Chernobyl, genetic engineering, and ecological disaster in the Lancasterverse
I thought the most recent two-parter was wonderful, and I was speculating whether the Chernobyl disaster would have happened in the Lancasterverse. This led me down an autistic rabbithole trying to craft lore for a scenario where there was a major disaster in the mid 1980s, but where the roles of nuclear power and genetic engineering are swapped in the verse. I also wanted to address the massive land use that would be required for the US ethanol industry. I've tried to make a bit of a narrative, but I'm definitely approaching this more from a scientific angle rather than historical.
Environmentalism
By the mid-1980s, the sheer amount of arable land that needs to be dedicated to the growth of corn for ethanol begins to become a problem, displacing human food crops and natural habitat. Internal reports circulate within the ethanol industry.
In 2006, former vice-president John Sununu releases the documentary film ‘A Convenient Lie’, which criticises the green fuel industry’s anti-environmentalist agenda and brings the Corn Carpet Crisis, often later referred to as the Soil Crisis, to the forefront on the American political imagination for the first time. Over half a century of reliance on artificial nitrogen fertilizers has led to land totally depleted of natural nutrients and the concentration of toxic nitrite compounds in the soil. The environmentalist movement has a new enemy, and its name is NO2.
Images of the whole US interior covered with endless homogenous fields of cornstalk in a desperate attempt to feed an every thirstier energy sector are powerful, but the manufactured doubt from the ethanol industry as to the ability of the continental US to sustain enough agriculture to support both people and industry is fierce. Every year, the industry spends millions promoting vegetarianism so that the 40% of land in the contiguous United States formerly used for livestock can be used as fodder for the ever-expanding carpet of corn that blankets the mid-west. Popeye the Sailor becomes a common icon for good old-fashioned American fruit and vege. In the 2010s, the ultra-processed chicken nugget becomes associated with the images of limp-wristed weakness and effeminacy and ‘nuggie boy’ becomes a popular online insult for men seen as such.
After the democrats gain control of the senate in the 2014 midterm elections, the influence of ethanol money on US politics sees a proposal for the disestablishment of the Mammoth Cave national park to make room for more corn fields. This is opposed by president Jindal, who invokes the image of Republican Teddy Roosevelt to promote the preservation of America’s national parks as an obviously right-wing ideal.
By the early 2020s, the effects of the Soil Crisis are starting to become evident. The monocultural cornfields are much more vulnerable to blight pathogens than natural grassland and crop failures that wipe out hundreds of acres are becoming increasingly common. Reliance on chemical fertilizers leave the soil left behind bereft of life. A single season can turn a thriving rural community into a ghost town, Carpet refugees having to migrate to other still-fertile regions of the US.
Activists point to the 1984 Monterrey Protocol's banning of PFAS as an example of how large-scale cooperation on environmental issues IS possible, but the Jindal and later Grassley administrations are frustratingly slow to act. By the time of Nikki Hayley's campaign, the soil crisis, once a fixture of right-wing activism is hardly mentioned at all.
Genetic Engineering
Beginning construction in 1974 in the Novosibirk Oblast, USSR, the science town of Kolsovo is the Soviet union's main centre for the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology.
In the 1980s, genetic engineering technology using retroviruses such as Moloney Murine Leukemia Virus as a vector to incorporate new genetic material into organisms is developed about 15 years earlier than the same technology was in our timeline owing to greater science funding within the USSR to remain competitive with Japan.
One of the main projects at Koltsovo is the genetic engineering of cold-tolerant crops to boost the agricultural output of rural Siberia. Ordinarily, the genome of a retrovirus vector is divided up so the viral particles can only infect the target tissue once, and can't divide. However, during a biosafety test on the 26th of April 1986, a rare recombination event allowed a strain of the viral vector to become replication-competent.
Poor design of biosafety compliant sealing allowed the virus to infect the lab workers, inserting fragments of non-human DNA into the genome of white blood cells within their bodies. Over a matter of days, the infection spread to the nearby village of Novobrosk, and Soviet geneticists informed the central committee that if left unaddressed, a viral pandemic could sweep across Europe, causing millions of deaths.
Historians debate the cultural impact of the Koltsovo disaster in the years to come. Genetic engineering was never viewed the same after the disaster, forever tainted by association with the threat of unpredictable and unseen poisoning of the very essence of life. Some view this as a valuable lesson about the dangers of a technology better not pursued, while others see this as a source of unwarranted hesitancy toward adopting techniques that could save us from the crises of the age, namely the Soil Crisis.
In 2025, President Jobs authorises strikes on Iranian agricultural research facilities, insisting they are on the verge of developing biological weapons under the guise of the New-Mesopotamia Agricultural project.
Nuclear Power
In 2020, nuclear physicist Jennifer Doudna wins the nobel prize in physics for her work in developing small modular actinide-recycling thorium reactors, a technology science journalists hail as the holy grail of reactor technology. SMARTR promises to revolutionise nuclear power, enabling anyone to have a small reactor at home with relatively accessible technology.
There is a growing movement on the Minitel in science-communication communities that SMARTR could be part of the answer toward solving the Soil Crisis by reducing the world’s energy-dependence on ethanol crops, and allowing the land to be reclaimed and reforested.