Tag: nuclear power

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Review

“The Curve of Binding Energy”

John McPhee

Truly astonishing that it took me this long to read this book; it’s thoroughly right up my alley.1 To start with, it’s McPhee, and he’s my favorite nonfiction author. And after that, it’s about nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and proliferation… with a solid digression into nuclear rocketry, which has long been an interest of mine.2 Nothing in the rocketry section was new to me—I’ve read up enough on that to the point that everything was familiar, although the personal story of Taylor, the interviewee, selling Wernher von Braun on the concept wasn’t something I recalled previously.

What was new, and awe-inspiring in a sort of dry-mouthed terror kind of way, was the nuclear weaponry aspect. This is a book about Theodore B. Taylor, one of the world’s greatest experts in the design of atomic weapons. Over the course of the book he does things like, sitting in front of McPhee during an interview, sketch out plans for a low-yield atom bomb that could be built using only commercially-available equipment and products, with the sole exception of the enriched uranium. He does so while carefully using only publicly-available information. And, in the midst of doing it, he describes each likely point in the commercial reactor fuel processing cycle that said fissile materials could be stolen, and exactly what you would need to do to process that form of the material into what you’d need to build a bomb. This book is, in essence, just a little bit short of being an instruction guide on How To Build A Nuke In Your Garage.

Pair that with a series of explorations of nuclear facilities, in-depth review of the various security failings therein, and a memorable anecdote about the time a fourteen-year-old boy came up with credible designs for a hydrogen bomb, and the fact that the we still, nearly 50 years after this book came out, have yet to see a terrorist organization—or just a really motivated whack-job—build their own bomb is, as I said, awe-inspiring in a dry-mouthed terror kind of way. It isn’t nearly as hard as it should be.

That’s really the key point of this whole book, and the thing that kept standing out to me. I had moments of fun dorkiness—laughing aloud about midway through when Taylor, distracted by a thought, started describing his plan to build what we’d today call a hyperloop network. A certain somebody isn’t nearly as inventive as he’d like to pretend he is; this guy was talking about it when you were still in diapers!3

All in all, this book was an absolute delight to read. I’m likely to reread it again in the next month, and only partially because I wound up finishing it with a bit too much lead-time before the actual book club meeting. I just really enjoyed it, and would like to take a second crack at it, this time without the commonplace book beside me to jot down notes. I absolutely recommend the read; check it out.4

  1. It says good things about my devotion to the whole “don’t buy yourself new books until you finish reading all the ones you’ve already bought” plan that I had to sell my book club on reading it so I could sneak it through the “buying books for book club doesn’t count” exception. ↩
  2. I’m a little tempted to publish the essay I wrote in high school about nuclear rocketry, since I dug it up to look at again while reading this, but probably for the best that I don’t. I’m not interested in knowing how bad my writing skills were that long ago. Or, worse, finding out that they’ve decayed. ↩
  3. Admittedly, Not Tony Stark’s approach gets some points for doing tunneling the boring way (ba-dum-tss) instead of through Taylor’s proposed plan of nuclear shaped charges.
    That said, Taylor’s expertise, and the paragraph of explaining how well one actually can shape a nuclear explosion when they’re Theodore Taylor, makes it a more credible plan than when I talk about that kind of concept. ↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Plutopia”

Kate Brown

I’ve always had an interest in the technological arms race of the Cold War, which fits right alongside my interest in infrastructure. And, as with every other aspect of technological arms race, the nuclear technology race was ridiculous; where it differs is in the degree. Cyborg cat to spy on the other side? Ridiculous. Space race? Very cool, some actually good civilian uses, conceptually ridiculous if you didn’t grow up knowing it’s possible to put stuff in orbit.

Deliberately creating tons upon tons of one of the most toxic substances known to mankind, and in the process creating other incredibly toxic substances in amounts that render massive areas uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years? That’s not just ridiculous, that is obscene.

Plutopia focuses on that—the two cities, Richland, Washington, and Ozersk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, that were built around the production of plutonium. And boy howdy, does nobody look good in this story; the similarities in mistakes made would be comic, if it wasn’t a tragedy that’s going to be screwing over our great^100-grandchildren. In addition to just about everyone involved from the time the cities were founded onward.

Two anecdotes stand out in my mind. First, in what reminds me of the Uber business model, a fun fact: the third-worst radiological disaster in human history officially listed zero casualties from the cleanup. Pause for effect. Because the USSR only tracked the health outcomes of paid employees working on the cleanup, which effectively meant they were only worrying about the people managing the people doing the cleanup work. Hey, careful handing out those orders, pal, you don’t want to get any of the radioactive waste on yourself!1

Second one, which immediately feels like fodder for HBO to do a second season of Chernobyl:

A week after the explosion, radiologists followed the cloud to the downwind villages, where they found people living normally, children playing barefoot. They measured the ground, farm tools, animals, and people. The levels of radioactivity were astonishingly high. S. F. Osotin, a monitor, remembered that a colleague went up to the children and held up his Geiger counter. He said, “I can tell with this instrument exactly how much porridge you had for breakfast.” The children happily stuck out their bellies, which ticked at forty to fifty microroentgens a second. The technicians stepped back, shocked. The kids had become radioactive sources.

Overall, this book fascinated me. And horrified me! But I grew up downstream of Hanford, and this is apparently just the world we live in now, so what else can you do? Better to be informed, I suppose. Check it out.2

  1. Don’t get all patriotic about this, my fellow Americans—the Hanford site did the same thing in their statistics, as well as a repeated trend of calling anything other than “died of their skin melting off” or “died of a thyroid full of radiation” a death not caused by radiation. Grew up drinking from the aquifer that the high level waste pond was seeping into, got cancer of the everything at 20? Unrelated, we assure you. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

A Short History of Nuclear Folly

So, ever since I heard about this book, I’ve wanted to read it. I’m a sucker for all this Cold War history stuff, okay? This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the books I’ve read on the subject.1
Anyhow, I’ve reached a point where very little of what I read in this book was actually new to me. Which is weird, because I hardly feel like an expert on the subject, but apparently I’m getting close. How strange.
That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it, or that I didn’t get anything new – quite the contrary, there were a couple really interesting bits in there that I found fascinating, and some things that I’d either never heard of or never explored in depth.
For example, while I knew about Project Plowshare, I hadn’t looked into some of the frankly ridiculous things they were trying to do.

Plowshare kicked off with the relatively small “Gnome” test near Carlsbad, New Mexico, on December 10, 1961. It was aimed, among other things, at investigating whether a nuclear explosion could be harnessed to produce energy. But the detonation destroyed the machinery that was supposed to convert the blast into power.

Hold up. They were trying to use a nuclear bomb as a generator? Had… had nobody told them about nuclear reactors? We already had those, folks.
But no, it’s more ridiculous than that, because if you dig into the full reports from the Gnome and Sedan tests, you find this:

GNOME was developed with the idea that a nuclear detonation in a salt deposit would create a large volume of hot melted salt from which heat might be extracted. The possibilities to be investigated for the production of power were the tapping of the steam created by the detonation itself and the generation of high-density, high-pressure steam by the circulation of some heat-absorbing fluid, like water, over the heated salt.
Defense Nuclear Agency, Projects Gnome and Sedan: The Plowshare Program, (Washington D.C.: Defense Nuclear Agency, 1983): 38.

tl;dr: they were going to build a geothermal power plant somewhere with no geothermal activity, and then set off a nuke to create the underground heat.
Gotta love the cold war. Other idiotic things that Plowshare wanted to try, but fortunately, was stopped from doing:

using nuclear bombs to melt the ice from polar ports, to re-channel rivers or to desalinate salt water from the ocean.

That said, the Soviets did even dumber stuff, including my single favorite sentence from the whole book:

Between 1965 and 1989, [the Soviets] carried out 116 civilian explosions . . . five were used to combat fires at oil fields.

“Hey boss, we’ve got a bit of a fire going over here.”
“Alright, we’re just gonna nuke it.”
“Seems reasonable.”

I’m going to stop here, because I can’t give away all of the fun parts of the book.2 I quite enjoyed it, so I’m quite happy to recommend it. Have a read.

  1. Fun story: Chase is trying to convince me to write a book about this stuff, because he’s a history nerd and thinks other people should be too. ↩
  2. And the long-winded blog post on the subject that I might wind up writing in the future, if Chase gets his way. ↩