U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel speaks during a news conference at the Japan National Press Club in Tokyo on Wednesday.  Photo: AP/Eugene Hoshiko

Politics

U.S. envoy confident Japan will ban LGBTQ discrimination

Feb. 16  06:35 am JST  45 Comments

By MARI YAMAGUCHI

TOKYO

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said Wednesday he has "full confidence" that the Japanese government will take the necessary steps to ban discrimination against LGBTQ people.

LGBTQ people have been campaigning for the government to adopt an anti-discrimination law after an aide to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters he wouldn't want to live next to LGBTQ people and that citizens would flee Japan if same-sex marriages were allowed. Kishida quickly fired Masayoshi Arai, the aide.

Activists are urging the government to enact anti-discrimination legislation before Japan hosts a summit of the Group of Seven industrialized nations in May in Hiroshima. Japan is the only G7 member that has not recognized same-sex marriage or enacted an anti-discrimination law for LGBTQ people.

"I have full confidence based on the swiftness of the prime minister's actions," Emanuel said at a news conference.

Japan's parliament "will reflect not only the will of the Japanese public, but take the steps necessary to be a clear unambiguous voice not only for tolerance, but against discrimination," he said.

Support for sexual diversity has grown slowly in Japan and legal protections are still lacking for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, who often face discrimination at school, work and at home, causing many to hide their sexual identities.

Campaigns for equal rights for LGBTQ people have faced persistent and strong resistance from conservatives in Kishida's governing Liberal Democratic Party. An attempt to enact an equality awareness promotion law ahead of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics was quashed by the party.

Meanwhile, more than 200 local municipalities, including Tokyo, have introduced partnership certificates for same-sex couples, allowing them to rent apartments and sign documents in medical emergencies and for inheritance. But the certificates are not legally binding and same-sex couples are often barred from visiting each other in the hospital and from accessing other services available to married couples.

Media surveys show public support for legalization of same-sex marriage has increased in recent years to more than 60%.

At a recent rally, more than 30 LGBTQ and other rights groups adopted an appeal to Kishida and heads of both houses of Parliament to enact an anti-discrimination law - not the awareness promotion legislation currently being considered by the governing party.

Recent equivocal comments by Kishida were seen as indicating his reluctance to promote equal rights for LGBTQ people despite a previous pledge to create an inclusive and diverse society.

Responding to a lawmaker's question in Parliament, Kishida said whether to allow same-sex marriage is "an issue that must be examined extremely carefully." A decision requires a thorough examination of all of society "because the issue may change the concept of family and values as well as society," he said.

Japan signed a G7 summit communique in June that called for "full, equal and meaningful participation of women and girls in all their diversity as well as LGBTIQ+ persons in politics, economics, education and all other spheres of society." Activists say Japan should keep that international pledge.

© Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

BBC raid: U.S. for ‘free press’ but seals lips on search

I would need to refer you to Indian authorities for the details of this search, says Ned Price

ITBP and police personnel deployed outside the BBC office in New Delhi on Wednesday after a protest by the Hindu Sena.

PTI
Anita Joshua | New Delhi | Published 16.02.23, 

The US state department on Tuesday avoided commenting directly on the income tax survey at the Delhi and Mumbai offices of the BBC but stressed how free media strengthens democracies everywhere including India.

Asked if the state department had any comment on “tax investigators raiding the BBC office”, spokesman Ned Price said: “We’re aware of the search of the BBC offices in Delhi by Indian tax authorities. I would need to refer you to Indian authorities for the details of this search. Beyond this discrete action, what I’ll say more broadly is the general point that I’ve consistently made in this context but in the universal context as well.

“We support the importance of free press around the world. We continue to highlight the importance of freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief as human rights that contribute to strengthening democracies around the world. It has strengthened this democracy here in this country; it has strengthened India’s democracy. These universal rights are the bedrock of democracies around the world.”

When the reporter persisted, asking if the income tax action on the BBC went against what he had said on press freedom, Price again side-stepped: “I couldn’t say. I couldn’t say. We’re aware that these — we are aware of the fact of the searches, but I’m just not in a position to offer a judgement.”

At the White House briefing, spokesperson Karine JeanPierre also steered clear of commenting on whether the President’s office had any reaction to the “documentary that the Indian Prime Minister censored”, which preceded the surveys. Her response was: “I don’t have a reaction to that for you from here.”

Earlier in the day, US President Joe Biden had spoken to Prime Minister Narendra Modi after Air India signed a record aircraft deal with Airbus and Boeing for 470 planes. Biden, in a statement, lauded the deal under which Air India will buy 200 American-made aircraft from Boeing. “This purchase will support over one million American jobs across 44 states, and many will not require a fouryear college degree,” Biden said.

Mehbooba Mufti on BBC raids

Juan Felipe Herrera, former U.S. poet laureate, receives Frost Medal for lifetime achievement

The acclaimed Latino poet's work includes the collections “Half the World in Light” and “187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border."

Juan Felipe Herrera reads one of his poems before the California Senate in 2015

.Rich Pedroncelli / AP file

By Associated Press

Former U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera is this year’s winner of the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement, with judges praising him for a “a poetic voice that is both deeply embedded and wholly original.”

Herrera, 74, is known for such collections as “Half the World in Light” and “187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border.” He was poet laureate from 2015-17.

“His poems move as he moves — through nature, through working-class communities of color, through political protests — though it would be more accurate to say he moves with them, for while Herrera is a keen observer he is never just looking on,” reads his citation Wednesday from the Poetry Society of America’s Board of Governors.

“His poems are acts of solidarity, a kind of extended family gathering, especially for Latinx, Indigenous, and other communities of color,” the citation also read.

Previous recipients of the medal, named for the late Robert Frost, include Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds.

Associated Press

Slavery and the Catholic Church: It’s time to correct the historical record

Christopher J. Kellerman

It was the morning of May 24, 1888, and a large, ethnically diverse crowd waited in the Sala Ducale of the Apostolic Palace in Rome for the pope to arrive. Led by Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, the French missionary archbishop of Algiers, the group had traveled to Rome on a double pilgrimage from North Africa and from the Diocese of Lyon, France. The pilgrims had earlier entered St. Peter’s Square with camels and a special gift for the pope: a pair of gazelles wearing silver collars inscribed with Latin verse.

Shortly after noon, the smiling Pope Leo XIII and his entourage entered the Sala Ducale to sustained applause from the pilgrims. It was a special year for Leo: the golden jubilee of his ordination to the priesthood. Preparations had been underway throughout nearly the entirety of 1887 for the yearlong celebration in which the pope would receive thousands of gifts from all over the world and greet an abundance of well-wishers.

Among the pilgrims who traveled to Rome during Leo’s jubilee, however, this group was unique, and its uniqueness was indicated by the 12 men strategically placed at the front of the crowd. These 12 African men had been enslaved before their freedom was purchased by Lavigerie and his missionaries. They were at the head of the group because today’s audience was an unofficial celebration of the release of Pope Leo’s encyclical on slavery.

On Feb. 10, the Brazilian statesman and abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco had met with Leo in a private audience and asked the pope to write the encyclical. Brazil was on the cusp of abolishing slavery, which would make it the last country in the Western Hemisphere to do so. Due to the Brazilian princess regent Isabel’s devout Catholicism, Nabuco thought a letter from the pope condemning slavery might embolden her to support abolition more aggressively. Leo was happy to oblige, and the news about this antislavery encyclical began to spread.

Upon hearing of it, Cardinal Lavigerie wrote to the pope and asked him to include something about the continuing presence of slavery in Africa. The anti-abolition prime minister of Brazil, however, was not happy with the news from Rome, and he successfully pressed the Holy See to delay the issuance of the encyclical.

Despite the prime minister’s back-channel machinations, Brazil’s parliament passed the abolition bill, and it was signed into law by Isabel on May 13. When the encyclical, titled “In Plurimis,” was released to the public on May 24, it was dated May 5, as if Pope Leo wanted it on the record that he had supported Brazilian abolition before it became the law of the land. Nevertheless, this late release intersected perfectly with Cardinal Lavigerie’s pilgrimage. The day before the audience, the 12 formerly enslaved men had been given the chance to read the document. Though other encyclicals of Leo would come to overshadow this one, it surely was one of his most theologically significant. For with “In Plurimis” and his follow-up encyclical, “Catholicae Ecclesiae,” Leo XIII did something astounding: He changed the church’s teaching on slavery. The Catholic Church, for the first time in its history, had finally gotten on board with abolitionism.
Divergent Explanations

That revolutionary day when Leo XIII became the first pope to condemn slavery is not well known by many Catholics and is rarely mentioned in scholarship related to the church’s history. This is not terribly surprising. The church’s historical engagement with slaveholding is very complex, and it is also widely misunderstood. Even in the past several years, well-intentioned Catholic writers have published accounts of the church and slavery that are full of inaccuracies.

Often, those inaccurate accounts are written to defend the church in some way. In 2005, for example, Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote a book review in First Things claiming that the popes had denounced the trade in African slaves from its very beginnings and yet had never condemned slavery as such, retaining a continuity of teaching that always allowed for some “attenuated forms of servitude.” Other apologists have taken a more absolute position: The church has always been against slavery itself. Both these lines of argumentation seem to agree on two central assertions: The popes always condemned the trade in African slaves, and the church’s teaching did not change.

Defending the church, either in its reputation or its doctrinal continuity, can be praiseworthy. But when it comes to the history of the Catholic Church and slaveholding, this posture of defense has been deeply damaging. It has unnecessarily led to confusion around the church’s history with slaveholding, and that confusion has helped to prevent the church from reckoning with a troubling history whose consequences are still present in our world.

The history of the church was nothing close to a steady, if interrupted, march to eliminate slavery.

And yet it was once widely known, and still is among historians of slavery today, that the Catholic Church once embraced slavery in theory and in practice, repeatedly authorized the trade in enslaved Africans, and allowed its priests, religious and laity to keep people as enslaved chattel. The Jesuits, for example, by the historian Andrew Dial’s count, owned over 20,000 enslaved people circa 1760. The Jesuits and other slaveholding bishops, priests and religious were not disciplined for their slaveholding because they were not breaking church teaching. Slaveholding was allowed by the Catholic Church.

One of the reasons the church’s past approval of slaveholding is so little known among the general Catholic population today is that the very popes who reversed the church’s course on slavery and the slave trade also promoted that same inaccurate narrative that defended the church’s reputation and continuity—even, intentionally or not, at the cost of the truth.
Condemning the Atlantic Slave Trade

The shifts began quietly. In 1814, Pope Pius VII, at the request of Great Britain prior to the upcoming Congress of Vienna, privately sent letters to the kings of France and Spain asking them to condemn the slave trade. At this time in history, condemning the trade did not equate to condemning slavery itself. “The slave trade” meant the transatlantic shipping of enslaved persons from the African continent to the New World. Hence, the slaveholding U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, prior to signing an anti-slave-trade bill into law in 1807, saw no contradiction in referring to the trade as “those violations of human rights” against “the unoffending inhabitants of Africa” all while continuing to keep Black descendants of the trade’s immediate victims enslaved. Britain itself outlawed the trade in 1807, but slaveholding remained legal afterward in parts of its empire. In the same vein, Pius’s private letters referred only to the trade, not to slavery itself

.

The Door of No Return is a memorial in Ouidah, a former slave trade post in Benin, a country in West Africa. (Alamy)

The papacy’s condemnation of the trade became a public one in 1839 with Gregory XVI’s bull “In Supremo Apostolatus.” Though the bull came, once again, at the request of Great Britain, Gregory deserves praise for being the first pope to publicly condemn the Atlantic slave trade after nearly four centuries of its operation. The bull was a strong one in many ways, blaming the advent of the trade on Christians who were “basely blinded by the lust of sordid greed.” And yet, as with Pius VII, Gregory did not speak directly on the issue of whether slaveholders in the Americas should free their enslaved people, something he easily could have included.

So when some abolitionists in the United States greeted Gregory’s bull as a fully antislavery document, Catholic bishops like John England of Charleston, S.C., and Francis Patrick Kenrick of Philadelphia argued that the only thing the bull did was precisely what the United States had already done: ban participation in the international slave trade. Gregory corrected no one’s interpretation, and so Catholic slaveholding was able to continue in the United States and elsewhere, arguably without disobedience to church teaching.

The Catholic Church approved, multiple times and at some of its highest levels of authority, of one of the gravest crimes against humanity in modern history.

Why Gregory was the first pope to publicly condemn the trade is an agonizing and perhaps unanswerable question. The arguments that Gregory used to support his condemnation had been articulated by countless theologians and activists over the previous few centuries, including by the representatives of Black Catholic confraternities who protested the trade before the Holy See in the 1680s. Any pope since at least the 1540s, when the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas changed his opinion on the trade after researching its injustices, could have issued nearly the same bull as Gregory did. Gregory was just the first to choose to do it.

Rewriting History

Unfortunately, Gregory also provided a narrative in his bull that did not present a truthful portrait of the church’s engagement with the trade. Pius VII had made an ambiguous and dubious claim that the church had helped to abolish much of the world’s slavery and that the popes had always “rejected the practice of subjecting men to barbarous slavery,” but Gregory expanded upon this claim in detail. He wrote that in ancient times, “those wretched persons, who, at that time, in such great number went down into the most rigorous slavery, principally by occasion of wars, felt their condition very much alleviated among the Christians.” He claimed that slavery was gradually eliminated from many Christian nations because of “the darkness of pagan superstition being more fully dissipated, and the morals also of the ruder nations being softened by means of faith working by charity.”

In Gregory’s telling, this steady Christian march toward eliminating slavery from the earth was then interrupted by greedy Christians who reduced Black and Indigenous peoples to slavery or who bought already enslaved persons and trafficked them.

Gregory claimed that the papacy had been opposed to these new situations of enslavement: “Indeed, many of our predecessors, the Roman Pontiffs of glorious memory, by no means neglected to severely criticize this.” As evidence for this statement, he cited the bulls prohibiting the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas written by Paul III, Urban VIII and Benedict XIV, as well as the then recent condemnations of the trade by Pius VII. He also included a curious reference: a 1462 letter of Pius II that, Gregory wrote, “severely rebuked those Christians who dragged neophytes into slavery.”

This narrative was deeply misleading. The history of the church was nothing close to a steady, if interrupted, march to eliminate slavery. Rather, the early church embraced slaveholding both before and after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the medieval church expanded the ways by which someone could become enslaved beyond those allowed by pagan Rome—allowing, for example, that women in illicit relationships with clerics could be punished with enslavement. Theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas theologically defended the practice of keeping humans enslaved, and St. Gregory the Great gave enslaved people to his friends as gifts.

Moreover, while it was true that the popes condemned the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the trade in African slaves was permitted and encouraged by a series of popes from Nicholas V, who died in 1455, forward. Gregory XVI mentioned none of this, instead seeming to suggest that Pius II’s letter meant the popes’ hands had always been clean with regard to the trade. But Pius II’s condemnation had nothing to do with the general Portuguese trade in enslaved Africans; it instead concerned a particular instance of Catholic converts being kidnapped. Nicholas V’s bulls had specified that only non-Christians could be seized and enslaved. Pius II’s letter was in accordance with Nicholas’ permissions, not against them.

While it was true that the popes condemned the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the trade in African slaves was permitted and encouraged by a series of popes.

The inaccuracy of this narrative did not go unnoticed. The Portuguese consul in Brazil scoffed at the bull, writing that “its doctrine has been most rarely sent forth from the Palace of the Vatican, for it is well known that Nicholas V…and Calistus III…approved of the commerce in slaves” and that Sixtus IV and Leo X also approved of the trade even after the letter of Pius II. He noted that Scripture did not condemn slavery and that the popes had previously condemned only the enslavement of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Erroneous as Gregory’s narrative may have been, he was not pulling it out of thin air. Some British and American abolitionist historians had been promoting such a narrative for decades in an attempt to argue that Christianity had historically been an antislavery religion. Just five years prior to Gregory’s bull, for example, the American historian George Bancroft falsely claimed that the slave trade “was never sanctioned by the see of Rome.” It is possible, then, perhaps even likely, that Gregory XVI honestly believed this narrative to be accurate. Nevertheless, it was wrong, and its publication in a papal bull meant that it would spread more widely.
An Abolitionist Church

When Leo XIII condemned not merely the slave trade but slavery itself on that exciting day in 1888, it may have not been too shocking to most people who heard the news. Slavery was now legally abolished in the Christian world; why would the church not be opposed to it? And yet both Nabuco and Lavigerie understood that Leo was making history. The condemnations of slaveholding that Leo issued in 1888 and 1890 did not represent merely a change in policy, which itself would have been momentous enough. The change was a theological one. What the Holy Office only a couple decades prior had proclaimed was “not at all contrary to natural and divine law” was now declared by Leo to be contrary to both.

Leo even used the arguments of abolitionists to make his case. There was a certain set of theological propositions that abolitionist theologians had been promoting for centuries, from as early as St. Gregory of Nyssa to the 19th-century abolitionists Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass and the French Catholic journalist Augustin Cochin. These propositions had been criticized or ignored by most Catholic theologians who wrote in favor of slavery, but Leo’s documents were filled with them. His successors would repeat and even deepen those abolitionist ideas in their own antislavery documents over and over again.

And yet, bold and praiseworthy as Leo’s abolitionist encyclicals were, he further concealed the truth about church history. Ignoring centuries of papal, conciliar and canonical approval of slavery, Leo strengthened Gregory’s narrative of a long antislavery march through history and inaccurately listed additional popes who had supposedly condemned the trade in African slaves and even slavery itself—including one of the popes who had renewed Nicholas V’s permissions.


What the Holy Office only a couple decades prior had proclaimed was ‘not at all contrary to natural and divine law’ was now declared by Leo to be contrary to both.

As with Gregory, Leo may sincerely have believed these falsehoods to be true. But far from being officially corrected, this erroneous papal narrative has survived online and in print. Even St. John Paul II, who apologized for the participation of Christians in the slave trade, repeated the false claim that the trade had been condemned by Pius II.

The Need for Reckoning and Reconciliation

The Catholic Church’s change in teaching regarding slavery was striking. While that change raises important theological questions about ecclesiology and doctrinal development, we must reject the temptation to jump straight to those questions without also doing the hard and painful work of reckoning with this history. It is morally imperative that we admit and deal with a series of difficult truths: that the Catholic Church approved, multiple times and at some of its highest levels of authority, of one of the gravest and longest-lasting crimes against humanity in modern history—and did not withdraw that approval for nearly 400 years.

During the full history of the Atlantic slave trade, roughly 12.5 million African men, women and children were forced onto ships to be sent across the ocean to a life of forced labor. Almost two million did not survive that journey. The survivors and millions of their descendants, all human beings made in God’s image, were the chattel property of other humans who had the power to whip them, force them to work unpaid their entire lives and keep their children enslaved as well.

A bas-relief sculpture on the wall of the Our Mother of Africa chapel at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., depicts the African American experience from slavery to emancipation and the civil rights movement. 

(CNS photo/Patrick Ryan for the National Black Catholic Congress via Catholic Standard)

As Catholics, we must consider the human beings affected by the church’s actions. How many people died chained to the disease-ridden hulls of ships because the popes before Gregory XVI repeatedly failed to take a bold stand? How many enslaved people were sexually assaulted because they were placed in a legal position allowed by the popes before Leo XIII that left them vulnerable to such abuse? How many enslaved people fell away from the Catholic faith because priests told them that the oppression they were experiencing was occurring with the approval of Holy Mother Church?

A process of reconciliation is needed. Our church needs to admit these past injustices.

As part of that reconciliation process, we need to do our best to repair the harm caused by the injustices our church perpetuated. Anti-slave-trade Catholic theologians of the 16th century were already writing about the need to make restitution to enslaved people. One 17th-century Capuchin even wrote about the eventual need for the descendants of slaveholders to make restitution to the descendants of the enslaved. Some religious communities have taken steps toward reconciliation, including the Jesuits of the United States, but at some point the Vatican will have to do the same. Perhaps there could be an international commission, or maybe a synod. When we consider the millions of lives the trade harmed and still harms to this day, it is difficult to imagine even the convoking of an ecumenical council as being too extreme a remedy.

Pope Leo XIII righted one significant wrong when he changed the Catholic Church’s teaching on slavery in 1888, and the popes since then should be lauded for their continual denunciation of slavery, slavery-like economic practices and contemporary human trafficking. But as with every unconfessed and unaddressed sin, harm remains. It takes courage to pick up that examination of conscience and pray with it. It takes courage to enter the confessional, say what needs to be said and commit to doing what needs to be done. And yet the justice and love of God demand such steps.

Christopher J. Kellerman, S.J., is the author of
All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church (Orbis Books, 2022).

A  Canadian nuclear reactor was melting down. Jimmy Carter came to the rescue.

As a 28-year-old Navy lieutenant, Carter was one of the few people on  the planet authorized to go inside a damaged nuclear reactor


By Gillian Brockell
February 20, 2023
WASHINGTON POST

Lt. Jimmy Carter, center top, in the main control room of submarine USS K-1 in 1952. (U.S. Navy)

The world was in the grip of the Cold War in 1952 when a nuclear reactor began melting down.

That reactor, located at Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario, had suffered an explosion on Dec. 12. 1952

Radioactive material had escaped into the atmosphere, and millions of gallons of radioactive water flooded into the reactor’s basement. Thankfully, no one was injured, but the Canadians needed help to disassemble the reactor’s damaged core.

The United States sent 28-year-old Jimmy Carter.

Carter, who entered home hospice care this weekend at 98, is best known for being the nation’s 39th commander in chief and oldest living president. But his service to the country began when he was a teenage plebe at the U.S. Naval Academy and continued for four decades after his presidency.

In the years after graduating from Annapolis in 1946, Carter was promoted to lieutenant and took a dangerous assignment aboard a submarine. He was away from his young bride, Rosalynn, and their growing family quite a bit.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter on their wedding day in 1946.

 (The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum)

It was in these years that President Harry S. Truman desegregated the military. Robert A. Strong, a politics professor at Washington and Lee University, recounts an incident from this period. While his submarine was docked in Bermuda, British military officers invited White members of the American crew to a party. At Carter’s urging, the entire crew refused to attend because it was segregated.

In 1952, Carter was selected to join an elite team to help develop the Navy’s first nuclear submarines. Once he had trained his crew and the submarine was constructed, Carter was to be the commanding officer of the USS Seawolf, according to Carter in his 1976 book “Why Not the Best?: The First 50 Years.”

Then the partial meltdown happened, and Lt. Carter was one of the few people on the planet authorized to go inside a nuclear reactor.

Part of the Chalk River nuclear facility in Ontario, circa 1945. (National Research Council Canada)

Carter and his two dozen men were sent to Canada to help, along with other Canadian and American service members. Because of the intensity of radiation, a human could spend only 90 seconds in the damaged core, even while wearing protective gear.

First, they constructed an exact duplicate of the reactor nearby. Then they practiced and practiced, dashing into the duplicate “to be sure we had the correct tools and knew exactly how to use them,” Carter wrote.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have been married longer than most presidents were alive

Each time one of his men managed to unscrew a bolt, the same bolt would be removed from the duplicate, and the next man would prep for the next step.

Eventually, it was Carter’s turn. He was in a team of three.

“Outfitted with white protective clothes, we descended into the reactor and worked frantically for our allotted time,” he wrote.

In one minute and 29 seconds, Carter had absorbed the maximum amount of radiation a human can withstand in a year.

The mission was successful. The damaged core was removed. Within two years, it had been rebuilt and was back up and running.

For several months afterward, Carter and his crew submitted fecal and urine samples to test for radioactivity, but “there were no apparent aftereffects from this exposure,” Carter wrote, “just a lot of doubtful jokes among ourselves about death versus sterility.”
But in an interview with historian Arthur Milnes in 2008, Carter wasn’t as cavalier. He said for six months his urine tested positive for radioactivity.

“They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now,” he said. “It was in the early stages, and they didn’t know.”

Carter returned to preparing to command a nuclear submarine, but soon, fate intervened. In July 1953, Carter’s father Earl died of pancreatic cancer at 58. (In fact, pancreatic cancer would eventually kill his mother and all three of his siblings.)

As the eldest child, Carter sought an immediate release from the Navy to take over the family business. After seven years of service, he was honorably discharged on Oct. 9, 1953.

The incident had a lifelong impact on Carter’s views on nuclear power, Carter biographer Peter Bourne told Milnes. As a young naval officer, he had approached it in a “very scientific and dispassionate way,” Bourne said, but Chalk River showed him its power to destroy.

“I believe this emotional recognition of the true nature of the power mankind had unleashed informed his decisions as president,” Bourne said, “not just in terms of having his finger on the nuclear button, but in his decision not to pursue the development of the neutron bomb as a weapon.”

How a future U.S. president helped avert nuclear disaster near Canada's capital

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Jimmy Carter was told work in Chalk River, Ont., meant he

likely couldn't have kids. He has 4.

Malcolm Campbell · CBC News · Posted: Dec 22, 2021 

A sign from inside Atomic Energy Canada Ltd., located at Chalk River, Ont., from the 1950s. (CBC Archives)

A viral post from the Historical Society of Ottawa is illuminating a part of the region's past that few in the area — or the country — have ever heard before.

Ben Weiss, co-ordinator of the society's Facebook page and speaker series, recently posted about the world's first nuclear reactor meltdown. And while Chornobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island often come to mind when nuclear incidents are brought up, this one happened less than 200 kilometres from the Canadian capital.

Even more interesting is catastrophe was averted, in part, with help from future U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

In December 1952, an experimental nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ont., about 180 kilometres northwest of Ottawa, "experienced mechanical problems and operator error that led to overheating fuel rods and significant damage to the NRX reactor core," according to a Government of Canada page.

That page goes on to say it was the world's first nuclear reactor incident, but little else about what actually happened.

Using details from an article written by journalist and author Arthur Milnes, Weiss had posted about the Chalk River meltdown last Tuesday night.

"The next morning … I took a look. And all of a sudden, I realize this story has been on fire all night. I assumed people slept at night," he said. "But it was very extraordinary. And it resonated with people."

The historical society's posts generally garner views in the thousands, Weiss said, but this has been "by far" the most-viewed post he's ever put up at close to one million views — and that's just on Facebook.

Milnes, who also published a book about Carter and his wife Rosalynn, said the former U.S. president takes a lot of pride in his involvement in the Chalk River event.

"It's not a topic that most American journalists or anything had much interest in. So when President Carter found out that I wanted to talk about Chalk River, he was just really eager," Milnes said.

"He got to the point where I ran out of questions."

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, right, is seen inside the home of author and journalist Arthur Milnes in Kingston, Ont., during a past visit to Canada. (Submitted by Arthur Milnes)

What happened?

The partial meltdown at the facility brought explosions and it was flooded with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, prompting the Canadian government to turn to its neighbour to the south for assistance.

Carter, a U.S. Navy lieutenant who was working on a nuclear submarine project in Schenectady, N.Y., at the time, was called upon to head north.

"We had the dubious distinction of having one of the first nuclear accidents. And the Americans, obviously, were very interested and … worried," Milnes said.

A view inside the labs at Chalk River, Ont., in the 1950s. (CBC Archives )

Carter led a team of men on the mission, which required the reactor to be shut down, taken apart and replaced. An exact replica of the reactor was built at a playground nearby, with Carter and his troops practising taking it apart and putting it back together as quickly as possible.

When it came time to work on the actual reactor, the men worked in shifts of 90 seconds — the high radioactivity made anything longer extremely dangerous.

"By today's standards, there's no way that would have happened," Milnes said.

"In [Carter's] case, at least, he was lowered into the building … with his wrench, and he had to run over to the reactor casing and he had one screw to turn. That was all the time he had. And then, boom, back up."

Milnes, right, and Carter are seen in Plains, Ga., at the launch of Milnes' book, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: A Canadian Tribute. (Submitted by Arthur Milnes)

Milnes said Carter remembered the after-effects of the experience decades later.

"He talks about [it] today. He had radioactive urine for many weeks afterwards. They were tested continuously," he said. "He was told it was likely that he would never have children."

Carter has four children.

After the story was shared so widely, Weiss said people across Canada and North America were reaching out, commenting and following the historical society's Facebook page.

So why does he think it caught so many people's attention?

"Jimmy Carter was the president who saved the day when he was a younger man; it definitely, definitely resonated," Weiss said.

"So they practise everything. And then, as they were actually going in, risking their lives … they were also keeping track of what they were doing on the replica in the playground, as well.

"That's a story we can all understand."

The NRX Incident

By Peter Jedicke

OVERVIEW

On December 12, 1952, a partial meltdown of the NRX reactor core at Chalk River, Ontario, occurred.   The causes of the accident provide insight for more recent events.   The environmental effects indicate what might be expected from reactors in emergency conditions.   Because this was the first serious reactor accident in the world, statistical information about the workers gives the best data about long-term health hazards associated with such events.

THE REACTOR

Canada's National Research Council co-operated with the United States and Great Britain on the atomic bomb projects during World War II.   An extensive laboratory facility was constructed on the Ottawa River, some 200 km upstream from Ottawa, at Chalk River.   Beyond the weapons application, the NRC realized the potential for pure research and even commercial production of power.   The NRC's experimental reactor was called NRX and it began operation on July 22, 1947.

NRX was contained in an aluminum cylinder, called the calandria, with a diameter of about 8 m, a height of about 3 m and its axis oriented vertically.   The calandria was fitted with about 175 vertical calandria tubes arrayed in a hexagonal lattice, was filled with up to 14 000 litres of heavy water (D₂O) and helium gas and sealed.   The purpose of the helium gas was to prevent chemical reactions with air.   The helium was held at a constant pressure of about 3 kPa above atmospheric, even as the fluid level in the calandria changed, by connection to an external helium gas holder with a capacity of approximately 40 m³.   As helium was moved back and forth from the gas holder to keep the pressure constant in the calandria, the volume of the gas holder changed by means of a domed cylinder that slid up and down on sealed tracks.   Thus the changing height of this dome gave an indication of gas flow to and from the calandria.

Heavy water serves as moderator for the nuclear chain reaction.   Natural uranium consists primarily of the isotope U-238, which captures fast-moving neutrons without splitting.   Less than 1 % of natural uranium is U-235, which splits when hit by slow-moving neutrons, yielding a combination of fast-moving neutrons, other products which are usually dangerously radioactive, and energy.   Because the energy is about 100 million times that released when a carbon atom oxidizes, nuclear reactions provide far more energy than chemistry.   Because neutrons are both required for and produced by the process, a chain reaction is possible.   However, for a chain reaction to occur, the absorption of the neutrons by the U-238 must be reduced, and the fast-moving neutrons must be decelerated.   In reactors using enriched uranium, the fuel has been processed ahead of time so that the ratio of U-235 is increased.   In NRX (and CANDU reactors), natural uranium is used, but the fast-moving neutrons are slowed down by having the uranium fuel surrounded by a moderator.   Heavy water is one of the most efficient moderators because the fast-moving neutrons readily collide with the deuterium nuclei in the heavy water molecules.   In NRX, the level of heavy water inside the calandria could be adjusted to help control the rate of the chain reaction and thus the power output of the reactor.   NRX was designed to produce 20 MW of power, but often was set at a much lower level for experimental purposes.

The NRX calandria tubes were sleeves, 6 cm in diameter, into which various rods could be inserted from above into the reactor.   A few calandria tubes were sometimes used to insert other materials into the reactor to be irradiated as part of various experiments.   Most of the tubes held uranium fuel rods, 3.1 m long, 3.1 cm in diameter, with a mass of about 55 kg.   The fuel rods were originally clad in aluminum, which was chosen because it absorbed less neutrons than steel or other materials available at the time.   There was actually a double-walled jacket of aluminum around the fuel rod, with ordinary water flowing between the walls as a coolant.   This also left a ring of air between the outer aluminum sheath and the calandria tube.   Up to 250 litres of water taken from the Ottawa river passed through the coolant sheaths of the fuel rods each second; and an airflow of about 8 kg per second was maintained through the calandria tubes.   These coolant systems included considerable plumbing outside the calandria which could be altered as part of the experiments.   In particular, there were storage tanks for the water and a 61 m stack for the air.

In addition, 12 of the calandria tubes were fitted with control rods, made of boron carbide powder in steel tubes, which could be raised and lowered into the reactor during operation.   If any 7 of these rods were fully lowered, so many neutrons were absorbed that no chain reaction was possible, and the reactor would be shut down.   The control rods were held up and out of the calandria by electromagnets; if the magnets failed, gravity would draw the rods into the reactor and shut it down.   In addition, there was a pneumatic system in each control rod which could push it down very quickly into the reactor by a blast of air, or push it slowly up out of the reactor from beneath. Four of the control rods operated together and were called the safeguard bank; the other 8 went up and down in an automatic sequence.   These two banks were activated by two pushbuttons on the main panel in the control room and a third pushbutton on the main panel activated magnets to seal the control rods into the pneumatic system; however, the pushbutton which actually initiated the pneumatic system to blow the rods down was located a few steps away.

THE ACCIDENT

On the day of the accident, NRX was set at low power. The investigations being carried out dealt mainly with coolant flow through the calandria tubes.   A number of the tubes were disconnected from the high-pressure ordinary water coolant system; one was being cooled only with air, while the others were connected by hoses to a temporary cooling system.   The depth of heavy water in the calandria was to be raised from 2.6 m to 2.77 m.

There were a series of valves in the basement beneath the reactor which controlled the control rod pneumatic system.   Some of them had actually had their handles removed to prevent them being opened.   Nevertheless, an operator opened three or four of them by mistake.   As a result, air pressure from above was reduced, and air pressure from below caused three or four control rods to rise out of the reactor.   This was the first step in the accident.

The movement of the control rods was indicated by red lights coming on in the control room.   The supervisor telephoned the operator in the basement, telling him to stop opening the valves.   The supervisor then left the control room, went to the basement, closed the valves himself and checked the air pressure.

The control rods should have fallen back into the calandria, and the supervisor assumed they had.   They moved downward enough to clear the red lights in the control room, but--for mechanical reasons not understood--not completely into the reactor.

The supervisor called the control room from the basement, wanting to tell his assistant to press the two pushbuttons which would seal the control rods into the pneumatic system and then activate the air pressure to push the control rods down.   However, he made a slip in giving the numbers of the pushbuttons, giving instead the number of the pushbutton which controls the pneumatic system and the number of the pushbutton which withdraws the safeguard bank.   The assistant could see that the red lights referring to the other control rods had cleared, meaning that there should have been enough control rods down in the calandria to keep the reactor shut down.   The assistant therefore thought it was perfectly normal for his supervisor to ask him to withdraw the safeguard bank and he did so, putting down the telephone so that he could reach over and depress the pushbutton to activate the pneumatic system.   The supervisor in the basement immediately realized his mistake and yelled into the telephone to correct himself.   But the assistant did not hear, since he did not have the telephone to his ear. The time was 15h07.

With a number of control rods only partially in place, the raising of the safeguard bank caused the power output of the reactor to double every 2 sec, according to later investigation. The people in the control room soon noticed the power rising dramatically, and the assistant activated the release mechanism for the safeguard bank after about 20 sec.   The reactor power was about 0.1 MW at that moment.

Because the pneumatic seals had not been activated, the pneumatic system could not push the four control rods of the safeguard bank into the calandria quickly.   Even gravity alone should have drawn them downward, but three of them did not fall, and the fourth fell much more slowly than it should have.   It would be about 90 seconds before that control rod was fully in place.   So the reactor continued to increase power; it would have levelled off at about 20 MW if the reactor's cooling system had not been altered for the test.

However, after only 10 sec the power output was about 17 MW, and the ordinary water in those calandria tubes which were being cooled by the temporary system began to boil, severely reducing the capability of the cooling system.   The power output began to increase more sharply.   This was noticed in the control room and, some 14 sec later, someone else in the control room threw the switch to begin dumping the heavy water moderator out the bottom of the calandria.   Reactor power increased for about 5 sec more, and peaked at 80MW, but once the moderator level was dropping, the reactions were quenched and the reactor could not continue to run away.   Some 25 sec later, the power output was zero. The total time that the power level was above 1MW was less than 62 sec.

Nevertheless, the situation got worse.   A gauge in the control room indicated that the pressure of helium gas above the heavy water inside the calandria was dropping sharply.   The assistant was concerned that the connection to the gas holder might be blocked and, if so, there was a danger that the calandria might implode as the heavy water was removed.   The assistant stopped the dump, but resumed a few seconds later when he noticed that the gas holder was still emptying. The heavy water level in the calandria was eventually stabilized at 1.34 m depth.

Inside the reactor, the sheathing around some of the fuel rods and even some of the calandria tubes had burst.   Not only helium, but hydrogen and other gases formed by heat and chemical reactions in the fuel rods were present inside and escaping from the calandria.   The dome of the gas holder dropped to its lowest point and jammed there.   With no additional source of helium to fill the calandria, air rushed in.   At 15h11, the dome of the gas holder suddenly jumped to its highest point, indicating that a hydrogen-oxygen explosion took place inside the calandria.   The calandria did not suffer complete structural failure, and more than 150 of the calandria tubes did not rupture.   This explosion marks the end of the accident.

To cool the reactor, the ordinary water cooling system was not shut down.   All of this water was radioactive, and it leaked out onto the floor of the reactor building.   By 18h, the floor was awash.   Within a few days, the water was 1m deep, and had spilled into the gas holder's room and the two rooms containing the heavy water storage tanks.   The system was maintained so that the leakage rate continued to be about 4 litres per second.   A 106 litre tank of clean water was emptied to the Ottawa River and then the contaminated water was pumped into the tank.   In total, some 4.5 x 106 litres of water were involved. Decontamination and clean-up required many months.   The calandria was removed, buried and replaced by a new one.   NRX was back in service within two years.

AIR QUALITY EFFECTS

Air flowing through the calandria tubes provided one of the means of cooling the fuel rods.   From the one fuel rod which was air-cooled alone, it was estimated that the fission products from an estimated 30 kg of uranium were released to the cooling air and then discharged through the stack.   The wind was from the west at about 4 m/s.   Staff at a neighbouring building called the control room to report that their radioactivitvy detectors were off- scale.   An electrician who was up a pole adjacent to the reactor stack and who was wearing radiation monitoring film received a dose of 350 millirems.   The emergency siren to stay indoors was sounded at 15h17.   Extensive monitoring was undertaken downwind all that weekend, and radioactivity was detected up to 400 m on either side of the plume centreline.   Traces of activity in buildings were cleaned up the following week.

Air quality inside the NRX building was affected mainly by the escape of contaminated cooling water.   Automatic radiation alarms sounded at 15h09.   200 millirems per hour were measured at the top of the reactor itself at 15h10; this figure was 900 a minute later.   At 15h15, wearing respirators was advised. About 15h27, radioactivity of 5 000 millirems per hour was measured in the basement where cooling water was being discharged.   At 15h47, the order was given to evacuate the entire plant.

WATER QUALITY EFFECTS

Heavy water is not radioactive by itself.   However, there was considerable leakage between the heavy water moderator and the ordinary water cooling systems, and both systems become contaminated with fission products.   The heavy water had to be reprocessed to remove the ordinary water and contaminants, but the heavy water system remained more or less intact.   However, the contaminated ordinary water leaked out onto the floor of the reactor building.   All the additional ordinary water that was pumped in to cool the reactor also became contaminated, and there was no way to keep it from also leaking out.

To avoid having the water reach the Ottawa River, a pipeline was built to a sandy area about 1 600m away.   The contaminated water, containing about 10 000 curies of long-lived fission products, was pumped to this area and allowed to seep away.   No radioactivity was detected in the creek which drained this area to a small lake.   Monitors were also established at the first two water intakes down-river, 22 and 37 km away, and observations showed no radioactivity above the natural level.

MORTALITY EFFECTS

No one died or was seriously injured as an immediate result of the accident.   Although some personnel were exposed to high radiation levels during the incident itself, no study has been done to isolate them from the larger group which participated in the clean-up.   The accepted limit for exposure at the time was 15 rem per year for each person.   Since levels in the building were high enough to reach that level with a few hours, no one person could work on the clean-up for a very long time.   About 150 United States military personnel, about 170 Canadian military personnel and about 20 construction company employees joined the 862 staff members at Chalk River to implement the clean-up.   The military authorities may have followed the health of their personnel after the accident; if so, this data is not available.

At the time of the accident in 1952, staff at Chalk River were employees of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL).   In 1982, a study of those who worked on the NRX clean-up was published.   Dosimetry files were lost in 1956 as a result of a fire and some information had not been duplicated, however, so some details cannot be traced.   The 1982 study was able to identify 562 employees who stayed with AECL ("Group B") and 288 who had left AECL ("Group A").   These people collectively absorbed 2021 rem during the cleanup.   Approximately 600 rem were absorbed by non-AECL participants.   The tables included here are excerpted from the study.   Mortality information was extracted from Canada's "Mortality Data Base," which is itself based on information provided by the death certificate for every death in Canada.   In group A, some deaths may not be recorded, since these are the people who left AECL, so the study did not report a ratio of observed deaths to expected deaths.   The number of expected deaths was derived from the general population of the province of Ontario from 1953 to 1978.   Of the 23 cancer deaths reported between 1966 and 1980, 10 were lung cancer, 2 cancer of the pancreas, 1 was lymphatic cancer, and none were leukaemia.   In each of these types, the number of cancer deaths was marginally smaller than that found in a similar-sized group in the general population.   The other cancers were not specified in the study.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eggleston, Wilfrid, Canada's Nuclear Story TK9026.e35.

Glen, Ron, Critical Choice: Nuclear Power for Canada TK9145.g54.

Government of Ontario, Nuclear Emergency Plan, Part I, 1986 TK9152.o55.

Hare, F.K. Safety of Ontario's Nuclear Power Plants. 1988 TK9152.h37.

Hinds, H.W., Barker, C.J., and Graham, R.D., Reassessment of the Control System of the NRX Research Reactor, (AECL-8484),Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories, Chalk River, Ontario, 1984

Megaw, W.J., How Safe? Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Beyond, 1987 TK9152.m44.

Silver, L. Ray, Fallout from Chernobyl, 1987 TK9152.s56.

Werner, M.M., Myers, D.K., and Morrison, D.P., Follow-Up of CRNL Employees Involved in the NRX Reactor Clean-Up, (AECL-7760),Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories, Chalk River, Ontario, 1982

QUESTIONS for students

1. On what date did the partial meltdown of NRX occur?
2. Where is NRX located?
3. On what date did NRX begin operation?
4. What is the aluminum cylinder, in which NRX was contained, called?
5. What were its dimensions?
6. How many tubes did it contain?
7. How were they arrayed?
8. What materials were sealed in the aluminum cylinder?
9. Why was an external gas holder connected to the aluminum cylinder?
10. How was the gas flow to and from the aluminum cylinder indicated?
11. What material serves as moderator for the nuclear reaction?
12. What percentage of natural uranium is U-235?
13. List the things that a U-235 nucleus yields when it is split by a slow-moving neutron.
14. Why do nuclear reactions provide far more energy than chemistry?
15. Why is a nuclear chain reaction possible?
16. How is absorption of neutrons by U-238 reduced in reactors using enriched uranium?
17. How much power was NRX designed to produce?
18. Describe the calandria tubes.
19. What did most of the tubes hold?
20. Why was aluminum used as cladding?
21. Why was air and cool water pumped through the calandria tubes?
22. How many control rods were there?
23. Of what were the control rods made?
24. How many control rods had to lowered to shut the reactor down?
25. How did control rods cause the reactor to shut down?
26. What would happen if power failed to the electromagnets which held the control rods up out of the reactor?
27. Name the two directions in which the control rods could be pushed by a pneumatic system.
28. Describe the speed with which the control rods could be pushed by a pneumatic system in each of two directions.
29. How many control rods comprised the safeguard bank?
30. How did the rest of the control rods move?
31. Where were the pushbuttons located which activated the two banks of control rods and the magnets to seal the control rods into the pneumatic system?
32. Where was the pushbutton located which actived the pneumatic system in a particular direction?
33. What was the power setting of NRX on the day of the accident?
34. What range was the depth of heavy water in the calandria intended to cover that day?
35. What mistake did an operator make which initiated the accident?
36. How was the movement of the control rods indicated in the control room?
37. What did the supervisor do after telephoning the operator in the basement?
38. What mistaken assumption did the supervisor make?
39. What was the supervisor's second mistake?
40. Why did the assistant in the control not realize that the other control rods were not fully inserted in the reactor?
41. The supervisor realized his second mistake immediately, but why could he not tell the assistant?
42. What was the first hint people in the control room had that something was wrong?
43. What was the reactor power at that moment?
44. Why could the pneumatic system not push the four control rods of the safeguard bank into the calandria quickly?
45. How would the incident have ended if the reactor's cooling system had not been altered for the test?
46. What happened to the ordinary water in those calandria tubes which were being cooled by the temporary system?
47. What happened to the power output?
48. How long was it before someone else in the control room threw the switch to begin dumping the heavy water moderator out the bottom of the calandria?
49. What was the peak level of reactor power?
50. Was all of the heavy water moderator removed from the reactor?
51. What might have happened if the supply of helium gas to the reactor was somehow halted?
52. What happened at 15h11 to make the dome of the gas holder suddenly jump to its highest point?
53. What fraction of the calandria tubes burst?
54. What happened to the ordinary water which passed through the calandria to cool it?
55. At what rate did this ordinary water leak from the reactor?
56. How did staff at a neighbouring building know something was wrong?
57. What was the first step advised to protect the workers inside the NRX building?
58. What safety related order was given at 15h47?
59. How much radioactivity was contained in the contaminated water?
60. What happened to this contaminated water?
61. How much radioactivity was detected in the creek which drained the area where the contaminated water was sent to a small lake?
62. What was the accepted limit for exposure at the time?
63. Why did the clean-up work have to be spread among so many people?
64. Is there any information about the health effects on the military personnel?
65. What happened to the dosimetry files of the AECL employees?
66. From where was mortality information extracted?
67. How did the number of cancers among participants in the clean-up compare to that expected in a similar-sized group in the general population?
68. What fraction of the AECL employees who participated in the NRX clean-up had died of cancer by 1982?
69. What fraction of those who died died of cancer?

Questions requiring further thought or research

1. Why was Canada's participation in the atomic bomb project during World War II sought by the U.S. and Great Britain?
2. Why was Chalk River chosen as the site of the AECL laboratory?
3. Where did the fuel for NRX (or for the CANDUs) come from? How much processing is involved? Compare this to the processing required for fuel for reactors in the United States.
4. What are some of the long-lived fission products that result from a natural uranium-fuelled reactor such as NRX? Compare these products with those of an enriched uranium-fuelled reactor.
5. How does a CANDU reactor's calandria differ from NRX's calandria? How would CANDU reactor safety systems have dealt with an accident like the one that happened to NRX? At each stage of the NRX events, could a CANDU have prevented further difficulties?
6. Find out about the medical applications of products from the NRX reactor. In particular, for what was Cobalt-60 used?
7. Is aluminum still used as cladding in CANDU reactors?
8. Calculate the time constant for the initial increase in power output from the reactor.
9. Where was the contaminated calandria from the reactor buried? Where is it today?
10. Name one United States military serviceman who served in the clean-up operation and later became a very famous politician and statesman.

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Written by Peter Jedicke (contact pjedicke at yahoo.com), in 1989 for Environmental Science 304, a course at Fanshawe College, London, Ontario.
Permission is granted to use this article for any educational or other non-commercial purpose, but please let the author know you are using it.