Used to contain, memorialise and ward off nuclear disaster, concrete is the primary building material of the atomic ageIn much the same way that the atomic age begins with the dropping of the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, so too does a certain kind of atomic architecture, which has always been carried out in one material: concrete. The reason for this can be found in Hiroshima itself. Unsurprisingly, it is the most comprehensively rebuilt of all the cities that were destroyed in the Second World War even more than Warsaw or Minsk. Here, leaving aside a couple of reconstructions, you can count the pre1945 buildings in the city centre on one hand. Historical Japanese architecture was usually executed in wood; the bomb destroyed all wooden buildings within a kilometre of the hypocentre. The subsequent fire destroyed nearly all the rest. Concrete buildings were gutted, and their roofs destroyed, but they survived as shells.The largest of these is a building which is usually described as the ABomb Dome. Still standing as a skeleton in the centre of the city, a short walk from the hypocentre, it is one of the most famous of war memorials, an early 20thcentury concrete structure with the metal frame of its original dome visible as a ghostly outline. If it is best known as a memorial, it also reveals something else. Photographs from 1945 (lead image; credit: Moonies World Photography / Alamy)show a nearly totally erased city being surveyed by the concrete building and its dome, an exhibition that concrete buildings could survive a nuclear explosion.The ABomb Dome was built as the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, a somewhat protomodernist Secessionist trade fair building of 1915, designed by the Czech architect Jan Letzel. It is one of a few concrete buildings, some designed by western architects, in early 20thcentury Japan; the technology was favoured because of its ability to withstand the countrys very common earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons, though here it withstood a wholly humanmade catastrophe. It will not do to exaggerate the buildings protective qualities all 30 people at work in the building on the day of the explosion were instantly killed but this building, and a handful like it around the city, were nonetheless evidence of material, if not human, resilience.Concrete was used to entomb the Chornobyl nuclear power stations Reactor 4 within a sarcophagus after itmalfunctioned during a cooling test, causing what remains among the worst nuclear disasters in human historyCredit:SSE ChNPPThe prestige architecture of the reconstructed city such as Kenz Tanges famous Corbusian Peace Memorial Park and Tgo Muranos angry, austere and moving World Peace Memorial Cathedral was executed in the same material, as was the rebuilding of the citys medieval castle, along with thousands of humbler houses, office buildings and housing estates. But the insights of Hiroshima were also applied elsewhere.The first nuclear tests were in the desert, in New Mexico, in which authorities believed that the poisonous radioactive isotopes could be flung far and wide. The first nuclear power stations, obviously, had to take a somewhat different approach. The earliest to be constructed for partly civilian use was Obninsk in the USSR, which began generating electricity in 1954. Rather extraordinarily, its reactors and elaborate cooling mechanisms were encased, as was mandatory in the Stalin years, in a classical superstructure a modest, faintly neoTsarist palazzo. It was soon followed by the frankly modernist Calder Hall better known as Sellafield in the north of England.Neither power station was solely for peaceful use Tony Benn, a decade later, was surprised to find as minister for technology and enthusiast for civilian nuclear power that Calder Hall was also a bomb factory for the Pentagon. But in its wake, scores of nuclear power stations sprang up around the world, most of which claimed nonmilitary use, and vowed to transform the atom from a soldier into a worker, to cite a slogan banner put up at the Chornobyl nuclear power station in Soviet Ukraine. All of these power stations had to deal with the problems of encasing, first, the reactors, and second, the waste they produced.El Cabril in Spain stores low- to intermediate level radioactive waste by encasing it within concrete cubes, each with a capacity of 18 barrels. Once filled, the cubes are again encased within another concrete structure, making it nearly impossible to accidentally open the containersIn design terms, nuclear power stations revolve around the often spherical nuclear reactors, in which the chain reactions that generate power take place. The walls of these had to be several feet thick to contain the extreme heat generated by the reactions, with a steel inner shield. It is these structures which lurk around the outer reaches of the island of Great Britain, sometimes with accompanying landscaping, sometimes with an establishment architect like Frederick Gibberd hired to dress up the elemental forms. Hinkley Point, Sizewell, Dungeness, Dounreay these are buildings of extreme abstraction and monumentality beyond anything any avantgardist ever dreamt up.Nuclear power, though carbonneutral, generates an enormous quantity of waste, which can remain radioactive for centuries. This waste can be encased in a cavern, as it was after an accident at the Lucens nuclear power plant in 1969, but its entombment in concrete is the norm; in a typical example, at the El Cabril nuclear power plant in Spain, it is put within a series of concrete boxes within other concrete boxes so that it would be almost impossible to accidentally uncover and open.Concrete also has a certain role in nuclear disaster prepping. In Britain, the sort of disturbing and often outright foolish contingency plans for nuclear attack, catalogued by Julie McDowall in her podcast Atomic Hobo, tended to entail immense concrete underground bunkers for the elite to escape to when the bombs dropped; the listed entrance to one of these underground cities stands as a bizarre raw concrete object at the edge of the Accordia housing estate in Cambridge.At the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, a crater resulting from US military nuclear experiments was capped by a concrete dome in 1980 (opposite). It is currently cracked, though the surrounding sea and land is equally if not more radioactive than its contents, according to US Department of EnergyCredit:US Defense Special Weapons AgencyProject Eastlays was perhaps the most elaborate of these plans, a privatised solution for the Thatcher era which promised to transform a Wiltshire quarry into a vast underground concrete city for 10,000, whose planners invited members of the public to purchase places. An equally maniacal but at least more democratic solution was found in the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxhas Albania, a state equally hostile to the US and the USSR, which guarded against attack by building hundreds of thousands of tiny, domed concrete bunkers, so that every Albanian family would be able to shelter when the imperialists or the revisionists struck.The most famous example of concrete nuclear architecture emerged as a result of the most notorious nuclear disaster. The Chornobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine is always identified with the material, from the prefabricated concrete panel housing of its company town, Pripyat, to the partially constructed cooling towers left unfinished after the explosion caused by a meltdown in the power stations Reactor 4. The site is dominated by the sarcophagus, an immense arched structure that towers over the surrounding countryside in northcentral Ukraine and southern Belarus. The original sarcophagus, officially the Shelter Object, was a square concrete structure which was erected in haste to stop the further spread of radioactive waste from the explosion in April 1986. This was replaced in 2016 with the arch of the current sarcophagus, known as the New Safe Confinement. This vast concrete arch is the single largest movable object in the world; it was rattled into place along rails, to ensure as little human interaction as possible with the still highly radioactive Reactor 4. It will stand for a century and then will have to be replaced again.Nuclear disasters on the scale of Chornobyl produce a chillingly impressive, brutally funereal emergency architectureOther nuclear disasters have not required such chillingly impressive, brutally funereal emergency architecture. After the only atomic disaster to compare to Chornobyl took place, when an earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in northern Japan in March 2011, the destroyed reactors were covered with a fabric shroud and a metal dome rather than a permanent concrete sarcophagus. Currently, the reactors are being dismantled and the irradiated cooling water discharged into the Pacific Ocean, to the horror of neighbouring China and South Korea.At the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, a crater resulting from US military nuclear experiments was capped by a concrete dome in 1980 (opposite). It is currently cracked, though the surrounding sea and land is equally if not more radioactive than its contents, according to US Department of EnergyCredit:US Defense Special Weapons AgencyThe Pacific, however, contains a structure as monumental and disturbing as that of Chornobyl. During the 1940s and 1950s, the US dropped its ever more powerful thermonuclear devices on Bikini and Eniwetok atolls in the Marshall Islands, an archipelago annexed in trust after the Pacific War with Japan. Eniwetok was so pounded by nuclear bombs that its soil became poisonous, and it was strewn with radioactive debris. Much of this was collected and placed into a crater created by a 1958 bomb, which was then covered in 1980 with the concrete Runit Dome, known in the Marshall Islands simply as The Tomb. The structure is currently cracking, though the US Department of Energys 2020 report on its problems concludes that there is no evidence to suggest that the containment structure represents a significant source of radiation exposure relative to other sources of residual radioactive fallout contamination on the atoll that is, given that the soil and sea around the dome is even more radioactive than the material within it, a breach would be fairly irrelevant.This enormous minimalist structure is an image straight from JG Ballards The Terminal Beach, a 1964 short story, set on Eniwetok, that mixed the writers personal memories of the Pacific War (Ballard claimed to have seen the flash of the Nagasaki bomb from a Shanghai prison camp), with his fascination with the concrete structures of the Nazi Atlantic Wall in northern France and the Channel Islands. Uncannily, Ballards protagonist finds a continuous concrete cap upon the island, a functional, megalithic architecture as grey and minatory (and apparently as ancient, in its projection into, and from, time future) as any of Assyria and Babylon. In the story, these structures are a threedimensional representation of madness. The reality may not be so very different.Photographer Robert Hackman has spent years documenting Albanias concrete nuclear bunkers, built from the 1960s to the 80s by the communist Hoxha regime and designed to accommodate both families and infantry. Nearly indestructible, the larger family bunkers have since been adapted into beach huts, cowsheds, tattoo parlours and residences, among other things. Urban development continues over and alongside these relics, as seen in this picture of a smaller infantry bunkerCredit:Robert Hackman / Alamy 2024-10-31Owen HatherleyShare AR October 2024Buy Now