Nuclear Fission Quotes

I’m smart enough to know that you feel it, too. This isn’t just heat, it’s a goddamned conflagration. Not chemistry, but nuclear fission.

At some point, Wax mentioned how appalling it seemed that those brilliant minds who could invent miracle medicines and nuclear fission and dazzling computer special effects, they had such a complete lack of imagination when it came to spending their money: granite countertops and luxury cars. Talking about that stuff, Wax driving, the madder he got, you could watch the speedo creep up past eighty, ninety, a hundred.

As I’ll argue, AI is a dual-use technology like nuclear fission. Nuclear fission can illuminate cities or incinerate them. Its terrible power was unimaginable to most people before 1945. With advanced AI, we’re in the 1930s right now. We’re unlikely to survive an introduction as abrupt as nuclear fission’s.

Of all human inventions the organization, a machine constructed of people performing interdependent functions, is the most powerful. Because it is so powerful, the organization is more dangerous than any other human invention, including nuclear fission (itself the product of an organized scientific project).

Mark Spitz had met plenty of the divine-retribution folks over the months. This was their moment; they were umbrella salesmen standing outside a subway entrance in a downpour. The human race deserved the plague, we brought it on ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species to extinction: the entire collapse of values as evidenced by everything from nuclear fission to reality television to alternate side of the street parking. Mark Spitz could only endure these harangues for a minute or two before he split. It was boring.The plague was the plague. You were wearing galoshes, or you weren't.

Professor J. B. S. Haldane was one of the most celebrated scientists in Britain. A pioneering and broad-ranging thinker, he developed a mathematical theory of population genetics, predicted that hydrogen-producing windmills would replace fossil fuel, explained nuclear fission, and suffered a perforated eardrum while testing a homemade decompression chamber: “Although one is somewhat deaf,” he wrote, “one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.

Most of us do not understand nuclear fission, but we accept it . . . Why is it so easy to accept manmade miracles and so difficult to accept the miracles of the Bible?

Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.

You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.

How much the world lost that September is immeasurable. The complementarity of the bomb, its mingled promise and threat, would not be canceled by the decisions of heads of state; their frail authority extends not nearly so far. Nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion are not acts of Parliament; they are levers embedded deeply in the physical world, discovered because it was possible to discover them, beyond the power of men to patent or to hoard.

Ideally, every single fission reaction should trigger just one more fission in a neighboring atom, so that each successive generation of neutrons contains exactly the same number as the one before, and the reactor remains in the same critical state.

As chemists, we must rename [our] scheme and insert the symbols Ba, La, Ce in place of Ra, Ac, Th. As nuclear chemists closely associated with physics, we cannot yet convince ourselves to make this leap, which contradicts all previous experience in nuclear physics.

We can and should complain about certain horrors of the modern world, but when it comes to the treatment of mental illness, the advances made in the last hundred years have been far more significant than the space program, nuclear fission, or even The Wire, for so many fortunate people.

generating a single watt of electricity requires more than 30 billion fissions every second.

The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy

What Mendeleyev discovered on 17 February 1869 was the culmination of a two-and-a-half-thousand-year epic: a wayward parable of human aspiration. In 1955 element 101 was discovered and duly took its place in the Periodic Table. It was named mendelevium, in recognition of Mendeleyev’s supreme achievement. Appropriately, it is an unstable element, liable to spontaneous nuclear fission.

extremely inefficient: just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy. But it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second.

The object of the project,” Serber said, “is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the energy is released by a fast-neutron chain reaction in one or more of the materials known to show nuclear fission.” Summarizing what Oppenheimer’s team had learned from their Berkeley summer sessions, Serber reported that by their calculations an atomic bomb might conceivably produce an explosion equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. Any such “gadget,” however, would need highly enriched

O. Hahn and F. Strassmann have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of nuclei of barium, lanthanum, strontium, yttrium, and, more recently, of xenon and caesium. It can be shown by simple considerations that this type of nuclear reaction may be described in an essentially classical way like the fission of a liquid drop, and that the fission products must fly apart with kinetic energies of the order of hundred million electron-volts each.

Some search for the North Pole. Others seek to split the atom. They are both perilous journeys. When it comes to the former, it is up to the men and women involved to consider risking their lives. I throw up my hands and leave them to it. However, when it comes to the latter, these nuclear adventurers risk the future of mankind, and I, for one, fear for us all.

The relevant time scale for superhuman AI is less predictable, but of course that means it, like nuclear fission, might arrive considerably sooner than expected. One formulation of the “it’s too soon to worry” argument that has gained currency is Andrew Ng’s assertion that “it’s like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”11 (He later upgraded this from Mars to Alpha Centauri.) Ng, a former Stanford professor, is a leading expert on machine learning, and his views carry some weight. The assertion appeals to a convenient analogy: not only is the risk easily managed and far in the future but also it’s extremely unlikely we’d even try to move billions of humans to Mars in the first place. The analogy is a false one, however. We are already devoting huge scientific and technical resources to creating ever-more-capable AI systems, with very little thought devoted to what happens if we succeed.

The missiles would be packed full of fissionable material, and fission scared her nearly as much as antimatter. It was the dirty, nasty form of nuclear energy. Shut down a fusion reactor, and the only radioactive materials left were those that had been made radioactive by neutron bombardment. Shut down a fission reactor, and you had a deadly, possibly explosive pile of unstable elements with a half-life that meant they would stay hazardous for thousands of years.

The simplest form of nuclear reactor requires no equipment at all. If the right quantity of uranium 235 is gathered in the presence of a neutron moderator—water, for example, or graphite, which slows down the movement of the uranium neutrons so that they can strike one another—a self-sustaining chain reaction will begin, releasing molecular energy as heat. The ideal combination of circumstances required for such an event—a criticality—has even aligned spontaneously in nature: in ancient subterranean deposits of uranium found in the African nation of Gabon, where groundwater acted as a moderator. There, self-sustaining chain reactions began underground two billion years ago, producing modest quantities of heat energy—an average of around 100 kilowatts, or enough to light a thousand lightbulbs—and continued intermittently for as long as a million years, until the available water was finally boiled away by the heat of fission.

The RBMK, like almost all commercial nuclear reactors, uses uranium - which has 92 protons, making it the heaviest naturally occurring element - as a fuel source. Uranium contains a mere 0.7% of the fissionable isotope uranium235 (92 protons and 143 neutrons), and the 190 tons of fuel in a second-generation RBMK reactor like Chernobyl’s Unit 4 consists of cheap, and only slightly enriched, 98% uranium238 and 2% uranium235, contained within 1,661 vertical pressure tubes.

Thus: the test of a ‘run-down unit’93. If a power failure occurred, the fission reaction would still be producing heat, while the remaining water in the pipes would continue its momentum for a short time and therefore steam would still be produced. In turn, the turbines would still rotate and generate electricity, albeit at an exponentially falling capacity. This residual electricity could be used to drive the water pumps for a few vital moments, giving the diesel generators sufficient time to get up to speed and take over, and it’s the hardware behind this that was being tested.

Either way, even 30MWt is near-as-makes-no-difference a complete shutdown and not even enough energy to power the water pumps. At such a low power, an atomic process of ‘poisoning’ the reactor begins - a release of the isotope xenon135, which absorbs and seriously inhibits the fission reaction - and the test was over before it began. Had this massive drop in power never happened, the test would have proceeded without incident and the RBMK’s dangerous shortcomings may never have come to light. Crucially, however, the man in charge of the test, 55-year-old Deputy-Chief Engineer Anatoly Dyatlov, did not stop.

The academician had returned home from Chernobyl for the second time, on May 13, a changed man, his hands and face darkened by a radioactive tan, his ideological confidence shaken.16 With tears in his eyes, he described to his wife how overwhelmed they had been by the accident, how unprepared they were to protect the Soviet people from its consequences: the lack of clean water, uncontaminated food, and stable iodine. An examination at Hospital Number Six revealed the toxic fingerprint of the reactor deep within Legasov’s body: doctors found fission products, including iodine 131, cesium 134 and 137, tellurium 132, and ruthenium 103, in his hair, airways, and lungs.

Eventually, Eisenhower found his “hopeful alternative” and presented it in a speech proposing an “Atoms for Peace” program. He suggested that the U.S. and the Soviet Union should contribute fissionable materials to an international effort to develop peaceful nuclear energy power plants. Delivered on December 8, 1953, at the United Nations, the speech was initially a public relations success—but the Soviets failed to respond. And neither had the president been candid about American nuclear weapons. Gone from the speech was any accounting of the size and nature of the nuclear arsenal, or any other information that was grist for a healthy debate. Instead of candor, Eisenhower gave America a fleeting propaganda victory.

During World War II, there had been a project to sabotage the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Years earlier, Leo Szilard, the first person to realize the possibility of a fission chain reaction, had convinced Fermi not to publish the discovery that purified graphite was a cheap and effective neutron moderator. Fermi had wanted to publish, for the sake of the great international project of science, which was above nationalism. But Szilard had persuaded Rabi, and Fermi had abided by the majority vote of their tiny three-person conspiracy. And so, years later, the only neutron moderator the Nazis had known about was deuterium. The only deuterium source under Nazi control had been a captured facility in occupied Norway, which had been knocked out by bombs and sabotage, causing a total of twenty-four civilian deaths. The Nazis had tried to ship the deuterium already refined to Germany, aboard a civilian Norwegian ferry, the SS Hydro. Knut Haukelid and his assistants had been discovered by the night watchman of the civilian ferry while they were sneaking on board to sabotage it. Haukelid had told the watchman that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman had let them go. Haukelid had considered warning the night watchman, but that would have endangered the mission, so Haukelid had only shaken his hand. And the civilian ship had sunk in the deepest part of the lake, with eight dead Germans, seven dead crew, and three dead civilian bystanders. Some of the Norwegian rescuers of the ship had thought the German soldiers present should be left to drown, but this view had not prevailed, and the German survivors had been rescued. And that had been the end of the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Which was to say that Knut Haukelid had killed innocent people. One of whom, the night watchman of the ship, had been a good person. Someone who'd gone out of his way to help Haukelid, at risk to himself; from the kindness of his heart, for the highest moral reasons; and been sent to drown in turn. Afterward, in the cold light of history, it had looked like the Nazis had never been close to getting nuclear weapons after all. And Harry had never read anything suggesting that Haukelid had acted wrongly.

It is now known that almost none of the neutron-absorbing boron mix in the sandbags made it into the core. The sandbags had, however, partially sealed the open gap between the slanted Upper Biological Shield and the reactor wall below. This was causing the fire to increase in temperature due to a reduction in heat exchange between the core and surrounding environment. The fire reached at least 2,250°C (the element ruthenium, which melts at that temperature, was detected in radioactive vapour that escaped the core), confirming that a meltdown was occurring.195 At the same time, the amount of fission products being dispersed into the atmosphere increased. Legasov’s sincere plan to save the plant, born out of a desperate need to do something, had succeeded only in making the situation worse.

I’m Sushi K and I’m here to say I like to rap in a different way Look out Number One in every city Sushi K rap has all most pretty My special talking of remarkable words Is not the stereotyped bucktooth nerd My hair is big as a galaxy Cause I attain greater technology [...] I like to rap about sweetened romance My fond ambition is of your pants So here is of special remarkable way Of this fellow raps named Sushi K The Nipponese talking phenomenon Like samurai sword his sharpened tongue Who raps the East Asia and the Pacific Prosperity Sphere, to be specific [...] Sarariman on subway listen For Sushi K like nuclear fission Fire-breathing lizard Gojiro He my always big-time hero His mutant rap burn down whole block Start investing now Sushi K stock It on Nikkei stock exchange Waxes; other rappers wane Best investment, make my day Corporation Sushi K [...] Coming to America now Rappers trying to start a row Say “Stay in Japan, please, listen! We can’t handle competition!” U.S. rappers booing and hissin’ Ask for rap protectionism They afraid of Sushi K Cause their audience go away He got chill financial backin’ Give those U.S. rappers a smackin’ Sushi K concert machine Fast efficient super clean Run like clockwork in a watch Kick old rappers in the crotch [...] He learn English total immersion English/Japanese be mergin’ Into super combination So can have fans in every nation Hong Kong they speak English, too Yearn of rappers just like you Anglophones who live down under Sooner later start to wonder When they get they own rap star Tired of rappers from afar [...] So I will get big radio traffic When you look at demographic Sushi K research statistic Make big future look ballistic Speed of Sushi K growth stock Put U.S. rappers into shock

To make matters worse, Unit 4 was at the end of a fuel cycle. One of the features of the RBMK design is ‘online refuelling’, which is the ability to swap out spent fuel while the reactor is at power. Because fuel burn-up is not even throughout the core, it was not uncommon for the reactor to contain both new and old fuel, which was usually replaced every two years. On April 26th, around 75% of the fuel was nearing the end of its cycle.95 This old fuel had, by now, been given time to accumulate hot and highly radioactive fission products, meaning any interruption in the flow of cooling water could quickly damage the older fuel channels and generate heat faster than the reactor was designed to cope with. Unit 4 was scheduled for a lengthy shutdown and annual maintenance period upon conclusion of the test, during which all of the old fuel would be replaced. It would have been far more sensible to conduct the test with fresh fuel, but management decided to push ahead anyway.

All around [the Centre Pompidou and Beauborg Museum], the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone—remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygienic design—but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness. It is a bit like the real danger nuclear power stations pose: not lack of security, pollution, explosion, but a system of maximum security that radiates around them, the protective zone of control and deterrence that extends, slowly but surely, over the territory—a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical glacis. What does the nuclear matter? The station is a matrix in which an absolute model of security is elaborated, which will encompass the whole social field, and which is fundamentally a model of deterrence (it is the same one that controls us globally, under the sign of peaceful coexistence and of the simulation of atomic danger). The same model, with the same proportions, is elaborated at the Center: cultural fission, political deterrence.

Preventing a radioactive release is the highest priority at any nuclear facility, so power stations are built and operated with a safety philosophy of ‘defense in depth’. Defense in depth aims to avoid accidents by embracing a safety culture, but also accepts that mechanical (and human) failures are inevitable. Any possible problem - however unlucky - is then anticipated and factored into the design with multiple redundancies. The goal, therefore, is to provide depth to the safety systems; akin to the way Russian dolls have several layers before reaching the core doll. When one element fails, there is another, and another, and another that still functions. The first barrier are the fuel ceramic pellets themselves, followed by each fuel rod’s zirconium alloy cladding. In an ordinary modern commercial nuclear plant, the nuclear core where the fission reaction takes place would be contained inside a third barrier: an almost unbreakable metal shield enveloping the reactor, called a ‘pressure vessel’.

The test would involve inserting all 211 control rods part-way, creating a power level low enough to resemble a blackout while continuing to cool the reactor to compensate for fission products. Use the residual steam in the system to drive a turbine, then isolate it and allow it to run down, generating electricity through its own inertia. The electrical output would be measured, allowing engineers to determine whether it was sufficient to power the water pumps in an emergency. Because the deliberately low power levels would appear to be a power failure to the control computer, which would then automatically activate the safety systems, these systems, including the backup diesel generators and Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS), were disconnected in order to re-attempt the test straight away if it proved unsuccessful. Otherwise, the ECCS would automatically shutdown the reactor, preventing a repeat of the test for another year. Astonishingly, these measures were not in violation of safety procedures when approved by a Deputy Chief Engineer, despite many subsequent reports to the contrary.96

Because of the extreme heat fission generates, the reactor core must be kept cool at all costs. This is particularly important with an RBMK, which operates at an, “astonishingly high temperature,” relative to other reactor types, of 500°C with hotspots of up to 700°C, according to British nuclear expert Dr. Eric Voice. A typical PWR has an operating temperature of about 275°C. A few different kinds of coolant are used in different reactors, from gas to air to liquid metal to salt, but Chernobyl’s uses the same as most other reactors: light water, meaning it is just regular water. The plant was originally going to be fitted with gas-cooled reactors, but this was eventually changed because of a shortage of the necessary equipment.75 Water is pumped into the bottom of the reactor at high pressure (1000psi, or 65 atmospheres), where it boils and passes up, out of the reactor and through a condensator that separates steam from water. All remaining water is pushed through another pump and fed back into the reactor. The steam, meanwhile, enters a steam turbine, which turns and generates electricity. Each RBMK reactor produces 5,800 tons of steam per hour.76 Having passed through this turbogenerator, the steam is condensed back into water and fed back to the pumps, where it begins its cycle again.

Using graphite as a moderator can be highly dangerous, as it means that the nuclear reaction will continue - or even increase - in the absence of cooling water or the presence of steam pockets (called ‘voids’). This is known as a positive void coefficient and its presence in a reactor is indicative of very poor design. Graphite moderated reactors were used in the USA in the 1950s for research and plutonium production, but the Americans soon realised their safety disadvantages. Almost all western nuclear plants now use either Pressurised Water Reactors (PWRs) or Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs), which both use water as a moderator and coolant. In these designs, the water that is pumped into the reactor as coolant is the same water that is enabling the chain reaction as a moderator. Thus, if the water supply is stopped, fission will cease because the chain reaction cannot be sustained; a much safer design. Few commercial reactor designs still use a graphite moderator. Other than the RBMK and its derivative, the EGP-6, Britain’s Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor (AGR) design is the only other graphite-moderated reactor in current use. The AGR will soon be joined by a new type of experimental reactor at China’s Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Plant, which is currently under construction. The plant will house two graphite-moderated ‘High Temperature Reactor-Pebble-bed Modules’ reactors, the first of which is undergoing commissioning tests as of mid-2019.

In Nevada, at Frenchman’s Flat, a bright flash and ugly mushroom cloud had signified a gigantic change in the tactical battlefield—a change that had not come about at Hiroshima, despite statements to the contrary. In its early years the atomic device had remained a strategic weapon, suitable for delivery against cities and industries, suitable to obliterate civilians, men, women, and children by the millions, but of no practical use on a limited battlefield—until it was fired from a field gun. Until this time, 1953, the armies of the world, including that of the United States, had hardly taken the advent of fissionable material into account. The 280mm gun, an interim weapon that would remain in use only a few years, changed all that, forever. With an atomic cannon that could deliver tactical fires in the low-kiloton range, with great selectivity, ground warfare stood on the brink of its greatest change since the advent of firepower. The atomic cannon could blow any existing fortification, even one twenty thousand yards in depth, out of existence neatly and selectively, along with the battalions that manned it. Any concentration of manpower, also, was its meat. It spelled the doom of Communist massed armies, which opposed superior firepower with numbers, and which had in 1953 no tactical nuclear weapons of their own. The 280mm gun was shipped to the Far East. Then, in great secrecy, atomic warheads—it could fire either nuclear or conventional rounds—followed, not to Korea, but to storage close by. And with even greater secrecy, word of this shipment was allowed to fall into Communist hands. At the same time, into Communist hands wafted a pervasive rumor, one they could neither completely verify nor scotch: that the United States would not accept a stalemate beyond the end of summer. The psychological pressures on Chinese Intelligence became enormous. Neither an evaluative nor a collective agency, even when it feels it is being taken, dares ignore evidence.

SOME WOMEN HAVE SAID that Mrs. Pym was never young, that even in her initial stages she was probably an elderly baby. Obviously, such women should drink milk out of saucers; still, it is a fact that Mrs. Pym was somehow stolid, enormously capable, and frequently harsh, even in the early 1920’s when she must have been around thirty. She affected the same ugly tweeds, the same enchantingly insane hats, and the same air of magnificent omnipotence as she does today. But her hair was brown then, with only the faintest touch of her current greyness. Her speech was as biting, and her contempt for authority and inefficiency as ready as on that notable day when she crashed the shocked portals of New Scotland Yard, the first woman ever to hold rank in Central C.I.D., where, in these present jittery times of nuclear fission and H-bombs, she is Mrs. Assistant-Commissioner Pym.

Hitler looked at me with gleaming, feverish eyes: "Do you know, Skorzeny, if the energy and radioactivity released through nuclear fission were used as a weapon, that would mean the end of our planet?" "The effects would be frightful..." "Naturally! Even if the radioactivity were controlled and then nuclear fission used as a weapon, the effects would still he horrible! When Dr. Todt was with me, I read that such a device with controlled radioactivity would release energy that would leave behind devastation which could only be compared with the meteors that fell in Arizona and near Lake Baykal in Siberia. That means that every form of life, not only human, but animal and plant life as well, would be totally extinguished for hundreds of years within a fadius of forty kilometers. That would be the apocalypse. And how could one keep such a secret? Impossible! No! No country, no group of civilized men can consciously accept such a responsibility. From strike to counterstrike humanity would inevitably exterminate itself. Only tribes in the Amazon district and in the jungles of Sumatra would have a certain chance of surviving." These marginal notes by Hitler lasted scarcely more than a few minutes, but I remember those minutes precisely. At the beginning of my time as a prisoner of war, in August 1945, I heard that two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unnecessary bombs, by the way, for the Japanese emperor had already asked the Americans for their peace terms. While a prisoner American officers constantly asked me the same question, "How did you bring Hitler out of Berlin at the end of April 1945 and where have you hidden him?" I can still see the consternated expressions of the American officer before me, when, disgusted with the question, I answered: "Adolf Hitler is dead, but he was right when he said that you and I would be the survivors of the Amazon.

Before 1945, no human being had ever observed a nuclear-fission (atomic-bomb) explosion; there may never have been one in the history of the universe.

Antimatter is the most powerful energy source known to man. It releases energy with 100 percent efficiency (nuclear fission is 1.5 percent efficient). Antimatter creates no pollution or radiation, and a droplet could power New York City for a full day. There is, however, one catch . . . Antimatter is highly unstable. It ignites when it comes in contact with absolutely anything . . . even air. A single gram of antimatter contains the energy of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb—the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Gaylord began to realize that if the thermonuclear or fusion bomb were successful, it would take its place with the nuclear or fission bomb as one of the two great scientific achievements of the age. And then what?

Like most stars, the really massive ones begin by burning hydrogen and creating helium. Stars are powered by nuclear energy—not fission, but fusion: four hydrogen nuclei (protons) are fused together into a helium nucleus at extremely high temperatures, and this produces heat. When these stars run out of hydrogen, their cores shrink (because of the gravitational pull), which raises the temperature high enough that they can start fusing helium to carbon. For stars with masses more than about ten times the mass of the Sun, after carbon burning they go through oxygen burning, neon burning, silicon burning, and ultimately form an iron core. After each burning cycle the core shrinks, its temperature increases, and the next cycle starts. Each cycle produces less energy than the previous cycle and each cycle is shorter than the previous one. As an example (depending on the exact mass of the star), the hydrogen-burning cycle may last 10 million years at a temperature of about 35 million kelvin, but the last cycle, the silicon cycle, may only last a few days at a temperature of about 3 billion kelvin! During each cycle the stars burn most of the products of the previous cycle. Talk about recycling! The end of the line comes when silicon fusion produces iron, which has the most stable nucleus of all the elements in the periodic table. Fusion of iron to still heavier nuclei doesn’t produce energy; it requires energy, so the energy-producing furnace stops there. The iron core quickly grows as the star produces more and more iron. When this iron core reaches a mass of about 1.4 solar masses, it has reached a magic limit of sorts, known as the Chandrasekhar limit (named after the great Chandra himself). At this point the pressure in the core can no longer hold out against the powerful pressure due to gravity, and the core collapses onto itself, causing an outward supernova explosion.

For decades, Green activists have been attacking our sources of energy. Every single one has been demonized. Coal, which liberated mankind from the Malthusian trap, gave us manufacturing, railroads, and steamships; more than doubled our life expectancy; and saved almost all of us from having to be dirt farmers. Oil, which substantially replaced coal in the 20th century, made airplanes and the private automobile possible, along with the rest of the modern world. And, starting in the 1960s and ’70s, hydropower, nuclear fission, and even natural gas have come under the guns of the activists. The currently fashionable “renewables,” such as wind and solar power, have largely escaped the attacks. Battery-powered electric cars are the darlings of the Greens. But this is because they are simply not capable of providing anywhere near the energy or range that civilization depends on at a price it can afford. Should any of these, or other new forms of energy, prove actually usable on a large scale, they would be attacked just as viciously as fracking for natural gas, which cuts CO2 emissions in half, and nuclear power, which would eliminate them entirely.

The desire to overcome physical limitations by magic manipulations owed as much to the mind as chemistry did to the alchemist's furnace: so impetuous, so willful, so insistent, was this desire that it sometimes tempted the alchemists to fake the result by hiding a pellet of gold in the ashes. But this subjective impulse to transcend the limitations of 'matter' has turned out to be closer to reality than the well-grounded inhibitions against it: the alchemists' dream, we now realize, pointed to the ultimate miracle of nuclear fission.

Once the secret of nuclear fission was unlocked, the construction of the new pyramids went on at such a furious rate that the United States military strategists, within a dozen years, were forced to invent a new term, 'overkill,' to describe the superfluous powers of extermination they already possessed. On a planet holding perhaps three billion people, they had bombs enough to wipe out three hundred billion. In this new economy of negative abundance, the means of death outpaced the means of life.

The Pashupatiastra was a pure nuclear fusion weapon, unlike the Brahmastra and the Vaishnavastra which were nuclear fission weapons. In a pure nuclear fusion weapon, two paramanoos, the smallest stable division of matter, are fused together to release tremendous destructive energy. In a nuclear fission weapon, anoos, atomic particles, are broken down to release paramanoos, and this is also accompanied by a demonic release of devastating energy. Nuclear fission weapons leave behind a trail of uncontrollable destruction, with radioactive waste spreading far and wide. A nuclear fusion weapon, on the other hand, is much more controlled, destroying only the targeted area with minimal radioactive spread.

Antimatter is the most powerful energy source known to man. It releases energy with 100 percent efficiency (nuclear fission is 1.5 percent efficient). Antimatter creates no pollution or radiation,

Historically, the Germans had a habit of associating the names of objects with the sounds they made. After bell makers-turned-cannon-makers learned that by closing off the mouth of the cannon before lighting the fuse, the entire cannon could be made to explode, the device they invented became known as the 'bum' (for boom!). In keeping with this tradition, the first one-thousand-pound bomb was dubbed 'ein laussen bum' (meaning, "a loud boom"). After the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, they called the fission device 'ein grossen laussen bum' (or, "a big loud boom"). The next obvious step was the fusion, or H-bomb, which was pronounced 'ein grossen laussen bum all ist kaput!

Besides, the big worry was that if the Allies didn't get nuclear fission working soon then the Germans would beat them to it. Given the choice between our blowing up the world and the enemy blowing up the world, it was obvious what to do.

chance the plant will survive.       Dr. Alton Mackey, Commissioner of the NRC gave the President a five-minute slide show with the pictures from 2011. Given the massive overtopping of the Garrison and Oahe dams, there was no way the two nuclear plants would survive the onslaught.     “How long does it take to shut down the reactors?”     Dr. Mackey hemmed and hawed. “When you turn your BBQ grill off, your steaks are still cooking even though the fuel is turned off.” The analogy was appropriate. “The control rods have already been disconnected which means the fission process has been stopped, but the fuel rods are still producing heat in the form of protons, helium nuclei, electrons, gamma rays, neutrons and positrons and a bunch of other radioactive crap. It takes years for the spent fuel rods to break down into less radioactive substances.

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot. It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose.

For some years there's been intense controversy over a pilot-plant "fast breeder" reactor, which was built to transmute the commonly occurring isotope U238 into the fissionable isotope P239 of the element plutonium. The controversy has raged because fast breeder reactors are much trickier and more dangerous than ordinary fission reactors, and because P239 is a suitable material for making atomic bombs as well as for fueling reactors. Critics have attacked fast breeder reactors both for the dangers of their operation and for the risk that in an all-nuclear economy there would be so much P239 being

The idea of an anthropic principle began with the remark that the laws of nature seem surprisingly well suited to the existence of life. A famous example is provided by the synthesis of the elements. According to modern ideas, this synthesis began when the universe was about three minutes old (before then it was too hot for protons and neutrons to stick together in atomic nuclei) and was later continued in stars. It had originally been though that the elements were formed by adding one nuclear particle at a time to atomic nuclei, starting with the simplest element, hydrogen, whose nucleus consists of just one particle (a proton). But, although there was no trouble in building up helium nuclei, which contain four nuclear particles (two protons and two neutrons), there is no stable nucleus with five nuclear particles and hence no way to take the next step. The solution found eventually by Edwin Salpeter in 1952 is that two helium nuclei can come together in stars to form the unstable nucleus of the isotope beryllium 8, which occasionally before it has a chance to fission into two helium nuclei absorbs yet another helium nucleus and forms a nucleus of carbon. However, as emphasized in 1954 by Fred Hoyke, in order for this process to account for the observed cosmic abundance of carbon, there must be a state of the carbon nucleus that has an energy that gives it an anomalously large probability of being formed in the collison of a helium nucleus and a nucleus of beryllium 8. (Precisely such a state was subsequently found by experimenters working with Hoyle.) Once carbon is formed in stars, there is no obstacle to building up all the heavier elements, including those like oxygen and nitrogen that are necessary for known forms of life. But in order for this to work, the energy of this state of the carbon nucleus must be very close to the energy of a nucleus of beryllium 8 plus the energy of a helium nucleus. If the energy of this state of the carbon nucleus were too large or too small, then little carbon or heavier elements would be formed in stars, and with only hydrogen and helium there would be no way that life could arise. The energies of nuclear states depend in a complicated way on all the constants of physics, such as the masses and electric charges of the different types of elementary particles. It seems at first sight remarkable that these constants should take just the values that are needed to make it possible for carbon to be formed in this way.

World War II began on horseback in 1939 and ended with nuclear fission in 1945.

anything said about how useful the material was.” The material was not just useful; it was priceless. In August 1941, another spy for the Soviet Union, the British civil servant John Cairncross, gave his handler a copy of the Maud Committee report outlining the aims of the nuclear weapons program. Fuchs provided the detailed reality of the bomb’s development, step by experimental step: the designs for a diffusion plant, estimates of the critical mass for explosive U-235, the measurement of fission, and the increasing British cooperation with American nuclear scientists. At the end of 1941, Fuchs co-authored two important papers on the separation of the isotopes of U-235

Making Carbon-Free Electricity Nuclear fission. Here’s the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It’s the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.

What these aliens did provide, however—and in abundance—was a phenomenal amount of knowledge, inspiration, and, in many respects, protection for those involved with the Amicizia group. And it needs to be pointed out here that, on at least two occasions since 1956, they had prevented a nuclear war on Earth. “They did so by transmuting the fissionable metals inside the warheads into lighter substances,

At ground zero, directly beneath the airburst, the temperature reached perhaps 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone on the bridge was incinerated, and hundreds of fires were ignited. The blast wave flattened buildings, a firestorm engulfed the city, and a mushroom cloud rose almost ten miles into the sky. From the plane, Hiroshima looked like a roiling, bubbling sea of black smoke and fire. A small amount of fissile material was responsible for the devastation; 98.62 percent of the uranium in Little Boy was blown apart before it could become supercritical. Only 1.38 percent actually fissioned, and most of that uranium was transformed into dozens of lighter elements. About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.

Nuclear fusion. There’s another, entirely different approach to nuclear power that’s quite promising but still at least a decade away from supplying electricity to consumers. Instead of getting energy by splitting atoms apart, as fission does, it involves pushing them together, or fusing them.

Nuclear fission. Here’s the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It’s the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.

They discussed the long, thorough theoretical paper by Niels Bohr and John Wheeler, “The mechanism of nuclear fission,” that had been published in the September Physical Review and especially its conclusion, which Bohr and Wheeler had elaborated from Bohr’s Sunday-morning graph work, that U235 was probably the isotope of uranium responsible for slow-neutron fission.1205

You said, “Teacher, what destroyed the House of the First?” “Not much,” said the Emperor, and he tried to smile. It was awful. “Rising sea levels and a massive nuclear fission chain reaction… it all went downhill from there.

Actually, Professor Heisenberg had not given any final answer to my question whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept under control with absolute certainty or might continue as a chain reaction.

Besides, the big worry was that if the Allies didn’t get nuclear fission working soon then the Germans would beat them to it. Given the choice between our blowing up the world and the enemy blowing up the world, it was obvious what to do.

In Delirio Familiari by Stewart Stafford He devoured radioactive pizza, eyes bulging to breaking point. Every riddle imploded in a flash, daymare fission without a joint. He, the man of conjured letters; she, his spark that moderates. Janus creature, clockface duo, oddballs, but fitting mates. With dollops of ambrosial agony, in frenzied closeness, but witty, The Brain Surgeon’s Cookbook, A bromide concoction served as ditty. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

It is well known in physics that when one compresses the mass of an object its potential energy increases exponentially. Coal is an example of such compression; nuclear fission another. There are several techniques in Qabalah for 'compressing' a text of scripture to 'increase' its 'power.' A book called the Cifri Ali is said to one of the books used by the Bektashis. It is a book revealed to Ali ('Alaihi Assalam) and secretly handed down to his descendants. Learned Şehy's are supposed to have learned from it and therefore to be able to practice divination.

AI is a dual-use technology like nuclear fission. Nuclear fission can illuminate cities or incinerate them. Its terrible power was unimaginable to most people before 1945. With advanced AI, we’re in the 1930s right now. We’re unlikely to survive an introduction as abrupt as nuclear fission’s.

Enriched uranium dissolved in water or an organic solvent will become an active nuclear reactor, increasing in power, if a specific “critical mass” is accumulated. The hydrogen in the water or the solvent acts as a moderator, slowing the fission neutrons to an advantageous speed, and even a fairly low U-235 enrichment level, like 3%, will overcome neutron losses by non-productive absorption in the moderator. This has been realized since the earliest days of reactor engineering, and those who work with uranium solutions are quite aware of the possibility.

Be that as it may, the problem of human squeamishness at having an A-bomb explode overhead could be addressed. Simply explaining to soldiers that a nuclear detonation at 10,000 feet was not the same as having it go off at 1,000 feet was true but insufficient. To the soldiers it was a matter of degree. At the high altitude there would be no ground disturbance. No radioactive dust kicked up into a mushroom cloud, no neutron activation of the ground, and negligible fallout. It was all a function of range. The fission neutrons could not travel that far in air before they decayed into hydrogen gas, and the gamma ray pulse would be short-lived and dissipated in a spherical wave-front with a diameter of four miles when it hit the ground.

Scientists believe that the walls are in a constant state of nuclear fusion and fission, creating and destroying atoms on a constant loop. Some scientists think this is part of the reason it looks the way it does, but no one has been able to explain why or how it happens, only that it does.

the discovery of nuclear fission early that year, by two German scientists, put Hitler within reach of a weapon with almost unfathomable power.

Heisenberg’s biographer, David Cassidy, posed a large and testing question about Heisenberg’s behaviour before and during the war: How was it possible that Werner Heisenberg, one of the most gifted of modern physicists, a man educated in the finest tradition of Western culture, who was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi supporter, how was it possible that such a man would not only choose to remain in National Socialist Germany for its entire twelve years of existence, but also actively seek a prominent academic position in Berlin at the height of the war, a position that included the scientific directorship of nuclear fission research for the German Army at war?56 It’s a question, obviously, that is asked in hindsight.

There were other worries too … in particular, might the experiment be too successful, setting off a chain reaction that not only spread through the experiment’s supply of uranium-235, but through everything else on Earth as well? Might the atmosphere catch fire? Calculations suggested: probably not. Besides, the big worry was that if the Allies didn’t get nuclear fission working soon then the Germans would beat them to it. Given the choice between our blowing up the world and the enemy blowing up the world, it was obvious what to do. That is, on reflection, not a happy sentence.

Incredible as it seems, the difference between the subcritical neutron population in a uranium mass, making no fission, and supercritical, making wild, increasing fission, is a very small number of available neutrons out of trillions: all it takes is just one neutron.

The second fundamental misconception in inductivism is that scientific theories predict that ‘the future will resemble the past’, and that ‘the unseen resembles the seen’ and so on. (Or that it ‘probably’ will.) But in reality the future is unlike the past, the unseen very different from the seen. Science often predicts – and brings about – phenomena spectacularly different from anything that has been experienced before. For millennia people dreamed about flying, but they experienced only falling. Then they discovered good explanatory theories about flying, and then they flew – in that order. Before 1945, no human being had ever observed a nuclear-fission (atomic-bomb) explosion; there may never have been one in the history of the universe. Yet the first such explosion, and the conditions under which it would occur, had been accurately predicted – but not from the assumption that the future would be like the past. Even sunrise – that favourite example of inductivists – is not always observed every twenty-four hours: when viewed from orbit it may happen every ninety minutes, or not at all. And that was known from theory long before anyone had ever orbited the Earth.

By 1950, then, the three primary fossil fuels—coal, petroleum, and natural gas—all fed the large energy needs of the United States and, in various portion, the rest of the developed world. If coal share was declining worldwide, petroleum was approaching dominance, and natural gas had only begun to penetrate the world market. In those immediate postwar years as well, an entirely new source of energy, nuclear fission, the first potentially major energy source not derived directly or indirectly from sunlight, languished behind walls of secrecy, released as yet only to military use.

On the cold winter afternoon of 2 December 1942, in a disused doubles squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago football stadium, the Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Fascist Italy, calmly initiated the world’s first controlled nuclear-fission chain reaction. Other than hand-operated cadmium control rods, nothing visibly moved in the garage-sized graphite and natural uranium assembly Fermi and his crew had stacked up by hand over the preceding two months. (Fermi called the assembly a “pile” in amused reference to its stacked arrangement.) The reactor required no radiation shielding. The energy it produced by splitting—“fissioning”—uranium atoms, held to a mere 200 watts, was not even enough to warm the unheated court.

A nuclear reactor requires two basic materials: a fissionable element such as uranium and a moderator. The function of a moderator, as its name implies, is to slow down the neutrons that come bursting out of a uranium atom when it fissions, increasing their chance of encountering and penetrating another atom of uranium and causing another fission. For CP-1—Chicago Pile No. 1—the moderator was graphite. For most of today’s power reactors, the moderator is water. Moderators slow down neutrons by giving them a target—for graphite, the nucleus of a carbon atom—to bounce off of repeatedly, losing energy with each bounce, much as billiard balls do.

On the cold winter afternoon of 2 December 1942, in a disused doubles squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago football stadium, the Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Fascist Italy, calmly initiated the world’s first controlled nuclear-fission chain reaction.

Natural gas followed a similar trajectory. In 1900, it accounted for 1 percent of the world’s energy. It took seventy years to reach 20 percent. Nuclear fission went faster, going from 0 to 10 percent in 27 years.

I’m Sushi K and I’m here to say I like to rap in a different way Look out Number One in every city Sushi K rap has all most pretty My special talking of remarkable words Is not the stereotyped bucktooth nerd My hair is big as a galaxy Cause I attain greater technology [...] I like to rap about sweetened romance My fond ambition is of your pants So here is of special remarkable way Of this fellow raps named Sushi K The Nipponese talking phenomenon Like samurai sword his sharpened tongue Who raps the East Asia and the Pacific Prosperity Sphere, to be specific [...] Sarariman on subway listen For Sushi K like nuclear fission Fire-breathing lizard Gojiro He my always big-time hero His mutant rap burn down whole block Start investing now Sushi K stock It on Nikkei stock exchange Waxes; other rappers wane Best investment, make my day Corporation Sushi K [...] Coming to America now Rappers trying to start a row Say “Stay in Japan, please, listen! We can’t handle competition!” U.S. rappers booing and hissin’ Ask for rap protectionism They afraid of Sushi K Cause their audience go away He got chill financial backin’ Give those U.S. rappers a smackin’ Sushi K concert machine Fast efficient super clean Run like clockwork in a watch Kick old rappers in the crotch

The conventional explosives in the warhead were packed tightly around the plutonium core in a spherical cover like a thick skin. It was segmented like a soccer ball, with detonators precisely placed in each segment of the explosives cover, to ignite in unison. This sphere of plastic explosives was designed in perfect balance for a powerful implosion, intended to compress the powdered plutonium core into a highly dense ball of fissionable material. The triggered compression was supposed to occur just as the warhead was delivered over its target.

When Hahn and Strassman conducted their experiment, they launched a neutron into an atom of uranium, a metal that was made up of the largest and heaviest atoms known at the time. Because a neutron has no electrical charge, it can slip through the powerful wall of electrons that surrounds every atom. This extra neutron is absorbed into the already bloated uranium nucleus, upsetting the careful balance of forces that holds the atom together. And in a flash the whole atom fractures. Its protons and electrons and neutrons rearrange themselves into different elements. The reaction also releases stray neutrons, which fly off on their own. But the most significant by-product of this collision is energy. Lots of it… Just how much energy comes from a nuclear reaction? About seventy million times more energy than from a chemical reaction. So if, for example, you fissioned one kilogram of uranium, it would make the same size explosion as 20,000 tons of TNT. One little chunk of uranium has more potential explosive energy than a pile of TNT stacked ten stories high. If fission could work on a large enough scale (instead of just one atom at a time), mankind stood to gain more than merely the ability to make explosions. In fact, fission promised to reveal some of the deepest mysteries of the universe. The secret behind fission’s awesome power lies in the type of reaction that is taking place. For practically all of human history, the most energetic reactions that humans were aware of were chemical reactions. Fire is a good example. If you ignite a lump of coal and make sure there is enough oxygen around, the result is fire (energy) and smoke. On a molecular level, the heat from the flame disrupts the electrons in the coal, causing each carbon atom to bond with two atoms of oxygen. The result is a new molecule made from the old atoms: CO2. We put in carbon and oxygen, and we get out carbon and oxygen, though in slightly different arrangements. But in a nuclear reaction, such as fission, the original atom of uranium disappears. It actually becomes two new atoms. Instead of changing merely the arrangement of the atoms, fission changes their very identity. In fission, scientists had finally discovered the philosopher’s stone that had captivated the minds of medieval alchemists. With fission, we could finally turn lead into gold.

Only one facet of the atomic bomb was still missing: Criticality. “Criticality” is a term used to describe the ideal conditions for a chain reaction. A row of dominoes is “critical: if each domino that falls knocks over one other. Fermi assembled a “critical mass” of uranium in his reactor, and he achieved a linear chain reaction. Each atom that fissioned caused one other atom to fission. Theoretically, that sort of reaction can go on forever (given infinite atoms), but it’s not getting any bigger. A bomb, however, requires something more explosive: a chain reaction that grows exponentially. A bomb requires a super critical mass. Imagine an area the size of an empty basketball court and a pile of dominoes. To make a super critical mass, line up the dominoes so that each one that falls will knock over two more dominoes. And each one of those knocks two more over, and so on… This is essentially what happens inside the core of an atomic bomb. The reactive material — uranium or plutonium — is packed together so tightly that when one atom fissions the released neutrons can’t help but hit two more atoms, causing them to fission as well. In other words, once a super-critical mass is assembled, an exponential chain reaction is practically inevitable. Variations on this kind of super-critical mass happen often in nature. Avalanches. Epidemics. But it’s a lot harder for humans to re-create these sorts of complex systems. A super-critical reaction requires an astounding amount of work and organization just to get all the necessary pieces arranged in the right order. All this work, whether it’s lining up dominoes or enriching uranium, builds toward one single moment: the moment when what was once impossible becomes unavoidable. In that moment the logic of the chain reaction takes over. The fire will only stop when there is nothing left to burn. The Trinity test was that moment. Once construction had finished on the factories, the laboratories, and the test sites… once the nation’s brightest minds had demonstrated the potential power of nuclear fission… and, finally, once the military had organized these many parts into a coherent plan to test a bomb… a chain reaction was about to be set in motion, making certain outcomes inevitable. With all that momentum, if a bomb could indeed be built, was there any justification to not build it? And once a workable bomb was built, was there really any chance that it wouldn’t be used?

Nuclear fission was discovered in Berlin by two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, in 1938. It was explained theoretically (and named) by the Austrian-born physicists Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch in 1939. The possibility of a nuclear chain reaction leading to “large-scale production of energy and radioactive elements, unfortunately also perhaps to atomic bombs” was the insight of the Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd. The possibility that such a chain reaction might also be harnessed in a nuclear reactor to generate heat was also recognized at that time. Yet it took little more than five years to build the first atomic bomb, whereas it was not until 1951 that the first nuclear power station was opened.

The lesson of Henry Kissinger’s lifetime is clear. Technological advances can have both benign and malign consequences, depending on how we collectively decide to exploit them. Artificial intelligence is of course different from nuclear fission in a host of ways. But it would be a grave error to assume that we shall use this new technology more for productive than for potentially destructive purposes.