Blog: In Nukes’ Shadow, Fearlessness and Fatalism

It bothers Gesha Witt that Germany is shutting down its nuclear plants. The one reactor that happens to loom here, over the twenty-something’s hometown of Brunsbüttel, in northern Germany, is already closed. What bothers Witt most isn’t the loss of local jobs or Germany’s likely future dependence on polluting coal, but the fact that she can no longer go swimming.

“When the plant was operating the (Elba) river was much warmer,” Witt lamented on a recent afternoon. “It was like 10 degrees warmer!”

That’s because the Brunsbüttel plant discharged hot water from its cooling system back to its source, the Elba. For years, Brunsbüttel enjoyed spa-like conditions along the banks of what is normally a chilly waterway.

Witt’s words struck me as flippant. So I repeated the question: Is it a good idea to shut down the reactors? Her answer was the same: No. The river. No more swimming.

I made a mental note to dismiss Witt’s commentary, then continued my stroll around Brunsbüttel. I was expecting to find what all the German polls were suggesting, that nearly four out of five Germans wanted nuclear power abolished immediately. Soon I started to wonder if Brunsbüttel was in Germany at all.

“This is crap,” Christian Heider, a former machinist at the nuclear facility, to me at the bar of a corner cafe said to me. “Where are we going to get our power from now? The Russians?”

“Our plant was safe,” said his brother and former co-worker, Pierre. “I seriously doubt that a plane was going to crash into the reactor, or that an earthquake or a flood would have damaged it.”

The plant was safe, he was telling me. But the plant had been closed not for political reasons but because it had suffered a major fire. No radioactive material had escaped, but clearly somebody somewhere felt that the facility was no longer secure.

I left Brunsbüttel that day without anyone telling me they favored closing the nukes. How was it, I wondered, that the people living literally right next to a reactor – those generators of dangerous waste, those alleged accidents waiting to happen – could be so fearless?

Over at Greenpeace in Hamburg, economist Kristoph von Lieven offered the most obvious answer.

“In the towns where the reactors are, the people are getting a lot of money. Not directly but via jobs and through taxes paid to the local government,” he said.

He was right, of course. Who in town was going to cheer the plant’s closure? Who’s ever seen a workers union chanting the slogan, “No More Jobs!?”

Von Lieven’s second answer was more intriguing. Basically, he said, so far in Germany there has yet to be a major nuclear accident. And so the psychological assumption for those who live and work at or near nuclear plants is that there won’t be one.

That, combined with actually seeing the object of such fear day in and day out, makes the fear go away. It all becomes ordinary, routine. The far-away protestors appear more and more absurd for their impassioned opposition.

But what of the attitudes of people who’ve already suffered a major nuclear accident? It’s too early to know the long-term psychological effects of Fukushima on locals, but in Ukraine a lot of studies have been done. In 2006 I visited the tiny woodland villages near Chernobyl, on the eve of that disaster’s 20th anniversary.

By contrast to the Germans living in Brunsbüttel, the Ukranians I met were in fact afraid. They knew what a meltdown meant. But they had lived for so long with their fear that they’d internalized it, grown complacent, fatalistic.

I was walking around one scrubby little hamlet in the spring cold when a couple of young women beckoned to me from the porch of a wooden house. I joined them.

They were sitting around in bathrobes, smoking cigarettes, drinking homemade vodka. They served me a shot, then another, in a chipped and stained coffee mug. They watched me expectantly each time I drank. One of them had a little daughter, barely old enough to walk, walking around the frosty yard without shoes, socks or even pants.

“We don’t look for work. We don’t do anything. Theirs is nothing anyone can do for us,” the women told me. “We are poisoned beyond saving.”

The people in this region were lied to during the disaster by the Soviet authorities and for years afterwards by their own. They trusted no one, because no one had cared enough about them, their families, their livestock, their crops, their newborn children, their toddlers, and their teens, to get them to safety when the meltdown was underway or afterward. They were afraid of dying but resigned to it, and sure of the plant’s role in it no matter what anyone might say.

The German and Ukraine scenarios are different and tough to compare – one plant sustained life, the other destroyed it – but the people I met in both places shared something in common. They had come to terms – uneasy or no – with living so close to their now shuttered plants.