A brief pause in political doomscreaming to remember where we came from and how beautiful and powerful the science of stories and the story of science can be
I remember seeing that in Scientific American and being absolutely enchanted by the idea of a natural fission reactor. What fascinates me the most is how negative feedback loops kept the reactor running within fairly narrow parameters, almost as if there were an intentional operator at the controls. A few years later I fell down the rabbit hole wondering if that could have happened elsewhere and -when as well. Couldn’t find any definitive answer because the tendency is to dig the uranium out of the ground and make either reactors or bombs out of it as fast as possible, and damn the measurements.
One thing that reactor can teach us is how to contain fissionable material, whether fresh or depleted from use, for long periods of time. That reactor ran for thousands of years without a meltdown. And countries other than the US have been successful in storing radioactive waste safely. For us it’s a political problem, not a technical one.
“This being the Cold War, people were pretty uptight about accounting for and tracking all fissionable isotopes in or out of any given civilian facility because, you know, big boom bad,”
And yet Hanford has admitted they can’t account for more than 1 metric ton of plutonium (more than enough to make 50 Hiroshima-size bombs). They don’t think it’s actually gone walkies, just that their process is imprecise. Then again, they sure left a lot of high radiation garbage lying around. This is a bit of a concern for me since I live in Portland (Oregon, not the one near you) just down the Columbia River from the creeping crap that’s leaking from Hanford.
All of which makes me wonder what an archeologist of some intelligent species evolved after we’ve been gone for 10 million years would make of the isotope ratios in the ground around Chernobyl.
There's a Bell Labs film 📽️ about nuclear fission with a neutron moderation demo using a field of mousetraps loaded with two ping pong balls each.
Unmoderated, the traps throw the balls outside the field, and the reaction fizzles. Moderated but with one ball each, the reaction goes slowly and stops when one ball lands between mousetraps. Moderated and with two balls, the whole field goes off very quickly.
oh my god that's GORGEOUS, Cat
thank you
I remember seeing that in Scientific American and being absolutely enchanted by the idea of a natural fission reactor. What fascinates me the most is how negative feedback loops kept the reactor running within fairly narrow parameters, almost as if there were an intentional operator at the controls. A few years later I fell down the rabbit hole wondering if that could have happened elsewhere and -when as well. Couldn’t find any definitive answer because the tendency is to dig the uranium out of the ground and make either reactors or bombs out of it as fast as possible, and damn the measurements.
One thing that reactor can teach us is how to contain fissionable material, whether fresh or depleted from use, for long periods of time. That reactor ran for thousands of years without a meltdown. And countries other than the US have been successful in storing radioactive waste safely. For us it’s a political problem, not a technical one.
“This being the Cold War, people were pretty uptight about accounting for and tracking all fissionable isotopes in or out of any given civilian facility because, you know, big boom bad,”
And yet Hanford has admitted they can’t account for more than 1 metric ton of plutonium (more than enough to make 50 Hiroshima-size bombs). They don’t think it’s actually gone walkies, just that their process is imprecise. Then again, they sure left a lot of high radiation garbage lying around. This is a bit of a concern for me since I live in Portland (Oregon, not the one near you) just down the Columbia River from the creeping crap that’s leaking from Hanford.
All of which makes me wonder what an archeologist of some intelligent species evolved after we’ve been gone for 10 million years would make of the isotope ratios in the ground around Chernobyl.
There's a Bell Labs film 📽️ about nuclear fission with a neutron moderation demo using a field of mousetraps loaded with two ping pong balls each.
Unmoderated, the traps throw the balls outside the field, and the reaction fizzles. Moderated but with one ball each, the reaction goes slowly and stops when one ball lands between mousetraps. Moderated and with two balls, the whole field goes off very quickly.
I read about it in _Scientific American_ in 1972 or 73. Never heard much about it since then, until now.