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Tuesday, January 29th, 2013

Seventy Years of Nuclear Fission, Thousands of Centuries of Nuclear Waste

Author:     GREGG LEVINE
Source:     Truthout.org
Publication Date:     Friday, 25 January 2013 00:00
Link: Seventy Years of Nuclear Fission, Thousands of Centuries of Nuclear Waste
Stephan:   The issue of nuclear waste is little discussed today. But its challenges are, if anything, more pressing than ever. The problem with nuclear power has always been the waste it produced. It is lethal for tens of thousands of years. To place it in some context, if Caesar had powered Rome with nuclear power, the waste dumps he created would still kill you and poison the land, and continue to be deadly for 10s of thousands of years beyond your life. Do you know of anything in human history that has been maintained perfectly for just the 2,000 plus years since Caesar? The argument advanced in defense of nuclear power is that the solution lies in the near future; it will happen. But no one can say when, and the tons of radioactive waste just keep building up. And remember every time an event happens, as we can see in Chernobyl and Fukushima, it never really ends. This report presents a good history of the industry. Note the role, as a young officer, played by Jimmy Carter, who is by training a nuclear engineer. It is easy to see why uniquely he has been the one president to turn away from the nuclear industry.

On December 2, 1942, a small group of physicists under the direction of Enrico Fermi gathered on an old squash court beneath Alonzo Stagg Stadium on the Campus of the University of Chicago to make and witness history. Uranium pellets and graphite blocks had been stacked around cadmium-coated rods as part of an experiment crucial to the Manhattan Project – the program tasked with building an atom bomb for the allied forces in World War II. The experiment was successful, and for 28 minutes, the scientists and dignitaries present witnessed the world’s first manmade, self-sustaining nuclear fission reaction. They called it an atomic pile – Chicago Pile 1 (CP-1), to be exact- but what Fermi and his team had actually done was build the world’s first nuclear reactor.

The Manhattan Project’s goal was a bomb, but soon after the end of the war, scientists, politicians, the military and private industry looked for ways to harness the power of the atom for civilian use, or, perhaps more to the point, for commercial profit. Fifteen years to the day after CP-1 achieved criticality, President Dwight Eisenhower threw a ceremonial switch to start the reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, which was billed as the first […]

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