The history and science of nuclear energy and the climate problem, part 2: historic context, and the development of nuclear fission energy
To understand the current state of nuclear energy, we must first travel back to its origins at the beginning of the previous century. The historic context of the parallel development of both nuclear fission and fusion energy with weapons of mass destruction, lead to some design choices, development priorities, and an understandable culture stigma, which to this day still have consequences for the current state and perception of nuclear energy.
Frédéric Joliot-Curie
In the early 1930s Ernst Rutherford and his colleagues discovered that splitting Lithium atoms released an enormous amount of energy. It did not take long for physicists to realise that if this were to be done with an element that released more energy than had to be put in to get it to split (elements heavier than Iron), that a chain reaction could ensue releasing enormous amounts of energy. Such chain reactions were experimentally confirmed by Frédéric Joliot-Curie in Paris when he showed that Uranium bombarded with neutrons would split and cause more neutrons to be emitted than were absorbed. The observant reader might recognize part of the last name of Joliot-Curie, they would be correct, this is indeed the son in law of the pioneers of radioactivity Marie and Pierre Curie.
The year of this discovery was 1939, a year that is more commonly infamous for the start of the second world war. Some physicists at the time were all too aware of the potential evil uses of their discoveries. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicst, who migrated to the US to escape the Nazi terror, urged Joliot-Curie not to publish his findings lest the Nazis get their hands on it. Where other physicists, such as Enrico Fermi, followed Szilard’s advice and self-censored their research, Joliot-Curie continued the Curie tradition of publishing all their work for the benefit of the entire scientific community and published in April 1939.
Despite his decision to publish anyway, Joliot-Curie, an outspoken communist, did not underestimate the risks of his discovery. Earlier that year, in January 1939 he wrote to fellow physicist, Abram Ioffe, in the Soviet Union, alerting him that the Nazis had been performing successful experiments with nuclear fission. And on the 30th of October, Frédéric and his wife Irène Joliot-Curie (also a nuclear chemist/physicist and a communist) took the decision to stop publishing their work after all and placed all their documentation on nuclear fission in the vaults of the French Academy of Sciences, where it remained until 1949.
After the Nazi-invasion of France the Joliot-Curies smuggled their working documents and materials to England, Irène sadly contracted tuberculosis and spent most of the war recovering in Switzerland, Frédéric stayed behind and joined the French resistance. During the Paris uprising in August 1944 he made Molotov cocktails for his fellow rebels, the main weapon against tanks. And after the liberation the Joliot-Curies were finally able to reunite again.
Because he was a communist, Frédéric got purged from most of his positions after the war. And like many comrades with them, the Joliot-Curies’ contributions to science, society and the resistance movement went mostly unappreciated in the west. This is why I have chosen to go slightly off topic here and give the Joliot-Curies their due credit.
Nuclear weapons and the Blitzkrieg
The 1st of September 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Poland, did not only mark the start of the second world war, it was also the day the second Uranverein (=Uranium Association) was formed. This shows us that Szilard’s worries about a possible Nazi nuclear weapon were not at all unjustified. Luckily the Nazis actually never had serious ambitions to create a nuclear weapon. Werner Heisenberg was one of the members of the Uranverein, he writes that physicists at the second meeting said that: “in principle atomic bombs could be made.... it would take years.... not before five." Heisenberg himself continues:
I didn't report it to the Führer until two weeks later and very casually because I did not want the Führer to get so interested that he would order great efforts immediately to make the atomic bomb. Speer felt it was better that the whole thing should be dropped and the Führer also reacted that way.
The Nazis trusted in a swift victory, and as such the lengthy development process of a nuclear weapon was mostly considered a waste of resources. By the time it was done, they would have won already, or so they thought. Furthermore, the Nazis were convinced that the Americans were also not even close to having a working nuclear weapon. Additionally, even if the Nazis did have serious ambitions to create a working nuclear weapon, they were already behind in this race. Because in April 1933, shortly after Hitler gained power, the ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ was passed, banning ‘non-Aryans’ and political opponents from being civil servants. The direct effect was that many of the people affected by this law fled the country, among them many scientists who took their knowledge and expertises with them.
Not only that, science in Germany, and physics in particular, had been suffering from nationalist tendencies for some time. This surfaced in the distinction between Deutsche Physik (=German Physics) and Jüdische Physik (=Jewish Physics), where the latter was considered inferior and bad science. The works of prominent physicists such as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr were censored and ridiculed because of their authors Jewish descent. Even the ‘Aryan’ scientists who stayed behind in German occupied territories were affected by this. Heisenberg, for example, was repeatedly harassed for teaching Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which were considered ‘Jewish physics’. Himmler eventually forbade attacks against Heisenberg, realizing that Germany could not afford to lose him as well, after Heisenberg’s mother had phoned Himmler’s mother to ask her if she would please tell the SS to give “Werner” a break.
Science does not thrive under censorship and oppression, the Nazis proved as much. It is highly likely that even if the Nazis had ambitions to create a nuclear weapon, that such attempts were doomed to fail. Because, as it turns out, it is rather difficult to do any nuclear research at all if you consider quantum mechanics and relativity to be inferior sciences. Despite this, the Nazis did perform some experiments in the field of nuclear physics, for applications in submarines. And after the invasion of Norway the Nazis had access to heavy-water factories there. Heavy-water is water where one of the Hydrogen atoms is the heavier isotope of Hydrogen: Deuterium. And it is a useful neutron moderator, which means that it can reduce the speed of neutrons in a nuclear reactor without capturing them; these slower neutrons are more likely to propagate the nuclear chain reaction. Furthermore, the Nazis also had access to the Uranium mines in the Czech Republic, and had banned the commercial sale of the Uranium mined there. In hindsight we might be able to conclude that a Nazi nuclear weapon was very unlikely, Szilard and others however could not know this and had more than enough reason to worry.
The stain of the Manhattan project
Szilard’s worries drove him to take action. On the 12th of July 1939 he and his, also Hungarian, colleague Eugene Wigner visited Einstein, and convinced him to sign a letter to the Belgian Ambassador to the US. The then Belgian Congo was at the time a major source of Uranium ore, and therefore a potential target for the Nazi Afrikakorps (=Africa Corps), and Einstein happened to know the Belgian royal family personally.
A second letter was addressed to president Franklin Roosevelt, it is this letter which will become famous as the Einstein–Szilard letter. In this letter Einstein and Szilard express their concerns about a possible Nazi weapon of mass destruction:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable – through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilárd in America – that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable – though much less certain – that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.
As it turns out Einstein and Szilard would be proven wrong about that last statement when a breakthrough in the UK massively reduced the required mass to sustain a nuclear chain reaction (the critical mass, to use the technical term).
Figure 4: First American atomic bomb.
An immediate result of the letter was the creation of the Advisory Committee on Uranium, and a huge investment in the experiments of Szilard and Fermi. Later theoretical successes in the UK (the MAUD reports) eventually prompted the authorisation of a full scale development plan for a nuclear weapon in January 1942. In June of that same year the US military took over the project, and rebranded it to the infamous Manhattan project.
And so it came to be that on the 2nd of December 1942 in the middle of Chicago the first nuclear reactor became operational. Not with the goal to provide humankind with massive amounts of electricity, but with the explicit aim to kill and destroy. An ugly stain which has been besmirching the entire field of nuclear physics ever since.
Not long after, in 1943, the first industrial Plutonium production reactor became operational on the Colorado river near Hanford. It was the Plutonium produced here that would be used in the first atomic bomb that exploded in the desert of New Mexico. And it was this Plutonium that on the 9th of August 1945, in the historical climax, razed Nagasaki to the ground. The cold war was now inevitable, and the fate of the reputation of nuclear physics was sealed.
The cold war
A: I think [the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] made it very difficult for us to take the position after the war that we wanted to get rid of atomic bombs because it would be immoral to use them against the civilian population. We lost the moral argument with which, right after the war, we might have perhaps gotten rid of the bomb.
Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?
But, again, don't misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect.
So Szilard tells us in an interview with U.S. News & World Report titled ‘President Truman Did Not Understand’ (a very interesting read by the way). Though the bombing of Japan might have ended one war, they also immediately signalled the start of the next one. Having observed the destructive power of the new weapons in the US arsenal, the USSR immediately accelerated their own nuclear projects. With a nuclear arms race as direct consequence.
Figure 5: First Soviet atomic bomb RDS-1.
As early as April 1942 the USSR had already started working on a nuclear weapon, because Russian physicist Georgy Flyorov had noticed that the Germans, British and Americans had stopped publishing papers on nuclear physics. However, due to the war with the Nazis in their own territories, the project was not very high on the priorities list and was therefore not progressing very rapidly. This would immediately change following the bombing of Japan, the Soviet Politburo took direct and complete control of the project, and just over a year later, on the 29th of August 1946, the Soviets also performed their first nuclear weapon test in what is now Kazakhstan.
And so an intense arms race was started, where the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons kept increasing and increasing. For every single technological and scientific question, the path chosen was the path that would lead to best applicability in weapons. The questions physicists on both sides had to ask themselves was “how do we destroy as much as possible”, instead of “how do we provide as many people as possible with as much electricity as possible efficiently and safely”. The remnants of the decisions taken in this historic context can still be seen in the state of nuclear reactors today. In part 3 we will analyse some of the paths taken, and also some of the paths not taken, and what this means for the current state of nuclear energy. Furthermore, in part 4 we will trace the origins of some of the worst nuclear accidents back to this desire to destroy.
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