One of global warming’s more colorful dangers is the possibility that melting permafrost would revive prehistoric diseases and trigger horrific pandemics.
However, the more immediate candidates for a disastrous, climate-fueled comeback are newer and caused by humans.
A hotter and more chaotic atmosphere is making it harder to build nuclear weapons and store waste safely in an unhappy union of two of humanity’s biggest headaches. There is little evidence that humanity is prepared for what could come next.
Everyone got a stark reminder last week when one of the wildfires scorching the Texas Panhandle came perilously close to the Pantex nuclear-weapons facility just outside of Amarillo. The plant shut down briefly, and workers scrambled to build a wildfire barrier — raising the question of why a nuclear-weapons facility in the parched Texas Panhandle did not already have a wildfire barrier.
Pantex builds and breaks down nuclear weapons, and stores nuclear material on its 7,284 hectare grounds in what is increasingly a tinderbox. Heavier-than-usual rainfall last year made undergrowth flourish in the Panhandle, creating more wildfire fuel. Then a freak winter heat wave fueled by hot, dry winds from Mexico made conditions perfect for the worst wildfires in Texas history.
This cycle — wetter wet seasons followed by hotter, drier dry seasons, leading to roaring wildfires — is expected to become increasingly routine as the planet warms. The wildfire risk for Amarillo over the next 30 years ranges from “severe” to “extreme,” the climate-data group First Street Foundation said.
Such conditions are expected continue to threaten not only Pantex, but nuclear sites worldwide.
I am no J. Robert Oppenheimer, but I know enough about nuclear things to understand they do not mix well with fire. When the Rocky Flats Plant, a former nuclear weapons maker just outside of Denver, burned in 1957, it spewed plutonium and other radioactive dust across the city and its suburbs. Every wildfire that comes near nuclear material risks creating another Rocky Flats.
Consider Oppenheimer’s old stomping grounds, Los Alamos National Laboratory, which still builds nukes and stores waste in northern New Mexico. It is also threatened by wildfires pretty often, most recently in 2000, 2011 and 2022. The 2000 fire burned one-quarter of its land, though by some miracle it touched none of the nuclear material. Over the decades, the lab has moved most of its nuclear waste elsewhere and tried to bolster its fire protection.
However, a US Department of Energy audit in 2021 found those steps were inadequate, and there is still more than enough waste at the facility to cause a serious environmental disaster.
Wildfires have also recently threatened the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory outside of Los Angeles, and the Chernobyl cautionary tale in Ukraine (in 2020, before Russian President Vladimir Putin became its biggest threat), to name a few.
There are the many nuclear power plants that are also increasingly threatened by floods, hurricanes, wildfires and droughts. Most US plants are unprepared for such disasters, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said.
About 60 percent of the US’ nuclear power capacity is directly threatened, the US Army War College has said.
Nuclear power could be a crucial part of a clean-energy transition, but not if it comes with a high risk of multiple Fukushima-like catastrophes.
That is not all. Global warming could eventually thaw out nuclear waste the US military buried deep in the ice in Greenland, a recent US Government Accountability Office report said.
Rising sea levels could disturb and spread radioactive waste in the Marshall Islands, the site of dozens of Cold War bomb tests, the report said.
Worryingly, there is little evidence nuclear operations or governments are ready for such potential catastrophes, said Nickolas Roth, senior director of nuclear materials security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group.
Roth pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example: Few sites had planned for an extended crisis that made in-person management difficult.
A rapidly changing climate makes such extended, or serial, crises more likely.
“We need to see more nuclear facilities developing resiliency mechanisms,” he said. “Not just because of wildfires. We are entering an era where rapidly evolving risks are impacting nuclear operations.”
The first thing site managers can do is get nuclear waste to safer locations. That is easier said than done. Few places are exactly begging to import nuclear waste. However, the time to look for alternatives was yesterday.
Operators can also help one another by freely sharing their experience and expertise, as Roth said happened during the pandemic.
They should not be left to fend for themselves. Some outfits are run by the US government, but many others are not. All would need broad logistical and financial support to avoid disasters whose effects could reach across society.
Places such as the Texas Panhandle face obvious climate risks, but people are learning all the time there are no real safe havens when the atmosphere goes haywire. Everyone working with materials that could spoil the environment and human health for generations must get ready for the risks to come.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017