Nuclear power is both simple and complex. Fissioning neutrons produce great heat. Heat placed in water makes steam. Steam accelerates a turbine which in turn powers a generator to make electricity. As a result, people can heat and cool their homes, operate their blow dryers, use their laptop computers, light their rooms at night, and feel safe in their cities. Nuclear power has been harnessed to make devastating bombs that can level cities and states and countries. Nuclear power can only be managed with human assistance and creativity. And yet the limitations inherent in human ingenuity have led to tremendous accidents which have made many sick and others dead. At the same time, oil prices continue to rise while coal mines collapse and workers die, so some people argue that nuclear energy is cheap and safe compared to other forms of power. Still, others have pointed to the problem of storage and disposal of nuclear byproducts, in particular toxic waste, substances that may remain deadly for billions of years. And then there are the so-called alternative energy sources, specifically wind and solar, both heralded by environmentalists while industry attempts to find a way to blend them with commerce. So while the process of nuclear energy is relatively simple, the moral, social, political and economic aspects of this power make it very complex.
The world’s first nuclear fission occurred in 1934 when physicist Enrico Fermi irradiated uranium with neutrons. He believed he had produced elements beyond uranium, not realizing that he had in fact split the atom.
But what is nuclear fission? Atomic theory holds that each atom has at its core a nucleus. Nuclear fission happens when large nuclei break up into two nearly equal fragments. In nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs the newly created neutrons cause other nuclei to fission, thus setting off a chain reaction. When humans are able to control this chain, they have in essence built a nuclear reactor. The heat this produces boils water and the resulting steam is used to generate electricity. But sometimes the chain reaction is not controlled. When this happens, humans will observe an explosion, properly thought of as a bomb.
But how is a nuclear reaction controlled? The fission is actually more slowed down than controlled and this happens when humans add control rods made out of elements such as hafnium, cadmium, or boron, rods which are very good at absorbing neutrons. These control rods minimize neutron fluxes and manage the rates of fission.
Fermi had fallen into a process that would change the world forever. As a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome, he experimented with fission by bombarding different elements with neutrons, in the process unwittingly splitting a uranium atom, an accomplishment that won for him in 1938 the Nobel Prize for Physics. This award was well timed because it allowed Fermi and his wife Laura to escape Rome one step ahead of the Italian Fascists. Once in America, he worked with physicist Leo Szilard to create the first ever artificial atomic reactor, one called an atomic pile. An atomic pile is a type of reactor with a core composed of graphite mixed in with uranium. Their Pile-1 was built beneath the stands at a football stadium at the University of Chicago.
As sometimes happens in physics, other people were working on similar ideas around this same time. Two of these, expatriate physicists Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, living in the United Kingdom, prepared a theoretical analysis of the possibility of fast fission in Uranium-235. Fast fission is fission caused by neutrons that are in a fast energy range and the process results in an increase in the amount of neutrons in the reactor core. In June 1939 they demonstrated that the fissioning of uranium could create a massive chain reaction. When something called Uranium-235 was used, the result would be a very nasty weapon. Uranium-235 differs from the more plentiful Uranium-238 in that it is less than one percent of all uranium isotopes and also in that it is the only one that can produce enough free neutrons to sustain a chain reaction. The number 235 refers to what scientists call the Atomic Mass of each isotope, or the number of protons added to the number of neutrons, in this case being 92 protons plus 143 neutrons. Because there is so little U-235 and so much demand, U-238 is sometimes enriched to become U-235. This is accomplished by gaseous diffusion, gas centrifuge, or laser separation.
With British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s endorsement, the British Chiefs of Staff agreed on September 3, 1941 to begin development on an atomic bomb. But it was not until December 18, after months of bureaucratic struggling and the United States entry into World War II, that a U.S. project to investigate atomic weapons finally got underway.
Enrico Fermi’s on-going work with graphite and uranium was, in January 1942, transferred to a new secret project, code named Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at the University of Chicago. In April, Fermi began design of CP-1, the world’s first human- built nuclear reactor. Throughout early and mid 1942, fundamental neutron physics research proceeded, as did work on developing industrial scale processes for producing fissile materials, which are, by definition, able to sustain a chain reaction of nuclear fission. This means that they can be used to fuel a thermal reactor, a fast reactor, or a nuclear explosive. But it became increasingly obvious that since this was to be an industrial scale project, a proven project manager was needed. Furthermore, since it was a weapons project, it needed to be brought under an organization experienced in producing weapons.
On June 18, 1942, Brigadier General Steyr (a member of the Military Policy Committee) ordered Colonel James Marshall to organize an Army Corps of Engineers District to take over and consolidate atomic bomb development. During August of that year, Marshall created a new District Organization with the intentionally misleading name “Manhattan Engineer District” (MED), now commonly called The Manhattan Project.
The nuclear age officially began on July 16, 1945 when the United States exploded the first nuclear bomb, code named “Trinity,” at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Today the Alamogordo Chamber of Commerce boasts that the state’s southeastern city is the gateway to the Land of Enchantment, a Space Museum, and a superb July 4th celebration. But years earlier it was the site of the first test of a nuclear bomb. Theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer called it the Trinity Test, a name inspired by poet John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 12.
Father, part of his double interest
Unto thy kingdom, thy Son gives to me,
His jointure in the knotty Trinity
He keeps, and gives me his death’s conquest.
This Lamb, whose death, with life the world hath blessed,
Was from the world’s beginning slain, and he
Hath made two wills, which with the legacy
Of his and thy kingdom, do thy sons invest.
Yet such are thy laws, that men argue yet
Whether a man those statutes can fulfill;
None doth, but thy all-healing grace and Spirit
Revive again what law and letter kill.
Thy law’s abridgement, and thy last command
Is all but love; oh let that last will stand!
Robert Oppenheimer came to prominence once news came to President Franklin Roosevelt that the German Nazis had split the atom and hence were quickly developing a nuclear weapon. Roosevelt directed Oppenheimer to head what came to be known as The Manhattan Project.
The site chosen for the Trinity Test was a remote corner on the Alamogordo Bombing Range known as the Jornada del Muerto, or Journey of Death, 210 miles south of Los Alamos. While Manhattan Project staff members watched, the device exploded across the New Mexico desert, vaporizing the tower and turning the asphalt around the base of the tower into green sand. Seconds after the explosion came, a huge blast wave and heat seared out across the desert. The shock wave broke windows more than one hundred miles away. As the orange and yellow fireball stretched up and spread, a second column, narrower than the first, rose and flattened into a giant mushroom shape, thus providing the atomic age with a visual image that has become imprinted on the human consciousness as a symbol of power and awesome destruction.
The Manhattan Project operated under several code names, including S-1, but whatever its name, it was launched under FDR and did indeed result in the development of the Atomic Bomb. When Roosevelt died in April, 1945, Harry Truman became President. He was, of course, informed of the existence of the Project and of the capability of the United States to use the Bomb. Robert Wilson, a member of the Manhattan Project, advised the new President that the World War II Allies should proudly demonstrate the power of the Bomb.
Not everyone agreed. James Franck, another member of the Manhattan Project, told the President: “The military advantages and the saving of American lives achieved by the sudden use of atomic bombs against Japan may be outweighed by the ensuing loss of confidence and by a wave of horror and repulsion sweeping over the rest of the world and perhaps even dividing public opinion at home.”
General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, concurred. He later said, “I voiced [to Truman] my grave misgivings, on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the Bomb was completely unnecessary.”
On August 6, 1945, a B-29 long-range heavy bomber took off from the island of Tinian (infamous as the first place where napalm was ever used) and headed north by northwest toward Japan. The aircraft was called the Enola Gay, and had been named after the mother of pilot Lieutenant Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets. The bomber’s primary target was the city of Hiroshima, located on the deltas of southwestern Honshu Island facing the Inland Sea. Hiroshima had a civilian population of almost 300,000 and was an important military center, containing about 43,000 Japanese soldiers.
At 8:15a.m. Hiroshima time, the Enola Gay released Little Boy, the 9,700-pound uranium bomb, over the city. Forty-three seconds later a huge explosion lit the morning sky as Little Boy detonated 1,900 feet above the city, directly over a parade field where soldiers of the Japanese Second Army were doing calisthenics. Though already eleven-and-a-half miles away, the Enola Gay was rocked by the blast. Some 70,000 people died as a result of the initial explosion, heat, and radiation. This included twenty American airmen being held as prisoners in the city. By the end of the year, the Hiroshima death toll was over 100,000. The five-year death toll exceeded 200,000, as cancer and other long-term effects took hold.
The next break in the weather over Japan was due to appear three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, to be followed by five days of prohibitive weather. The plutonium bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” was rushed into readiness to take advantage of this window of opportunity. A B-29 named Bock’s Car lifted off from Tinian and headed towards the primary target of Kokura Arsenal, a massive collection of war industries adjacent to the city Koura. At 11:02 a.m., at an altitude of 1,650 feet, Fat Man exploded over the city of Nagasaki. The yield of the explosion was later estimated at 21 kilotons, forty percent greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb. Although the destruction at Nagasaki received less worldwide attention than that at Hiroshima, it was nonetheless extensively deadly. Everything up to half a mile from ground zero was completely destroyed, including even the earthquake-hardened concrete structures that had sometimes survived at comparable distances at Hiroshima.
The same Robert Wilson who had earlier advised Truman to show the power of the bomb to the Japanese was quick to reconsider. After the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Manhattan Project engineer announced:
"A specter is haunting this country—the specter of nuclear energy. As a scientist who worked on the atomic bomb, I am appalled that the public is so apathetic and so uninformed about the dangerous social consequences of our development. There is no secret of the atomic bomb. In my opinion, in two to five years other countries can also manufacture bombs, and bombs tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times more effective than those which produced such devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This country with its concentrated industrial centers is entirely vulnerable to such weapons; nor can we count on, or even expect, effective counter-measures. Unless strong action is taken within the near future toward a positive control, this country will be drawn into an armament race which will inevitably end in catastrophe for all participants. . . . It is the responsibility of the press to stimulate public discussion on this vital matter and to educate the people as rapidly as possible. Where security permits, my colleagues are eager to help with scientific information. It was our hope in developing the bomb that it would be a great force for world cooperation and peace."
As to proliferation, he was certainly correct. On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union became the second country to test the explosion of an atomic bomb. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviets’ atomic bomb program shifted into high gear. The USSR began construction of a near copy of the Fat Man, using the detailed design descriptions presumably provided by Klaus Fuchs. This replica, which the western nations named Joe-1, was detonated at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. Its estimated yield was about 22 kilotons. The Russians called it First Lightning, but the West named it after The Soviet General Secretary, Joseph Stalin.
At the outbreak of World War II, Karl Fuchs, being a German citizen, was interned in a camp in Quebec, Canada. However, Professor Max Born of Edinburgh University intervened on his behalf, and by early 1941, Fuchs had returned to Edinburgh, where he was approached by Rudolf Peierls to work on the British atomic bomb research project. He became a British citizen in 1942.
The following year, Fuchs was among the British scientists sent to the U.S. to collaborate on the atom bomb. He was sent to the weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he worked in the theoretical division. His chief area of expertise was the problem of imploding the fissionable core of the plutonium bomb. He was present at the Trinity Test.
Fuchs later testified that he passed detailed information on the project to the Soviet Union through a courier in 1945, and further information about the hydrogen bomb in 1946 and 1947. But it was not until 1948 that it was discovered that the Manhattan Project security had been breached, and not until 1949, when Fuchs had returned to England and the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment, that he was confronted by intelligence officers as a result of the cracking of Soviet ciphers. Fuchs confessed in January 1950 and was convicted on March 1, 1950, and sentenced to 14 years in prison. His testimony to British and American intelligence agencies eventually led to the trials of David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the U.S.
On December 20, 1951, in the first instance of using nuclear power to produce electricity, the National Reactor Testing Station at Idaho Falls lit four of its own light bulbs by employing their Experimental Breeder Reactor-1. The following day it generated enough power to illuminate the entire EBR-1 facility. The reactor not only pioneered the atomic production of electricity, it also demonstrated that a reactor could generate more atomic fuel than it consumed. EBR-1 did this by bombarding uranium base material with excess neutrons that otherwise would have been absorbed by shielding. That turned enough of the uranium into plutonium, also a reactor fuel, to more than compensate for the fuel EBR-I burned up.
The United States detonated a 10.4-megaton hydrogen device on the Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952. The test, code named “Mike,” was the first successful implementation of Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam’s concept for a Super Bomb. Even those who witnessed previous atomic detonations were stunned by the blast of The Mike Test. The mushroom cloud, when it reached its furthest extent, stretched 100 miles wide and 25 miles high. The explosion evaporated Elugelab Island, leaving behind a crater more than a mile wide. The blast destroyed life on the surrounding islands.
It may be helpful to try to understand something about the men behind this test. One of the key enthusiasts was the aforementioned Edward Teller. Of all the scientists who worked on the U.S. nuclear weapons program, none were more controversial than he. Described by one Nobel Prize winner in physics as “one of the most thoughtful statesmen of science,” and by another as “a danger to all that’s important,” Teller was recognized by most of his colleagues as being one of the most imaginative and creative physicists alive. But at the same time, his single-minded pursuit of the hydrogen bomb and his autocratic style alienated many of the scientists with whom he worked.
After World War II, Teller left the Manhattan Project and returned to his teaching job at the University of Chicago. But once the Soviet Union conducted its test of an atomic device, he did his best to drum up support for a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb. Teller argued that a Super Bomb was essential to the very survival of the United States. He said: “If the Russians demonstrate a Super before we possess one, our situation will be hopeless.” President Truman agreed. When Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam finally developed a Hydrogen Bomb design that would work, Teller was not chosen to head the project. He left Los Alamos and soon joined the newly established Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a rival weapons facility in California.
But back to the Super Bomb. Mike was incredibly large. In 1952, the smallest atomic bomb with enough explosive force to set off a fusion reaction was almost four feet in diameter. The actual casing for the “Mike” gadget would end up being twenty feet long. According to one of the scientists who worked on the project, a full-scale drawing of the device became essential for everyone on the team to communicate effectively with each other. The drawing was so big that a balcony had to be built from which to view it.
Physicist Herbert York summed up the implications of the first test of a thermonuclear device: “The world suddenly shifted from the path it had been on to a more dangerous one. Fission bombs, destructive as they might have been, were thought of [as] being limited in power. Now, it seemed we had learned how to brush even these limits aside and to build bombs whose power was boundless.”
Since the days of Mike, the United States has carried out 1,030 nuclear weapons tests, the last one on September 23, 1993. The Soviet Union administered 715 such tests, the last one on October 25, 1990. France comes in third with 210 tests, its last one occurring on January 27, 1996. Britain has detonated 45 test bombs, their final one on November 26, 1991. And China rounds out the current list with 43 explosions.
Not all nuclear disasters were the results of uncontrolled nuclear fission. Some were the consequence of “controlled” fission. On December 12, 1952, millions of gallons of radioactive water accumulated inside the nuclear reactor at Chalk River, near Ottawa, Canada, the result of a partial meltdown of the reactor’s fuel core. Future U.S. President Jimmy Carter, then a Navy officer, was part of the clean-up crew.
Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility describes what happened.
"The first of two accidents in the 1950s occurred in 1952, when the NRX reactor underwent a violent power excursion that destroyed the core of the reactor, causing some fuel melting. Unaccountably, the shut-off rods failed to fully descend into the core. A series of hydrogen gas explosions hurled the four-ton gasholder dome four feet through the air where it jammed in the superstructure [Emphasis added]. Thousands of curies of fission products were released into the atmosphere and a million gallons of radioactively contaminated water had to be pumped out of the basement and “disposed of” in shallow trenches not far from the Ottawa River. The core of the NRX reactor could not be decontaminated; it had to be buried as radioactive waste. Five years later, in 1958, several metallic uranium fuel rods in the NRU reactor overheated and ruptured inside the reactor core. One of the damaged rods caught fire and was torn in two as it was being removed from the core by a robotic crane. As the remote-controlled crane passed overhead, carrying the larger portion of the damaged rod, a three-foot length of fiercely burning uranium fuel broke off and fell into a shallow maintenance pit. The burning fuel lay there, spreading deadly fission products and alpha-emitting particles throughout the reactor building. The ventilation system was jammed in the open position, thereby contaminating the accessible areas of the building as well as a sizable area downwind from the reactor site. A relay team of scientists and technicians eventually extinguished the fire by running past the maintenance pit at top speed wearing full protective gear, dumping buckets of wet sand on the burning uranium fuel."
For the people inside the Chalk River Plant, the world must have been coming to an end. A dome jumps through the air, radioactive water has to be pumped into trenches, the reactor has to be cased and buried, fuel is burning everywhere, spreading gaseous poison, and a bunch of guys in yellow protective Demron suits are spreading beach sand over fires that don’t want to go out. And unseen but real radioactivity shooting out at twice the speed of light embeds itself in everything it can.
Edwards went on to discuss the clean-up procedures. "Over a thousand men were involved in the cleanup operations following these two accidents. More than 600 men were required for the NRU cleanup alone. Official AECL reports stress that very few of these men were over-exposed to radiation— that is, most of the recorded radiation doses did not exceed the levels that were considered permissible for atomic workers at that time. The reports also imply that no adverse health effects were caused by the exposures received. However, no medical follow-up has ever been done to see whether the population of men involved exhibited a higher-than-normal incidence of cancer later in life."
The current reactor at Chalk River, in addition to one in the Netherlands, produces about 90% of material for nuclear medicine in the world. This is significant because on November 18, 2007, the National Research Universal Reactor (NRU), which makes medical radioisotopes, was shut down for routine maintenance. This shutdown was extended when the Atomic Energy for Canada Limited or AECL (presumably a Canadian version of the Atomic Energy Commission), in consultation with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), decided to connect seismically-qualified emergency power supplies (EPS) to two of the reactor's cooling pumps (in addition to the AC and DC backup power systems already in place), which had been required as part of its August 2006 operating license issued by the CNSC. This resulted in a worldwide shortage of radioisotopes for medical treatments because Chalk River makes the majority of the world’s supply. On December 11, 2007, the Canadian House of Commons, acting on independent expert advice, passed emergency legislation authorizing the restarting of the NRU reactor and its operation for 120 days (counter to the decision of the CNSC), which was passed by the Parliament and received Royal Assent on the next day. Prime Minister Stephen Harper accused the “Liberal-appointed” CNSC for the shutdown which, he claimed, jeopardized the health and safety of tens of thousands of Canadians, insisting that there was no risk.
In 1953, waste from chemical plants destroyed the New York town of Love Canal. The village remained uninhabitable for the next forty years. How did such a travesty of sense, logic and morality come about?
Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation acquired Love Canal for its own private use in 1947 and buried 21,000 tons of toxic waste there over the next five years. After the site couldn’t hold any more, Hooker filled in the canal. Love Canal is near Niagara Falls, New York. During these years, Niagara’s population was growing and the city was desperate for new land. The city of Niagara bought the Love Canal for one dollar. The subsequent construction of a school punctured a copper barrier Hooker Chemical had used to contain the toxic waste. The danger of toxic waste can last for billions of years, so a leak such as this is extremely important to address.
The Niagara and Love Canal population reported health problems and strange odors over the next years, but it was not until the president of the Love Canal Homebuilders Association, one Lois Gibbs, investigated the situation that the severity was realized. The homeowners, many of them extremely sick, had to fight Hooker Chemical and the U.S. Government and only received financial compensation for having to relocate in 1978 when then President Carter declared the site a Federal Emergency Area.
The government did what governments do when they hope to legitimize their own cowardice. They ordered scientists to investigate. Those scientists determined that the atomic plant dumped chemicals that seeped into basements and the air and were responsible for the sickness of the residents. Over 800 families relocated and the Environmental Protection Agency sued Hooker’s parent company, Occidental Petroleum, for $129 million.
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.
Tune in tomorrow for the conclusion of The Brief Future of Earth.