No energy technology has been more revolutionary than nuclear power.
While Tucker Carlson has attributed nuclear energy to demons created at some unknown date, the actual start of the nuclear period is well-documented. In 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann bombarded uranium with newly-discovered neutrons. Only six years earlier had James Chadwick described the neutron and received a Nobel Prize in 1935, as Hahn and Strassman would go on to do in 1944. Eleven of Chadwick’s associates also received the prize in Physics or Chemistry. The period from the turn of the century to the mid-1940s was an extraordinary time in discovering the behavior of atomic components.
One person who did not receive a Nobel Prize was Lise Meitner. The Germans saw that uranium broke down to smaller atoms but did not understand what they saw. Meitner and her nephew—both of whom had fled Germany as they were Jewish—interpreted the results and gave the name of “fission” (the biological term for one cell splitting into two daughter cells) to the process by which a heavy atom bombarded with neutrons could be broken down into smaller atoms. Leo Szilard and others understood the enormous implications of the German work: the lost mass of neutrons during fission could be realized as enormous quantities of energy, as per Einstein’s famous equation: E = mc2, where m is the mass converted into energy and c is the speed of light. Szilard even applied for patents over the energy uses of fission. He also got Albert Einstein to write the letter to FDR that got the Manhattan Project started. Edward Teller and many other famous Jewish scientists fled Europe and found home in England and the United States. Enrico Fermi, one of the most important figures in the Manhattan Project, was not Jewish but his wife was. When he went to pick up his 1938 Nobel Prize for creating radioactive elements via neutron bombardment, he went to the U.S. instead of coming back to his native Italy. Twenty-nine Nobel laureates were associated with the U.S. bomb project.
Fission was discovered and described in 1938. The U.S. had atomic bombs on Japanese cities in 1945. The progress from a very initial lab observation to the release of kilotons of TNT equivalents took well less than a decade. The Manhattan Project itself required $2 billion of wartime funding and overcame massive challenges of production, testing, and fielding of working nuclear weapons. The first three bombs produced all worked. A new age of both weaponry and energy was born. The U.S. ran 1,000 nuclear tests prior to the total test ban. Nuclear reactors popped up. People said that nuclear energy would be “too cheap to meter” though the reality has been quite different.
Hyman Rickover was sent by the Navy to learn about the new nuclear power. He worked on both commercial and naval nuclear propulsion. Admiral Rickover served in the Navy 63 years and is the unquestioned father of the Nuclear Navy. There are about 100 nuclear-powered U.S. naval vessels plying the oceans today. Rickover proposed putting a nuclear reactor into a submarine to make it a true submarine with no need to surface to refresh batteries or receive fuel. The Russians laughed: a reactor is the size of a massive building. Rickover won and the USS Nautilus reported that it was under power with nuclear energy in 1954. In less than 20 years from the German discovery of an unusual chemical phenomenon, a U.S. submarine was transiting underneath the North Pole, a feat that was impossible for every submarine up until that time.
Nuclear power received a black eye from the Three Mile Island incident as well as concerns for the safety of nuclear reactors and their spent fuel. Georgia opened two new reactors in 2023 and 2024; their immediate predecessor opened 30 years earlier. There is today much interest in reviving the nuclear energy sector for the simple reason that AI takes enormous amounts of energy to work. Meta is opening a new $10 billion dollar data center in Louisiana that President Trump described as having a footprint equal to 80 percent of Manhattan. The need for cheap electricity has allowed those who were against nuclear energy to give it a new look. The simple reality is that wind and sun will not be able to reliably power AI and growing demands for electricity. Hydrocarbons can produce a lot but if one wants a carbon neutral source of electricity that is reliable and works 24/7, then nuclear is the way to go. Nuclear power is becoming more efficient. The USS Enterprise aircraft carrier (1961) required eight reactors; Nimitz and Ford classes make due with two. Ohio class ballistic missile submarines required a midlife refueling that took years and cost a fortune. The new Columbia class boats that will come online later this decade have a higher density reactor core so as to allow continuous operation for 40 years with no requirement for refueling. I wish that I could refuel my car once in 40 years.
When the USS Columbia hits the sea, it will represent the pinnacle of nuclear efficiency less than 100 years from the first nuclear experiments. The main difference between a nuclear bomb and a nuclear power plant is the release of massive amounts of energy in a controlled manner over time for the latter versus total release in seconds for the former. The U.S. is again producing plutonium pits and nuclear weapons have also undergone improvements over the decades. Thermonuclear weapons can have 1,000 times the destructive force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A traditional fission explosion initiates fusion in a lithium deuteride fuel. The X-rays produced by the fission bomb reach the fusion fuel before the shockwave of the explosion. The high-energy neutrons released during fusion cause the inert uranium 238 bomb casing to undergo fission and contribute half of the energy of the total explosive power. An Ohio class sub has more destructive force with its 24 multi-warhead missiles than all of the bombs dropped in the two world wars. I don’t have a bucket list but if there is one thing I would like to do it's stand in the “forest” of 24 nuclear missiles on an American nuclear missile boat. I would just contemplate the destructive power around me as well as the nuclear reactor powering everything on the sub.
Nuclear power has been a boon and a bane for mankind. Had Iran not played around with nuclear weapons development, Israel and the U.S. would have had far less reason to bomb it. Japan and the Europeans have given up their nuclear reactors and are learning through their reliance on renewable energy sources that electricity is more expensive and less reliable. Spain recently lost all power in the country. Nuclear power definitely comes with the risk of an accident like at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. It also includes the problem of what to do with highly radioactive waste that will present a danger for thousands of years. With all of the risks and challenges, it still remains an amazing accomplishment that from a laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute came forth a technology that has revolutionized so many facets of our world. And with the demand for a lot more energy going forward, the need for nuclear energy only grows stronger.
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