Thomas B. Cochran is the director of NRDC's Nuclear Program and holds the Wade Greene Chair for Nuclear Policy. He initiated NRDC's nuclear weapons databook project and the U.S.-Soviet nuclear weapons verification project, a four-year collaboration between NRDC and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, to demonstrate that a low-threshold nuclear test ban treaty could be verified. Dr. Cochran has been a member of numerous government advisory committees on nuclear energy, nonproliferation and nuclear clean-up issues; he joined NRDC in 1973.
(For another profile of Dr. Cochran, see the May 1998 issue of Scientific American.)
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PROFILE
I am a nuclear physicist and an environmentalist. The primary focus of my work has been on matters related to nuclear weapons, fissile material control, and nuclear waste management.
VITAL STATS
Age 59. Married: Carol is an elementary school counselor. Two children: Jaquelin is in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, in the ERG Program; Carrie works on a Chesapeake Bay Foundation farm growing organic vegetables for low income families.
PRESENT ACTIVITY
Right now my time is divided between two projects: NRDC's Nuclear War Plans Project and assisting in the development of a mechanism for raising money to secure Russian weapons-usable fissile material against theft and diversion. With regard to the first, my colleague, Matthew McKinzie, and I are developing a computer model for assessing the blast and radiological impacts of using nuclear weapons under U.S. and Russian war fighting scenarios. Even today, a decade after the Cold War ended, a military officer follows each of the two presidents with a case holding a list of war scenarios which are very real and are tied to nuclear weapons on alert in both countries. Our computer program attempts to replicate the war plans and simulate realistically the use of nuclear weapons on likely targets under the various scenarios.
FAVORITE PLACE
Monterey/Carmel peninsula -- it's hard to beat. I spent four years and met my wife there. The landscape is gorgeous, it's well zoned, there is little pollution because of the prevailing winds from the ocean, and the weather beats the East Coast.
ENVIRONMENTAL HEROES
There are many terrific environmentalists at NRDC and elsewhere. The champion of all of them is [NRDC president and founder] John Adams. He has spent 30 years building and leading NRDC, the premier environmental organization in the world. He has managed it almost flawlessly, instilling qualities in the organization that make working at NRDC rewarding and a pleasure.
MOST WORRISOME PROBLEMS
The most troublesome environmental problems are hunger, lack of potable water, good hygiene and decent medical care throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia and North Korea; and now in Russia we are seeing serious and rapid deterioration of the quality of life due to a lack of food and adequate medical care and widespread pollution, primarily from the production and use of industrial chemicals.
WORST POLLUTION IN RUSSIA
Lake Karachay at Chelyabinsk-65, a Russian nuclear weapon production site, contains 120 million curies of radioactivity, mostly cesium-137. That's equivalent to emptying essentially all the high-level waste tanks at the Hanford Reservation in Washington state into a 30-acre lake that's only about eight feet deep. The radioactivity has been seeping into the groundwater for decades and the Russians don't have the money to clean it up.
HOW TO REMEDY THE PROBLEM
It's a national sacrifice area -- it will never be cleaned up entirely. The situation can be partially stabilized by filling in the lake and covering it over. Even in this case, wealthy folks in the West are going to have to ante up, otherwise it's just not going to happen. There is no money available for environmental remediation in Russia. The Russian economy is cratering. Western investors are scared off by rampant corruption and a failed legal system -- it's like Chicago in the 1930s.
FUTURE OUTLOOK
The United States is spending about $6 billion cleaning up the nuclear weapons complex, and even here the Department of Energy is relaxing standards, creating our own national sacrifice areas and cutting other corners to save money. In Russia, the pollution is far worse, and there is essentially no clean-up program whatsoever. It looks bleak.
last revised 6.19.00
