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Enrico Fermi and Fission.html

Nuclear fission is the process of messing with unstable atoms by breaking them up using their own internal insistence on balancing out  their electrons, protons and neutrons and, at the same time, forcing those atoms around them to do the same thing. In the process of kicking out the troublesome sub atomic particles that were causing them such problems, they generate a lot of energy, that near magical thing that makes our lives so much better.

What is most surprising of nuclear fission as a way of generating energy is how quickly it all happened. Consider the most basic sources of energy that were used for centuries. Fire and wind and steam combined with simple engines and then more complex machines. While each innovation was a breakthrough in it’s own right, and in it’s own time, they were all centuries in the making. It may be that steam was the engine of the industrial revolution and ushered in a time of rapid technological innovation and growth, but it had been in the works in one form or another for a very very long time. And the fuels have been largely the same. Carbon based materials we burn starting with wood and moving on to fossil fuels. It may be that gasoline and the internal combustion engines that burn them are relatively new, but coal and the steam engine, it’s not too distant cousin, function under the same principles. Not so with nuclear power. It’s something altogether different. Nothing is burned. There are no carbon based fuels. There was no long trajectory from someone discovering fire, to someone digging more efficient coal. It wasn’t about technologists tinkering with one another’s inventions to make a better version of it and then, in turn, passing the ideas off to another who, maybe a hundred years or more later, does something that looks new but it really an improvement. It may be marginal, or it may be significant, but it’s always short of “new”.

Johannes Moreelse's Democritus

Nuclear power was new. And it started out, not in the hands of technologists and engineers, but in the hands of scientists. The Greek philosopher Democritus, with the help of his teacher, Leucippus, suggested tha the world was made of tiny particles that were largely all the same but arranged differently. He said these were ‘indivisible” or “uncuttable) - in Greek, “atomos.” That was 2500 years ago and no one much paid attention to that idea until 1800 when John Dalton turned atomic theory into a science. It took a hundred years after that to find the electron and the nucleaus. In February 1932, James Chadwick published a paper titled “The Possible Existence of a Neutron,” and then, barely 13 years later, two bombs, known as Little Boy and Fat Man, were dropped on Japan killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Enrico Fermi

The man who moved this source of energy along so quickly was Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist who had both the science, and the willingness to get his hands literally dirty with graphite, necessary to make develop fission into a source of energy. Fermi built the first nuclear reactor in downtown Chicago. Even before it was used to demonstrate the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction in 1942, people thought it was a bad idea to keep up that kind of work in the basement of a building in the middle of one of the biggest cities in America, so they spread out the world and Fermi found himself at the Trinity site only 3 years later watching the terrible destructive force of his new ideas.

We take a trip to Chicago and Fermi's world here: https://mediaspace.minnstate.edu/media/Enrico+Fermi+Nuclear+Fission+and+the+Chicago+Pile/0_umyhplii