In my previous blog, I talked about the importance of proper storage of nuclear waste and some basic variables in a nuclear waste management system. While some variables in the system, such as the radioactive elements themselves and their half-lives are easy to track and measure, others were not so clear. Today, we will look at the Chelyabinsk Disasters closely from a systems dynamics perspective and try to come up with the dynamics and feedback loops that came back to haunt the people of the region.
Reconstructing the mental model behind the nuclear arms race
The first thing to do when trying to reconstruct the dynamics is to examine the mental model of those who came up with the nuclear policy in Chelyabinsk, that is, the Soviet Union government. The story begins at the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The emergence of nuclear weapons at the end of the war sparked an arms race between the two superpowers. The atomic weapons complex Mayak built in the late 1940s 80km north of Chelyabinsk was one of many such facilities constructed. The first plutonium production reactor was built at this complex. Only seven years later, the first of three major nuclear disasters struck the province.
It is clear that the United States' nuclear capacity put pressure on the Soviet Union to keep up. This forced the Soviet Union to start a nuclear weapons programme of their own to improve their nuclear capacity. Of course, the United States government was well-aware of the increased effort of the Soviets to catch up, which put additional pressure onto the government to stay ahead. The natural thing to do would be to ante up and improve their own nuclear programme and hence their nuclear capacity. This puts even more pressure on the Soviet government to invest more and more into the programme. The end result is a reinforcing feedback loop, which I have called the "Nuclear Arms Race", in which both the US and Soviet governments continue to increase their nuclear weapons programme, trying to stay one step ahead.
Rebuilding the unintended consequences leading to the death of thousands
In my opinion, the three Chelyabinsk disasters can be directly linked to feedback loops generated by the Soviet nuclear programme, which not only killed and contaminated over a million people, but also caused a ripple effect that reduced the Soviet nuclear programme (Please note that in my mental model, I am not considering the possibility that the Soviet government ignores the suffering of the people and do nothing. Tragically, the facts are that the four villages along the Techa River were never evacuated and that less than one percent of the people affected by the 1957 explosion were evacuated.)
The first feedback loop, called "Irresponsible Waste Disposal", is linked to the first and third disaster. In both cases, a more intense nuclear programme resulted in more nuclear waste. A facility has a limited capacity to treat and store waste. Since it costs time and money to improve waste treatment which could have gone into more research, the amount of untreated waste disposed into rivers and lakes increases, which increases the risk of nuclear contamination. More contamination means more manpower hours must be wasted to evacuate civilians and to seal-off highly contaminated areas, which reduces the effort into the nuclear programme.
The 1957 disaster could have been caused by the feedback loop I'm calling "Pressure Creates Accidents", in which an intensive research programme increases the schedule pressure on the workers at Mayak. With less time available to finish a task, workers may have been force to neglect maintenance of various components of the reactor, therefore increasing the chance of a malfunction leading to an explosion. In the 1957 explosion, the coolant system of a waste containment unit malfunction, releasing 20 million Curies of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Again, the disaster means that time and money must be 'lost' on helping civilians, which reduces the funds available for the nuclear programme.
Avoiding future disasters
In the end, it was the narrow-minded obsession of the Soviet government to have a more powerful nuclear arsenal than the Americans to cause these disasters. For them, this was more important than the safety of over a million of their citizens and this is why there were multiple tragedies. Even when the Techa River was killing those who depended on it, they failed to evacuate all of the villages. Even though they chose to ignore some villages, the river was sealed off, which would have certainly inhibited the nuclear programme.
To finish off this post, I found a very interesting video called "Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet" on Youtube. It is divided into 7 parts, the first of which I have posted on this blog. The other parts can be found on Youtube for those who are interested in more detailed coverage.
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