Climate Changes Everything: Episode 16, The Future Ain't What It Used to Be, Part 1

Nuclear power has had a complicated history. There are still many questions about its safety, sustainability, and impact on the environment. Nuclear power has its roots in the Big Bang and the fusion and fission reactions that occurred. Humans have harnessed fission, the splitting of atoms, to generate energy. The discovery of uranium and radiation in the late 18th and 19th centuries paved the way for nuclear energy. In 1939, scientists made breakthroughs in understanding the potential of fission and its ability to release a large amount of energy. The development of nuclear weapons during World War II overshadowed peaceful uses of nuclear power. After the war, the focus shifted to using nuclear energy for electricity generation. The rivalry between the West and the Soviet Union during the Cold War played a role in the push for nuclear power plants. While the concept of a nuclear power plant is similar to a coal-fired power plant, there are complexities in controlling the fission react Hello, and welcome back to Climate Changes Everything. This is Episode 16. The future ain't what it used to be, part one. And that future was absolutely, positively, undoubtedly going to be nuclear. Until it wasn't. And then it really wasn't. And then it really, really, really wasn't. But now, might, just might be again. Or at least more than a little bit. If that sounds complicated, fasten your seatbelts. It gets much worse. Significant and stubborn policy, commercial, financial, technical, and regulatory questions still dog nuclear power. Here are just a few. Is nuclear power safe or unsafe? Is it sustainable or unsustainable? Is it Earth-positive or Earth-negative? Climate-positive or climate-negative? Humanity-positive or humanity-negative? Or, in each case, somewhere in between. Or, it depends. In this episode, we'll work through the basics of nuclear power and begin its epic history from the Big Bang universe's perspective in its very brief, but topsy-turvy and often existentially terrifying history from a human perspective. Then, in the next couple of episodes, we'll bring that topsy-turvy history to the present day. And as we do, we'll look at nuclear power in the context of the power system and identify opportunities for innovation, entrepreneurship, and advocacy as climate changes everything today. As always, eyes wide, wide, wide open. So let's begin, as always, at the beginning. In this case, the beginning is further back than we've ever gone on the podcast before. Set the Wayback Machine for, well, the birth of the universe, the Big Bang. Well, on second thought, maybe not. Even more than the raining asteroids of the late heavy bombardment a few episodes back and a few billion years back, the Big Bang is the very definition of spectacular, but not survivable. About 13.8 billion years ago—that's billions with a B—our universe was born. Everything that ever was is now and ever will be. And a mere few minutes into the Big Bang, nucleosynthesis—not to belabor the physics, and who am I kidding? But the synthesis of those nuclei in the universe's first few minutes laid the groundwork for the nuclear reactions in the lives and deaths of stars that created most of the other nuclei in the universe. Those reactions come in two basic forms. Fission is when a larger nuclei is broken into smaller ones. One big into many small—that's fission. Fusion, on the other hand, is when two smaller nuclei combine into a larger one. Two small into one big—that's fusion. As you can imagine, these are spectacular high-energy events, even on a cosmic scale. But I pause on the ideas long enough to make the point. Nuclear power is both the original energy of and the ultimate source of all energy in the universe. So yeah, totally not going back there on the way back machine. Fast forward all of those 13.8 billion years to, in all the human terms, almost the present day. As we'll see in this episode, we humans have figured out fission—again, one big into many small—on an earthly scale. Think of a nuclear power plant, or a nuclear submarine, or a nuclear bomb. And we're starting to figure out fusion—small fusing into big. A note of caution on fusion, though. For a long time, we've recognized its huge promise. We've celebrated incremental advances with a lot of breathless news stories. But the research continues, and it's only likely a source of human-scale power in many generations in the future. So we'll focus on fission, the one we've figured out. As you've probably guessed, the story of nuclear energy is a story of extremes. As we've seen, nuclear is both the oldest and the newest form of energy—the OE, original energy from the perspective of the universe, but the new kid on the block for we humans. It's also an international story, starting in Germany and then bouncing among Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, and the then-Soviet Union. Unlike other energy sources, we actually had to discover nuclear energy before we could harness it. On the other side of that coin, think about water, wind, solar, or even wood—those burning rocks and liquids and substances and fumes that turned out to be coal and oil and methane, for example. But humans, or hominids more accurately, didn't need to proactively discover that those things had energy. Stand in the new day sun, or in a strong wind, or in a flowing river, or watch a fire—the energy is self-evident. Uranium, the element that represents most of our work on and with radioactivity, was only discovered, though, in 1789, during what seems to be a frenzy of discovery in chemistry as a whole. There's also a second radioactive element called thorium, which I'll cover later. Radiation, though, would not be identified for another century—1895, in fact. Now, to our ears, 1895 seems like a long time ago. But the 128 years between then and now is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the 13.8 billion years since nuclear energy came to exist, courtesy of the Big Bang and all that nucleosynthesis. Even relative to the Wonder Work cave timeline—remember that first campfire—it's a fraction of a fraction, about 0.0064% of all those two million or so years. Born at the dawn of time, literally, but discovered basically the day before yesterday, both from the perspective of physics and human history. So again, simultaneously the OE and the new kid on the block. The relative timeline gets even shorter when it comes to harnessing that power for human purposes—just a handful of generations, in fact. It started, of course, with fundamental science—understanding the atom and its potential so that humanity might better survive and thrive in our world. Some beneficial uses for radiation were rapidly spun out of this work, including medical x-rays. And then, with that understanding, the other side of human nature—finding ways to kill as many of the populations of humans we don't happen to like at the moment as quickly and efficiently as possible. There's no way to sugarcoat that. Finally, our focus here—the lens through which I'll massively summarize the history of atomic research and development—turning that same energy into electricity. Fast forward to 1939, when that basic science, each discovery adding to the foundation of knowledge, reached a tipping point. In March of 1939, German scientists Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, and Fritz Straussmann showed that not only did fission itself release a lot of energy, it also released additional neutrons. These additional neutrons, in turn, could cause fission in other uranium nuclei and possibly set off a self-sustaining chain reaction, leading to an enormous release of energy. Two months later, in May, French scientist Francis Perrin calculated the critical mass of uranium required to produce self-sustaining release of energy. He then demonstrated that a chain reaction could be sustained in a uranium-water mixture, with the water being used to slow down the neutrons, provided external neutrons were injected into the system. He also demonstrated the idea of introducing neutron-absorbing material to limit the multiplication of neutrons and thus, thankfully, control the nuclear reaction. Spoiler alert, this control is the basis for the operation of a nuclear power station. Then, a few months after that, still in 1939, Danish scientist Niels Bohr and American John Wheeler extended these ideas and those of many others, including the use of a moderator to slow down the emitted neutrons in a paper that became the classical analysis of the fission process, A Roadmap for Harnessing Nuclear Energy, published August 29, 1939. Does that time ring a bell? Well, what happened two days later, on September 1, 1939, the start of World War II, with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland? In that context, as you might imagine, destructive uses for nuclear power trumped peaceful uses for the duration of the war. On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima. Three days later, Nagasaki. More broadly, though, that wartime environment, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its aftermath, and that of the Cold War that followed, colors every aspect of the nuclear quest, both peaceful and destructive, almost to the present day. I have to imagine that much of the science and engineering of nuclear destruction informs the science and engineering of peaceful uses, productive uses for nuclear power, like electricity generation, and vice versa. Swords into plowshares into more deadly swords and more productive plowshares. When World War II concluded, nuclear weapons development continued at full speed on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But at the same time, scientists and engineers and policymakers in both the West and the Soviet Union began to seriously consider other applications for the tremendous heat produced in the fission process, including electricity generation. Now, there's another Cold War element here. The rivalry between the West and the Soviet Union was as much or more about economic competition than military competition. And back then, industrial production was a primary measure of economic success. And then, as now, heat and electricity are primary inputs to those industrial outputs. So getting those nuclear power plants up and running was, in many ways, just war by different means. Now, conceptually, it's not that difficult. Remember coal-fired power plants burning coal to make heat, to make steam, to drive a turbine, to drive a generator, to make electricity? Well, substitute burning coal for splitting atoms. Voila, a nuclear power plant. Now, there's a lot of complexity in that casual voila. The atom splitting must be carefully controlled, and the steam itself is highly radioactive, for example. But the basics are pretty basic. It's a source of heat. And in 1951, a mere six years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a small reactor was designed and operated by Argonne National Labs, sited in the US in Idaho, that produced a very small amount of electricity. We were off to the races. The Soviet Union was off to the races as well, pouring money and brainpower into refining existing nuclear-reacted designs and developing new ones. In 1953, US President Dwight Eisenhower introduced his Atoms for Peace program, focusing on research efforts on nuclear electricity generation, and setting the course for civil and not just military nuclear energy development in the US. In Atoms for Peace, Eisenhower proposed that a new international agency be created to develop peaceful nuclear technologies. Speaking of taking nuclear materials, quote, out of the hands of soldiers and into the hands of those who will adapt them to the arts of peace, unquote. It wasn't all Atoms for Peace, or even Atoms for Industry, of course. More about putting them into civilian as well as military hands, not instead of military hands. You won't be surprised that both the US and the Soviets were already hard at work on nuclear-powered naval vessels, especially submarines. The world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, was launched by the US in 1954, just a year after Atoms for Peace. In 1959, both the US and the USSR launched their first nuclear-powered surface vessels. And it wasn't just the Americans and the Soviets, of course. The British, French, and Canadians, for example, all launched aggressive nuclear power programs. China, though, focused solely on nuclear weapons, the destructive and not the productive. Mao Zedong was famously sanguine about nuclear weapons, calling them a paper tiger. In other words, capable of frightening, but not defeating an adversary. Mao did see the value in that fright, however, and his domestic chaos aside, moved pretty rapidly. But China's nuclear power plant program, the productive use of nuclear power, would not start until the 1970s. So, back in those Cold War adult days of the 1950s, the future of both peace and warfare was clearly nuclear. But was it? And what about those bigger questions? Is nuclear power safe or unsafe? Sustainable or unsustainable? Earth positive or Earth negative? Climate positive or climate negative? And ultimately, humanity positive or humanity negative? Or, in each case, somewhere in between, or even more likely, it depends. We'll pick up that thread in the next episode of Climate Changes Everything. Thanks for listening. Transcribed by https://otter.ai