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Thanks for sticking around for the conclusion, if you'll pardon the express. From the comments received yesterday, I see this conclusion is more in order than I realized at first. I trust this will clear up some of the confusion.
The world’s first nuclear power plant generated electricity in Obninsk in the Soviet Union on June 27, 1954. The capacity was only five megawatts, small by today’s standards, with most reactors now exceeding 1,000 megawatts. This power plant was shut down in May, 2002 because, as Russian Mayak Radio reported, its further operation became pointless. The radio station reported that the reactor had come to the end of its life after almost fifty years in operation.
The world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, was launched in January, 1955. Nautilus' nuclear generator allowed it to dive longer, faster, and deeper than any submarine before it. Nautilus continued to break records in 1958 by becoming the first vessel to cross the North Pole. Decommissioned in 1980, the submarine was converted into a museum in 1985.
In 1955 the Atomic Energy Commission announced the beginning of a cooperative program between government and industry to develop nuclear power plants. Arco, Idaho (population 1,000) became the first U.S. town powered by nuclear energy. An experimental reactor, BORAX III, provided energy for the first U.S. nuke town. The power was generated at the Idaho National Energy Laboratory.
This same year the United Kingdom announced its decision to develop thermonuclear weapons. A few months later, the United Nations sponsored the first international conference on what they termed the “peaceful” uses of nuclear energy, a decision reached and announced in Geneva, Switzerland.
This may be a good place to point out the different types of reactors in existence.
The first type is the Pressurized Water Reactor. In the PWR the water which passes over the reactor core to act as moderator and coolant does not flow to the turbine, but is contained in a pressurized primary loop. The primary loop water produces steam in the secondary loop which drives the turbine. Put simply, water gets hot, converts to steam, and the steam powers the turbine which in turn generates electricity. The obvious advantage to this is that a fuel leak in the core would not pass any radioactive contaminants to the turbine and condenser.
Second is the Boiling Water Reactor. In the BWR, the water which passes over the reactor core to act as moderator and coolant is also the steam source for the turbine. While this seems more efficient, the disadvantage is that any fuel leak might make the water radioactive and that radioactivity would reach the turbine and the rest of the loop.
In the Pressurized Water Reactor, the water which flows through the reactor core is isolated from the turbine. But the Gas-Cooled Reactor (GFR) system features a fast-neutron-spectrum, helium-cooled reactor and closed fuel cycle. The GFR uses a direct-cycle helium turbine for electricity generation, or can optionally use its process heat for production of hydrogen. Through the combination of a fast spectrum and full recycle of actinides (such as Uranium), the GFR minimizes the production of long-lived radioactive waste. The GFR’s fast spectrum also makes it possible to use available fissile and fertile materials (including depleted uranium) much more efficiently than thermal spectrum gas reactors with once-through fuel cycles. Several fuel forms are candidates that hold the potential for operating at very high temperatures and to ensure an excellent retention of fission products: composite ceramic fuel, advanced fuel particles, or ceramic-clad elements of actinide compounds. Core configurations may be based on pin-or plate-based assemblies or on prismatic blocks. The GFR reference has an integrated, on-site spent fuel treatment and refabrication plant.
Russia holds an unintentional monopoly on the Light Water Graphite Reactor. The Soviet designed RBMK is a pressurized water reactor with individual fuel channels which uses ordinary water as its coolant and graphite as its moderator. It is very different from most other power reactor designs in that it was intended and used for production of both plutonium and power. The combination of graphite moderator and water coolant is found in no other power reactors. The design characteristics of the reactor were shown, in the Chernobyl accident, to cause instability when at low power. This was due primarily to control rod design and a positive void coefficient.
The Fast Neutron Reactor, the final major type, more deliberately use the uranium-238 as well as the fissile U-235 isotope used in most reactors. If they are designed to produce more plutonium than they consume, they are called Fast Breeder Reactors (FBR). But many designs are net consumers of fissile material, including plutonium. Fast neutron reactors also can burn long-lived actinides which are recovered from used fuel out of ordinary reactors.
What constitutes a nuclear accident has never been agreed upon, not even by nuclear physicists or the various Atomic Energy agencies throughout the world. But we take “accident” to mean that something dangerous happened that was not planned. With that view in mind, here is an incomplete list—incomplete partly because not all accidents are likely to have been reported and partly because a list of all accidents would require a separate book. We focus here on the most significant or horrendous events.
A container of uranium hexafluoride exploded on September 2, 1944, in the Oak Ridge transfer room, killing Peter N. Bragg, Jr., and Douglas P. Meigs and injuring three others. A steam pipe exploded and the incoming water vapor combined with the uranium compound to form hydrogen fluoride, a dangerous acid, which all five inhaled. Bragg and Meigs died from whole-body acid burns.
Shortly after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were detonated in August 1945, Harry K. Daghlian, Jr., working at the Los Alamos Omega Site, accidentally created a supercritical mass when he dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto a plutonium core. He removed the piece, but was fatally irradiated in the incident.
It was in November, 1950, when a B-50, returning one of several U.S. Mark IV bombs secretly deployed in Canada, developed engine trouble and jettisoned the weapon at 10,500 feet. The bomb, which carried some uranium but not its plutonium core, was set to self-destruct at 2,500 feet and dropped over the St. Lawrence River off Rivre du Loup, Quebec. The explosion shook area residents and scattered nearly 100 pounds of uranium.
During the early morning of March 1, 1954, a Japanese fishing boat, the Fukuryu Maru, or Lucky Dragon, and its crew witnessed what they thought was the sun rising to the west of them as they sailed in the Pacific Ocean. That struck the more alert of them as unlikely, what with the sun being in the habit of rising in the east. What they were actually seeing was the 12 Megaton detonation of the Hydrogen “Bravo” Bomb at the Bikini Atoll, eighty-five miles away. Several hours later, white ash began to fall like snow onto their ship. Many of the crew members, thinking they had come upon nonmelting snowflakes, began gathering the ash into bags as souvenirs. Before the actual sun set, the entire crew had fallen ill. (The 86 residents of Rongelap Atoll had similar experiences from their own deadly snow.) The twenty-three crew members were hospitalized in Japan and one later died of kidney failure due to being exposed to radiation. Not surprisingly, the incident caused a rift in relations between Japan and the United States because the U.S. did not warn Japan or any other country of the bomb’s testing, leaving the Lucky Dragon exposed to the fallout. The U.S. issued an apology and paid $2 million in compensation. The twenty-three crewmen were among 264 people accidentally exposed to radiation because the explosion and fall-out had been far greater than expected. The original natives were granted $325,000 in compensation and returned to Bikini in 1974 from which they were again evacuated four years later when new tests showed high levels of residual radioactivity in the region. Twenty-three nuclear tests were carried out at Bikini between 1946 and 1958.
It was in 1957 in the South Ural Mountains of the USSR that radioactive waste exploded at a Soviet nuclear weapons factory, resulting in the evacuation of 10,000 people. Soviet officials claimed there were no casualties. However, the Russian scientist who reported the accident said that hundreds of people died from radiation sickness. A series of less prominent accidents preceded and followed this meltdown, in addition to a polluted water supply for people remaining in the area. More than 500,000 inhabitants of the region were exposed to radiation as a result.
In October of that same year, a fire in a graphite-cooled reactor north of Liverpool, England, sent radiation clouds into the countryside, contaminating a 200 square mile area.
The world’s first official fatal atomic accident happened on January 3, 1961, when a small experimental BWR called SL-1 (Stationary Low-Power Plant Number 1) in Idaho Falls blew up after a control rod was manually removed. At the time of this accident, a three-man crew was on top of the reactor where they were assembling the control rod drive mechanisms and housing. The nuclear excursion, which resulted in an explosion, was caused by manual withdrawal of the central control rod blade from the core beyond the limits specified in the maintenance procedures. Two crewmen died instantly from the force of the explosion. The third man died two hours later from a head injury. Twenty-two of the people engaged in recovery operations received radiation exposure. Some gaseous fission products, including radioactive iodine, escaped into the atmosphere and drifted downwind in a thin plume. Particulate fission material was largely confined to the reactor building with slight radioactivity in the immediate vicinity of the building.
A vessel called the Scorpion was the Soviet Union’s first nuclear-powered submarine. When a pipe in the control system of one of the reactors ruptured, radiation spread through the sea craft, killing the captain and seven crew members. Folksinger Phil Ochs wrote and recorded a moving song about the event.
When a sodium cooling system failed on October 5, 1966, the core of a reactor partially melted. The Fermi 1 was a breeder reactor located at Lagoona Beach, thirty miles from Detroit. High temperatures were measured (700 Fahrenheit compared to normal 580 Fahrenheit) and radiation alarms sounded involving two fuel rod subassemblies. The reactor scrammed (shutdown) and fuel melted. Had the super-heated fuel hit the water table, a hydrogen bubble would have arisen and spread toxic gas over much of southern Michigan and northern Ohio. As singer Gil Scott-Heron put it, “We almost lost Detroit.”
After a month of squirming, the officials tested out enough subassemblies to limit the damage to six of them. By January 1967 they learned that four subassemblies were damaged with two stuck together, but it took four more months to remove them. When they had checked the sodium flow earlier, they had detected a clapping noise. In August 1967, technicians were able to lower a periscope device into the meltdown pan and found that a piece of zirconium cladding had come loose and was blocking the sodium coolant nozzles. The zirconium cladding was part of the lining of the meltdown cone designed to direct the distribution of fuel material should a meltdown of the fuel occur. Such structures are necessary in a breeder reactor because of the possibility or, in fact, likelihood of molten fuel reassembling itself in a critical configuration. This is not a possibility in an ordinary light water reactor because of the low level of enrichment of the uranium, but a fast breeder reactor is operated with a much higher level of enrichment. The phrase “China syndrome” was coined in regard to this accident as government and industry were contemplating the possibilities should a meltdown of fuel with critical reassembly take place. The uncontrolled fission reaction could create enough heat to melt its way into the earth, and some engineer reported quipped, “It could go all the way to China.”
With tools designed and built for the purpose, the piece of zirconium was fished out in April of 1968. In May 1970, the reactor was ready to resume operation, but a sodium explosion delayed it until July of that year. In October it finally reached a level of 200 Megawatts. The total cost of the repair was $132 million. In August, 1972, upon denial of the extension of its operating license by the Atomic Energy Commission, the plant was permanently shut down.
Before the end of the 1960s, a reactor coolant malfunctioned at the Lucens Vad, Switzerland plant and an undisclosed amount of radiation escaped into a cave, one which was quickly sealed. Switzerland had by this time established itself as a major developer of nuclear energy once the first commercial plants were opened in the cities of Beznau and Mühleberg. But disaster struck the reactor as disasters often do. This one hit on January 21, 1969. A pressure tube burst, creating a power surge, and the reactor malfunctioned. Some radioactive gas escaped from the cavern and the reactor had to be shut down.
The Swiss government ordered an inquiry into the incident and a report was published right away, if by “right away” you mean ten years later. The result? The inquiry by the Swiss Association for Atomic Energy found there had been no major negligence on the part of the plant’s managers. It blamed the blast on a corroded pressure tube, which had been caused by humidity.
The reactor core in the Lubmin Plant in what was on December 7, 1975 known as East Germany came very close to melting down as the result of a fire caused by an electric short circuit.
But it was on March 28, 1979 that there occurred an accident that everyone of a certain age will always remember. The nuclear power plant accident happened at Three Mile Island, located near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. What happened in the early morning hours of this day was the worst reported nuclear plant crisis in United States history so far. Due to equipment failure and operator error, Three Mile Island experienced a partial nuclear core meltdown at the Unit’s Number Two Reactor. A meltdown occurs when the reactor core burns through its case and begins a descent down into the Earth. Once it reaches the water table, two things will happen. First, an enormous hydrogen bubble will rise up through the freshly-bored path and into the atmosphere, a concern of no small magnitude since hydrogen is extremely flammable. Second, the reactor hitting the water table will create a radioactive geyser 10,000 times the size of Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park.
Twenty-four hours later, no one had been able to cool the reactor. The meltdown continued. Forty-eight hours later, the plant owner, Metropolitan Edison, made the decision to vent radioactive materials into the atmosphere to reduce the pressure the reactor was under and hence cool the core to prevent the China Syndrome from happening. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an agency as pro-nuclear power as they come, wrote up the situation this way: “By the evening of March 28, the core appeared to be adequately cooled and the reactor appeared to be stable. But new concerns arose by the morning of Friday, March 30. A significant release of radiation from the plant’s auxiliary building, performed to relieve pressure on the primary system and avoid curtailing the flow of coolant to the core, caused a great deal of confusion and consternation.” By the words “confusion” and “consternation” the NRC meant that people thought they were going to die. Even Pennsylvania’s Governor advised all children and pregnant women within a five mile radius of the plant to evacuate. Over that weekend, 140,000 central Pennsylvania residents evacuated. By the first of the week, President Jimmy Carter, himself a nuclear engineer, toured the facility in glowing yellow boots in an effort to convince people that it was safe to return.
According to the NRC’s own report: “It was later found that about one-half of the core melted during the early stages of the accident. Although the TMI-2 plant suffered a severe core meltdown, the most dangerous kind of nuclear power accident, it did not produce the worst-case consequences that reactor experts had long feared. In a worst-case accident, the melting of nuclear fuel would lead to a breach of the walls of the containment building and release massive quantities of radiation to the environment.”
“Breach” is one of those words government agencies love to use because this is a word that does not convey much of a mental image, which is why we heard it used so often during the New Orleans flooding after Hurricane Katrina. In the case of Three Mile Island, the word “breach” meant that the walls would rattle apart and collapse, allowing for an ungodly amount of radioactive gases to spray up into the air and contaminate the surrounding planet.
And yet the disaster was not quite finished. The operation to rid the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant of radioactive material was not completed until 1988, almost ten years after the installation was crippled by the world’s first major nuclear accident. The clean-up operation was suspended while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other government organizations prepared environmental impact “studies.” The NRC said it did not regard Three Mile Island as a safe waste disposal site. “Removing the damaged fuel and radioactive waste to suitable storage sites is the only reliable means of eliminating the risk of widespread contamination,” the Commission report said.
Also in the United States, on February 11, 1981, 100,000 gallons of radioactive coolant leaked into the containment building of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Sequoyah Plant, contaminating eight workers. The accident occurred while the plant was shut down for maintenance. The plant used slightly contaminated water for emergency coolant, because clear water would raise costs “needlessly.”
Half a world away, in Bhopal, India, a Union Carbide plant leaked a toxic gas known as methyl isocyanate, killing 2,000 people and contaminating 150,000 others on December 3, 1984. The Indian government estimated that some 50,000 people were treated in the first days after this horrible accident. They were suffering from terrible side effects, including blindness, kidney failure, and liver disease. Since then, researchers have said that nearly 20,000 others have died from the effects of the leak. Investigations into the disaster revealed that something had malfunctioned with a tank that stored the lethal methyl isocyanate. In 1989, Union Carbide, now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, paid the Indian Government 470 million pounds in a settlement which many described as woefully inadequate. But in 1999 a volunteer group in Bhopal, believing that not enough had been done to help victims, filed a lawsuit in the United States asserting that Union Carbide violated international law and human rights. Three years later the government of India announced it was seeking the extradition from the United States of former Union Carbide boss Warren Anderson. CEO Anderson faced charges of “culpable homicide” for cost-cutting at the plant which was alleged to have compromised safety standards. In October 2004, the Indian Supreme Court approved a compensation plan drawn up by the State Welfare Commission to pay nearly $350 million to more than 570,000 victims of the disaster.
The world’s largest reported nuclear accident occurred a little after 1:00 a.m. on April 26, 1986 at the Chernobyl facility in the Ukraine. Thirty people died the first day. An area of twenty square kilometers remains permanently quarantined. Russian scientists estimated that all of the xenon gas, about half of the iodine and cesium, and at least five percent of the remaining radioactive material in the Chernobyl 4 reactor core (which had 192 tons of fuel) was released in the accident. Most of the released material was deposited close by as dust and debris, but the lighter material was carried by wind over the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and to some extent over Scandinavia and Europe.
The casualties included firefighters who attended the initial fires on the roof of the turbine building. All these were put out in a few hours, but radiation doses on the first day were estimated to range up to 20,000 millisieverts, causing twenty-eight more casualties by the end of July 1986. By the time it was presumed to be all over, half a million people died as a result of this nuclear accident. Since the meltdown occurred, a nineteen mile radius of the plant has been closed off to the public. But sometime in 2011 the area is scheduled to be a tourist attraction, open to the public. Those visitors who survive will be rocketed off to Saturn to see if they can also exist without oxygen.
The accidents, meanwhile, just kept on clicking.
September 18, 1987: At Goiania, Brazil, 244 people were contaminated with Cesium-137 from a cancer-therapy machine that had been sold as scrap. Cesium-137 is one of the radionuclides yielded by nuclear reactions. Four people died.
March 24, 1992: Radioactive iodine escaped from the Sosnovy reactor near St. Petersburg, Russia. Radioactive iodine can cause thyroid problems. Long-term or chronic exposure to radioactive iodine can cause nodules or cancer of the thyroid.
November, 1992: France suffered its worst nuclear accident when three workers were contaminated once they entered the particle accelerator in Forbach. Company executives went to prison for neglecting proper safety measures.
November, 1995: In Monju, Japan, a prototype fast-breeder reactor leaked two tons of sodium from the cooling system. The basic problem with sodium cooled reactors like the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor is the safety problem inherent in the use of sodium as a coolant. Sodium reacts chemically with both air and water, and will burn strongly with either. Hence sodium leaks become a significant issue with sodium cooled reactors. The history of sodium cooled reactors give scant comfort to those who argue that they are safe.
March, 1997: In the first of two accidents at Tokaimura, Japan, a fire and explosion contaminated thirty-five workers with radiation.
September 30, 1999: A second accident at Tokaimura’s uranium processing plant exposed fifty-five workers to radiation and led the government to order 300,000 people to stay indoors. Two of the plant’s workers died.
May, 2003: Cesium-137 settled on trees in Siberia, Alaska and northern Canada. During that summer, these trees are burned as part of routine forest fires. A monitoring device at the Canadian Arctic detected the Cesium, which was produced decades earlier during nuclear weapons testing.
August 9, 2004: Non-radioactive steam leaked from a nuclear power plant in Mihama, Japan, killing four workers.
Chemical technician and union activist Karen Silkwood was killed on November 13, 1974. She left a union meeting at the Hub Café in Crescent, Oklahoma. Another attendee of that meeting later testified that Silkwood had a binder and a packet of documents at the café. These were not found at the crime scene. Silkwood got into her car and headed alone for Oklahoma City, about thirty miles away, to meet with New York Times reporter David Burnham and Steve Wodka, an official of her union’s national office. It has been postulated that Silkwood’s car was rammed from behind by another vehicle and with the intent to cause an accident that would result in her death. Skid marks from Silkwood’s car were present on the road, prompting some to suggest that she was desperately trying to get back onto the road after being pushed from behind.
Silkwood had begun carrying around notebooks to document a variety of safety violations at the plant. Her claim was that people were being contaminated by plutonium all the time. Indeed, there were at least seventeen acknowledged incidents of exposure involving seventy-seven employees of Kerr-McGhee in the then recent past.
September 29, 2003: India announced it would begin a seven-year construction of an advanced heavy water reactor, one which would yield more uranium than it consumes.
July 31, 2005: The Palo Verde Unit 2 near Phoenix, Arizona, becomes, in terms of output capacity, the largest reactor site in the United States.
To understand the future of Earth, it may be helpful to examine the use of energy in many of our planet’s countries. The use of electricity is of course a major concern. According to a fascinating series of documents known as the CIA World FactBook, the top five countries in terms of electric power usage or consumption are The United States, China, The European Union, Russia, and Japan. These same five countries also lead the world in production of electricity (and in the same order). Oil consumption is also an enormous concern, in part because of its contribution to the fact of global warming and also because its presence is finite, which is to say it is nonrenewable, cost-prohibitive, and of an uncertain and far from limitless quantity. The top five consuming countries, according to the same source, are The United States, The European Union, China, Japan, and India. In the U.S., for example, eighteen million barrels of oil are used every day. By contrast, the top five oil producing countries, in order of most to least, are Russia, Saudi Arabia, United States, Iran, and China. Solar power, which is renewable, is a very different picture. In 1997, the United States was responsible for forty percent of the world’s solar energy production. But by 2007 the number had dropped to eight percent. By 2009, solar and wind incentives to energy corporations had been completely eliminated by the U.S. Government (thanks in large part to Bush-Cheney energy policies, both men having permanent connections to the energy industries) while Germany and Japan increased theirs dramatically. In the meantime, the World Coal Association boasted about the increased use of the smoky black lumps of carbon. The top five countries in coal consumption, in order, are China, United States, India, Japan, and South Africa.
If all these statistics suggest that many of the same countries are responsible for the use of most of the polluting and nonrenewable energy sources, then some people have argued that the best solution is a return to overwhelming dependency on nuclear power. As the Economist reported in 2009:
"It is hard to know the true cost of a modern nuclear plant. Most Western reactors that are still running were built years ago (Britain’s newest, Sizewell B, is 14 years old). Two new reactors of the type Britain may choose are being constructed in Finland and France. Discouragingly, the Finnish reactor, originally priced at €3 billion (£2.1 billion at the time), is three years late and around €2 billion more expensive than expected. The French plant is also thought to be over budget, by around 20%."
Of course, the economics of compound interest can make anything appear to be financially promising. The real issue, some people warn, is that no matter what safeguards are in place, the opportunity for a major accident and meltdown is always present. The other clear issue is the storage of toxic radioactive waste. The waste has to be stored for thousands of years. The same magazine points out that the economic issue can be addressed by carbon taxing: “Nuclear energy’s best hope lies in carbon pricing, which forces fossil-fuel plants to pay for the environmental cost of the carbon they generate.” On the issue of safety, however, the publication is silent.
That is not the case with the Union of Concerned Scientists. In 2007 they wrote: “The United States has strong safety regulations on the books, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not enforce them consistently. Current security standards are inadequate to defend nuclear plants against terrorist attacks. A major accident or successful attack could kill thousands of people and contaminate large regions for thousands of years.”
Ah, but as the makers of detergents like to say, clean-ups are a breeze. Well, not really. Reprocessing of nuclear fuel seemed for about ten minutes to be the answer to waste disposal. However, it was only tried in one place and did not exactly result in a world-class success. West Valley, New York was the site of the first and only commercial reprocessing plant in the United States. After beginning operations in 1966 with a theoretical capacity to reprocess 300 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel per year, the facility reprocessed a total of 640 tons of waste in six years (far below expectations) before shutting down in 1972. In that time, it transformed West Valley into a radioactive waste site, ultimately accumulating over 600,000 gallons of high-level waste in onsite storage tanks. After years of delay, legal disputes, and waste treatment and billions of dollars in federal expenditures, stabilization of the high-level waste under the West Valley Demonstration Project (WVDP) was completed in 2002, but all of it remains onsite. Cleanup of reprocessing activities at the site, including “low-level” waste removal and decontamination, is expected to take forty years and cost over $5 billion. But that is all in the past, right?
Nope. For six years, workers processed nuclear waste at the plant outside Buffalo. In its short life, the West Valley Demonstration Project polluted soil, air and water, and sickened employees. Four decades later, hundreds of cleanup workers are still at the site decontaminating buildings that will eventually be torn down. As of December 2010, workers are preparing to install a massive underground wall designed to stop the spread of a radioactive plume that threatens the region’s groundwater. The Department of Energy estimates the ultimate cost of the cleanup to be in excess of five billion dollars.
The other major nuclear issue of our time concerns the ugly matter of nuclear weapons. Even though the so-called Cold War is presumed to be over, a lot of nuclear weapons are still hanging around, waiting to be used or dismantled. The United States leads the list of countries with both strategic and nonstrategic nuclear weapons, modestly claiming 10,500-12,000 such devices. Russia comes in second with 10,000. France hits third place with 464, followed by China at 410, Israel with 200, and India with approximately 60.
We have seen the effects of nuclear bombs at the various tests throughout the world and of course at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But that was years ago! What about today? What are the effects of nuclear weapons right now? Of course, the answer depends upon the size of the bomb, but in general, certain factors are consistent. The energy of a nuclear explosion is transferred to the surrounding medium in three distinct forms: blast, thermal radiation, and nuclear radiation. The distribution of energy among these three forms will depend on the yield of the weapon, the location of the burst, and the characteristics of the environment. But for a low altitude atmospheric detonation of a moderate sized weapon in the kiloton range, the energy is distributed roughly as follows:
50% as blast
35% as thermal radiation, made up of a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, including infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light and some soft x-ray emitted at the time of the explosion; and
15% as nuclear radiation, including 5% as initial ionizing radiation consisting chiefly of neutrons and gamma rays emitted within the first minute after detonation, and 10% as residual nuclear radiation. Residual nuclear radiation is the hazard in fallout.
Because of the tremendous amounts of energy liberated per unit mass in a nuclear detonation, temperatures of several tens of millions degrees centigrade develop in the immediate area of the detonation. This is in marked contrast to the few thousand degrees of a conventional explosion. At these very high temperatures the nonfissioned parts of the nuclear weapon are vaporized. The atoms do not release the energy as kinetic energy but release it in the form of large amounts of electromagnetic radiation. In an atmospheric detonation, this electromagnetic radiation, consisting chiefly of soft x-ray, is absorbed within a few meters of the point of detonation by the surrounding atmosphere, heating it to extremely high temperatures and forming a hot sphere of air and gaseous weapon residues, otherwise known as the fireball. Immediately upon formation, the fireball begins to grow rapidly and rises like a hot air balloon. Within a millisecond after detonation, the diameter of the fireball from a 1 megaton air burst is 150 meters. This increases to a maximum of 2200 meters within ten seconds, at which time the fireball is also rising at the rate of 100 meters per second. The initial rapid expansion of the fireball severely compresses the surrounding atmosphere, producing a powerful blast wave.
As it expands toward its maximum diameter, the fireball cools, and after about a minute its temperature has decreased to such an extent that it no longer emits significant amounts of thermal radiation. The combination of the upward movement and the cooling of the fireball gives rise to the formation of the characteristic mushroom-shaped cloud. As the fireball cools, the vaporized materials in it condense to form a cloud of solid particles. Following an air burst, condensed droplets of water give it a typical white cloudlike appearance. In the case of a surface burst, this cloud will also contain large quantities of dirt and other debris which are vaporized when the fireball touches the earth’s surface or are sucked up by the strong updrafts afterwards, giving the cloud a dirty brown appearance. The dirt and debris become contaminated with the radioisotopes generated by the explosion or activated by neutron radiation and fall to earth as fallout.
But the Earth does not have to be a repository for an unending series of toxic waste barrels and fallout shelters protecting the few survivors from thousands of years of radioactive poisoning. Solar energy is a viable and attractive alternative.
It was during the latter half of the 1950’s that solar power saw its first mainstream usage. The first solar water heated office building was built during this time by an architect named Frank Bridgers. A short time later a small satellite of the US Vanguard was powered by a solar cell of less than one watt.
After such big strides in the 1950’s, one would assume that solar power really took off, but oil prices then held back an even more mainstream usage of solar power. In the 1960’s the oil prices were so cheap that it was more affordable for people to power their homes with oil than it was to power their homes or offices with solar energy.
Solar power saw a rebirth in the 1970’s with the OPEC oil embargo. This was a great opportunity to utilize solar power. As a matter of fact, the US Department of Energy financed the Federal Photovoltaic Utilization Program. This program was responsible for the installation and testing of over 3,000 photovoltaic systems.
The 1990’s brought an even more mainstream interest in solar power. The Gulf War once again made many take note of where we get oil and had some worried about our dependence on foreign countries for our energy resources. Solar power was seen as a great alternative to oil and petroleum products. During the 1990’s over one million homes had some form of solar power installed.
But the Bush administration in the United States did away with the overwhelming majority of industry incentives to further develop solar power. And so today solar energy is used in only two different manners. First is the photovoltaic conversion format, which most people call solar panels. These panels are used to create electricity directly from the sun. They can be used alone or in conjunction with other power resources. The second type of solar power that is used today is thermal solar power, which is where the sun is used to heat fluids which then powers turbines or other types of machinery.
While solar power is more commonly used today than any other time in history, the fundamentals are about the same as they have always been. The power of the sun is used to heat liquids just as it was used to heat space in ancient times. The photovoltaic technology has been updated so that the panels are thin and smaller, but the technology is basically the same. The reason for this is that when the sun is over head, an acre of land receives four thousand horse power of power at any time. The sun always has been, and always will be, a tremendous source of power, which leaves no question that with the improvement of technology, our ability to harness this power will only become greater and more widespread in its use. That is, unless governments and industries conspire to prevent it, a sobering possibility, given the long history of just this type of collusion.