The amazing story of how a young Jimmy Carter helped avert a nuclear disaster

[NNadir]

2. While it is true that Jimmy Carter went into the core of the reactor, it is an huge exaggeration to say he "prevented...

...a catastrophe." He was one of hundreds of people who worked on the NTX reactor, and hardly a leader of the program.

There really wasn't a risk of a "catastrophe," and to say there was is simply to display no knowledge whatsoever of nuclear technology.

It is worth noting that Jimmy Carter was in proximity to two melted reactors, the other being Three Mile Island, this when he was President of the United States.

It should give "nuclear catastrophe" scare mongers pause for thought to say that Jimmy Carter has lived to be 100 years ago, and in fact, lived decades longer than all of his siblings, and both of his parents. This is not, surely, because of exposure to radiation and may in fact be in spite of it. The Carter family displayed a genetic disposition to pancreatic cancer, and it would seem that Jimmy won the genetic lottery. Probably his father and mother were both for the genetic mutation represented a dominant oncogene, as were three of his siblings, which statistically would have broken like this - not that it did - OO, Oo, Oo, oo, where the capital refers to the dominant gene and where Jimmy himself was oo.

I wrote about Carter's history with the clean up in this space sometime ago:

President Carter is among roughly 350,000 "liquidators" involved in nuclear reactor "clean ups."

In his interview, he did not claim to have saved the world.

This Stanford under graduate student's term paper describes Carter's experience there: Carter at Chalk River

A CNN piece around the time of Fukushima, when Carter was 86 years old, directly quoted the former President on this experience: Jimmy Carter's exposure to nuclear danger

"We were fairly well instructed then on what nuclear power was, but for about six months after that I had radioactivity in my urine," President Carter, now 86, told me during an interview for my new book in Plains in 2008. "They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now. It was in the early stages and they didn't know."

Despite the fears he had to overcome, Carter admits he was animated at the opportunity to put his top-secret training to use in the cleanup of the reactor, located along the Ottawa River northwest of Ottawa.

"It was a very exciting time for me when the Chalk River plant melted down," he continued in the same interview. "I was one of the few people in the world who had clearance to go into a nuclear power plant," he said.

"There were 23 of us and I was in charge. I took my crew up there on the train..."

..."It was the early 1950s ... I had only seconds that I could be in the reactor myself. We all went out on the tennis court, and they had an exact duplicate of the reactor on the tennis court. We would run out there with our wrenches and we'd check off so many bolts and nuts and they'd put them back on.

And finally when we went down into the reactor itself, which was extremely radioactive, then we would dash in there as quickly as we could and take off as many bolts as we could, the same bolts we had just been practicing on. Each time our men managed to remove a bolt or fitting from the core, the equivalent piece was removed on the mock-up..."

(Later President Carter, while President, would walk through the Three Mile Island Reactor while the situation was, excuse the pun, fluid, much to the consternation of the Secret Service.).

I mention this as an indication of how difficult it is to ascertain the "true numbers" associated with the exposure to radioactivity at Chernobyl. President Carter is the oldest of four siblings, and is the only one of them who is still alive. The other three, Ruth Carter Stapleton, Gloria Carter, and "Billy" Carter all died, Ruth in her 50's, from the same disease, pancreatic cancer.

As an advocate of nuclear energy, I could point to this anecdotal evidence about President Carter and make the specious claim that being exposed to a nuclear meltdown, two in Carter's case, the big bogeyman at Three Mile Island included, is a potential way to protect people with a clear familial history of pancreatic cancer, for them to avoid dying from the disease. This of course would be exceedingly misleading, since we really don't know what effect, if any, his participation in the clean ups had on his pancreas cells. It might be that is other three siblings inherited a different set of genes from their parents than he did.

On the other hand, if President Carter were to die at the age of 100, a nuclear opponent could easily claim that he would have lived to 110 if he hadn't cleaned up Chalk River and toured Three Mile Island while its core was melting. Some of them are indeed this stupid.

He went into the reactor core for a short time and loosened a few bolts. So did the people in his command, and many others.

We don't serve ourselves by Trumpian scale exaggerations. Embracing the truth is a better idea.

For the record, given that we are currently living with extreme global heating, which is killing the entire planet, I have argued and will continue to argue that nuclear energy is the last best hope we have to save what is left to save and restore that which can be restored. The "nuclear disaster" selective attention mentality - which is based on fear and ignorance - kills people and is killing the planet