaware of all the work that has gone before.’ Citing the Navy’s abandonment of sodium reactors, he suggested that companies such as TerraPower ‘are unaware, or intentionally choose to ignore history’.” 

“He recalled that Admiral Hyman Rickover, who ran the Navy’s nuclear program for three decades, would personally command the sea trials of every new nuclear submarine. In that spirit, he suggested, ‘they should only license a small modular reactor on condition that the head of the corporation that built it takes up permanent residence within a quarter mile of the plant’.”

“As the sodium saga indicates, the true history of nuclear energy is largely unknown to all but specialists, which is ironic given that it keeps repeating itself. The story of Santa Susana follows the same path as more famous disasters, most strikingly in the studious indifference of those in charge to signs of impending catastrophe. The operators at Santa Susana shrugged off evidence of problems with the cooling system for weeks prior to the meltdown, and even restarted the reactor after initial trouble. Soviet nuclear authorities covered up at least one accident at Chernobyl before the disaster and ignored warnings that the reactor was dangerously unsafe. The Fukushima plant’s designers didn’t account for the known risk of massive tsunamis, a vulnerability augmented by inadequate safety precautions that were overlooked by regulators. Automatic safety features at Santa Susana did not work. This was also the case at Fukushima, where vital backup generators were destroyed by the tidal wave. 

Attempts to conceal or mitigate effects of nuclear accidents make it difficult for the public to assess the types of scenarios that might play out should it choose to reembrace nuclear power.  As an example, Cockburn uses the potential damage the Japanese thought they faced as the Fukushima disaster was unfolding.

“No one knows exactly how much radiation was released by Santa Susana—it exceeded the scale of the monitors. Nor was there any precise accounting of the radioactivity released at Chernobyl. Fukushima emitted far less, yet the prime minister of Japan prepared plans to evacuate fifty million people, which would have meant, as he later recounted, the end of Japan as a functioning state.” 

“Another common thread is the attempt by overseers, both corporate and governmental, to conceal information from the public for as long as possible. Santa Susana holds the prize in this regard: its coverup was sustained for twenty years, until students at UCLA found the truth in Atomic Energy Commission documents.” 

Radiation released from a reactor accident kills few people quickly.  Most die slowly.  A radiation-induced cancer could take years to kill.  If no one is interested in counting the dead and dying, it is easy to conclude that “reactor accidents aren’t so bad.” 

“Most striking of all is the success of official campaigns asserting that even the most serious accidents have caused little or no harm. The spectacular scale of the Chernobyl disaster, with its mass evacuations and radioactive clouds wafting across borders, made it difficult to downplay health effects. Yet, as Kate Brown, a historian of science at MIT, details in Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization helped promote the notion that the disaster’s health effects had been minimal. In 2005, the UN settled on a figure of 4,000 deaths among those most exposed in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia—a number at the low end of a strikingly wide range, Brown observed. The IAEA had earlier reported ‘no health disorders that could be attributed directly to radiation exposure.’ It was only when Keith Baverstock, a scientist with the World Health Organization, defied a superior and publicly disclosed a sharp increase in extremely rare thyroid cancers among Belarusian children that there was some grudging acceptance of the disaster’s deadly consequences. Even so, Baverstock says, he was threatened with firing unless he withdrew his findings; others in receipt of WHO funding claimed the jump in cases was merely the result of intensified screening.”

Kate Brown would spend years trying to overcome the official obfuscation to obtain a more realistic assessment.

“Brown spent ten years in archives across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, disinterring records of what happened to the millions of people exposed not only to the invisible cloud, but to its residue in the landscape from which they drew their food. That residue had global reach—a truck carrying Ukrainian blueberries to the United States from Canada was so radioactive it was stopped at the border. Traveling around affected areas, some far from the plant itself, Brown encountered evidence of communities shredded by radiation, such as women who sorted wool from sheep slaughtered in the radiation zone. Toting bales of radioactive wool, Brown has said, ‘was like hugging an X-ray machine while it was turned on over and over again.’ Many got sick and died. Yet amid the tens of thousands of pages Brown perused, just one obscure official document furnished a hard figure for Chernobyl-related deaths: 36,525. That was the number of women in Ukraine who received pensions because their husbands had died as a result of the disaster—a toll far in excess of anything reported by Western officials. But that stark number must represent only a small fraction of the total. ‘That’s just Ukraine,’ she told me, ‘which received only 20 percent of the radiation. There’s no comparable figure for Belarus, which got far more’.” 

This source tells us that after seventy years of research there are only two active sodium-cooled reactors.  Both are in Russia.  That country claims it will have a version safe and reliable enough for export in 2036.  It is still in development.

Pharmaceutical companies can run an eight-week clinical trial for a drug and move on to commercialization having no inkling whether long-term effects might emerge years later.  In general, waiting years before administering a drug is counterproductive.  With a new design for a nuclear reactor, how long does one wait before deeming the plant safe for commercialization?  Certainly not eight weeks.  Is eight years sufficient?  Is any amount of time sufficient?

There was no time estimate for when the Wyoming reactor would be operational.  Given history, it could be many years, and many years afterward to demonstrate a degree of safety.  And how many years might it take for even a successful demonstration product to be approved across the nation?  We do not have time to wait.  The worst that could happen is if the promise of clean nuclear power slowed the relentless push required for other forms of clean energy.  Even if the technology worked, it might produce more harm than good.

One wonders if Bill Gates would be willing to take up residence within a quarter mile of his Wyoming project.