"Onkalo" is a Finnish word for a cave or a hollow. It implies something big and deep: you don't know where an onkalo ends or whether it ends at all.

It's a fitting name for a huge grave made in Finland over the last 20 years. Onkalo, which lies 450m (1,500ft) deep inside the bedrock of Olkiluoto island in the southwest of the country, is the world's first permanent storage site for spent nuclear fuel.

The gently winding road to Olkiluoto is lined with pine trees stretching high up to the sky. Nature has come back to life here after five months of winter. The ground is covered by a carpet of small yellow flowers and the air is filled with birdsong. It's almost too beautiful a setting for a major industrial site.

Olkiluoto is home to three nuclear reactors, which stand side by side on the seaside. The third launched only this year, becoming the first new reactor to provide power in Western Europe in 15 years. These reactors, along with two others in Loviisa on the south coast, produce 33% of Finland's electricity.

A few minutes' drive away from the Olkiluoto reactors, construction of the world's first Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) for spent nuclear fuel is nearing completion.

In 1946, a dangerous radioactive apparatus in the Manhattan Project killed a scientist when his screwdriver slipped. To tell his story, Ben Platts-Mills pieced together what happened inside the room.

Less than a year after the Trinity atomic bomb test, a careless slip with a screwdriver cost Louis Slotin his life.

In 1946, Slotin, a nuclear physicist, was poised to leave his job at Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the Manhattan Project). When his successor came to visit his lab, he decided to demonstrate a potentially dangerous apparatus, called the "critical assembly". During the demo, he used his screwdriver to support a beryllium hemisphere over a plutonium core. It slipped, and the hemisphere dropped over the core, triggering a burst of radiation. He died nine days later.

Last week, BBC Future explored the consequences of this fatal accident in a specially illustrated story created by the artist and writer Ben Platts-Mills:

• The Blue Flash: How a careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project

In this gallery, Platts-Mills explains how he composed the illustrations, based on reconstructions created shortly after the accident, archive photographs, and his own mock-up of the apparatus built from household materials.

In the 1950s, with the USSR seemingly sprinting ahead in the space race, US scientists hatched a bizarre plan – nuking the surface of the Moon to frighten the Soviets.

One day in Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project, a brief, casual moment of carelessness killed one scientist and severely injured another. In this specially illustrated story, the artist and writer Ben Platts-Mills recounts what happened to these atomic bomb-makers – and why their accident holds powerful lessons for today.

"...In the search for a harmonious attitude towards life, it must never be forgotten that we ourselves are both actors and spectators in the drama of existence." – Niels Bohr, physicist //

On 21 May 1946, the physicist Louis Slotin was in his final weeks of working for the Project. He was an expert in bomb assembly and had played a central role, hand-building the "Trinity" device for the first test in July 1945, just a month before the Fat Man and Little Boy atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. But, like Oppenheimer, in the months that followed, he came to object to the continuation of the nuclear weapons programme and had decided to go back to civilian life.

Slotin was giving a tour to Alvin Graves, the scientist who was due to replace him. A little before 15:00, in the middle of one of the laboratory buildings, Graves spotted something he recognised: the "critical assembly", which was Slotin's specialism. Like an experimental nuclear bomb, it was used to safely test the reactivity of a plutonium core.

Graves commented that he had never seen the assembly demonstrated. Slotin offered to run through it for him.

From the other side of the room, Raemer Schreiber, Slotin's colleague, agreed. However, he encouraged him to proceed slowly and with caution: //

There are conflicting reports about what went wrong. An onlooker said Slotin's approach on this occasion was "improvised". Others said what he did was perfectly normal. In Schreiber's official report, he said Slotin acted "too rapidly and without adequate consideration", but that the others in the room "by their silence, agreed to the procedure".

"I turned because of some noise or sudden movement," wrote Schreiber. "I saw a blue flash... and felt a heat wave simultaneously." It seems the screwdriver had slipped and the plutonium had gone "prompt critical" as the reflector dropped down over it. It happened, as Schreiber wrote, in "a few tenths of a second." Slotin flipped the upper reflector to the floor, but his reaction was already too late. In the moments after the accident, the room was silent.

Then Slotin said quietly: "Well, that does it." //

Slotin died nine days later from organ failure. "A pure and simple case of death from radiation," as a colleague would later describe it. //

In fact his boss, Enrico Fermi, had explicitly warned Slotin only a few months earlier about his approach to critical assemblies. "You'll be dead within the year, if you keep doing that," he had said.

But it seems Fermi's was a lone voice in an institution that tended to downplay the dangers of its work. //

Relatively unscathed by the accident, Schreiber went on to help re-design the way procedures like the one that killed Slotin were conducted, with a greater emphasis on safety.

Standing at Slotin's shoulder, Graves received a high dosage of radiation and became critically ill. //

Floy Agnes Lee, the haematologist treating Graves after the accident described in a 2017 interview how severe his condition was. "His white blood cells were so low that they didn’t understand why he was still living," she said. "I don’t remember how long it took before his hair started growing back again."

Today Universal releases “Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan. The IMAX biopic stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb.

Nolan’s film is based on the biography American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. This review summarizes the book. Nolan’s film does not focus on the early career of this brilliant and eccentric academic. For that, we can rewatch “The Absent-Minded Professor” (1961). Cinema can remind us of the 1940s’ heroic battles as well as more cerebral endeavors to develop instruments for detection, navigation, and propulsion.

Oppenheimer’s life holds major questions about the use of power that continue to affect the world today. His team’s scientific advances warrant a much closer look. //

The design challenge for Oppenheimer’s team was enormous. They had to investigate the fission process into a near-instantaneous chain reaction based on meager experimental results. Oppenheimer’s keen ability to comprehend and extol these specialists is a testament to his diligence during those long hours. //

Our violent introduction to the atomic age taints humanity’s acceptance of it. The amazing phenomenon of atomic nuclei releasing energy by exchanging nucleons holds enormous promise.

Had fission been discovered a decade earlier or later, it could have benignly provided electrical power. But in an existential military conflict, leaders deemed such patience a luxury America couldn’t afford. So humans turned this fantastic tool into a cudgel, and continue to live under that shadow today.

The movie “Oppenheimer” opens Friday. I’ve read and seen a lot about the man and his contribution to the Manhattan Project. Was he a genius? Sure. Was he later conflicted about what he did to usher in the atomic age and end World War II? Apparently. Would atomic energy have eventually found its way into weaponry without him? Of course.

The movie will spark a renewed “debate” regarding the efficacy and ethics of dropping two atomic bombs to end the war in the Pacific. On one side of the scale, there are people who firmly believe that killing a massive number of civilians wasn’t necessary. (The fire-bombing of Tokyo likely killed more people than died at Hiroshima, but that is another story.)

Those people might be pacifists; they might just be contrarians who believe that America could have warned the Japanese of our “super weapon.” America did, in fact, drop leaflets warning civilians of Hiroshima to get out. It was done throughout the war, but both cities were warned.

Or there are people who contend that we could have “demonstrated” one of the bombs by blowing up an open field. There is no evidence that the Japanese were not going to surrender after a demonstration.

On the other side of the ledger are people like me, who believe that although Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible means to an end, those two events brought a close to a world war. I am also convinced that without those bombs, I never would have been born because my father never would have come home.

My dad joined the Marines in 1943. Thereafter, he participated in five assault landings—island hopping with the Marines—then ending with the 4th and 6th Marines Divisions. The last big battle he was in was the assault on Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa, which resulted in 3,000 US casualties. It was the only time he gave any thought to dying. When he was in combat before that, he never thought he wasn’t coming home. Others were fatalistic. My dad was an optimist. But there was one other time he thought about death and dying in combat. Fortunately, it was after Japan had surrendered.

He was part of the occupying force that landed in Tokyo Bay (Task Force 31). He and thousands of Marines, sailors, and soldiers were on ships that slowly worked their way into the bay. That’s when he saw them. Thousands of flags. White flags. Like the hills were blanketed in snow. After the Japanese surrendered, the Japanese home forces were instructed to place a white flag on gun emplacements on the hills around the bay, so occupying forces would know where they were. My dad described it

Chills ran up and down my spine. I thought: “Man, if we’d invaded here, we would have been cut to ribbons.”

Operation Downfall was the invasion code name. Operation Olympic was the code name of the invasion of Kyūshū. My dad would have been part of Olympic’s landing and invasion force. Estimates of casualties vary, but most estimates place casualties in the millions, and that was just for Allied forces. DoD estimates of KIA were conservatively placed at a half-million dead soldiers, sailors, and Marines.

When my dad stood on the deck of his ship and stared at the hills around the bay, he knew. He knew had he been on a landing craft in November 1945 for his 6th assault landing, he wasn’t going home. After three years of never being wounded, his odds of survival were slim.

Chris DeRose @chrisderose
·
Oppenheimer is sure to revive some debates about the end of WWII. Worth noting: Purple Heart medals awarded in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, War on Terror—all 370,000 since 1945—were manufactured for the anticipated invasion of Japan. We have 120,000 remaining.
10:34 AM · Jul 21, 2023

As the U.S. permanently occupied base in Antarctica at McMurdo Sound expanded over the years, delivering fuel for heating, desalination of water, running diesel generators for electric power, and fueling aircraft and land vehicles accounted for fully half the total cargo delivered to Antarctica by the late 1950s. In August 1960, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was authorised to install a nuclear power plant at McMurdo to provide heat, water, and electricity. A contract was let to the Martin Company, which built a version of their portable modular nuclear reactor which was designated PM-3A. This reactor was delivered to Antarctica in December 1961 and went critical for the first time in March 1962. It began to supply power to the McMurdo station in July 1962. When fully operational, the reactor supplied 1.8 megawatts of electrical power and 14,000 gallons (53 cubic metres) of fresh water a day.

Unfortunately, the reactor proved unreliable in operation, with availability of only 72% due to frequent malfunctions and shutdowns. In 1972, it was decided to shut down the reactor and replace it with diesel generators. Over its ten year lifetime, the reactor suffered 438 malfunctions. Cleaning up the site and shipping radioactive material back to the U.S. took until 1979. This was, to date, the only nuclear reactor ever operated in Antarctica, although radioisotope thermal generators 1 have been used to power scientific instruments in remote locations.

Here is a history of “Nuclear Power at McMurdo Station, Antarctica”. The reactor used was developed as part of the U.S. Army Nuclear Power Program. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9S1P54n1FA

Between 1954 and 1977, the U.S. Army Nuclear Power Program developed a series of small, modular nuclear reactors intended to provide electrical power and heating to remote installations which would otherwise require continuous logistical support to supply fuel. One of the project’s first pilot installations was the PM-1 reactor installed at the U.S. Air Force’s Sundance Air Force Station radar base in Wyoming. Located on a mountain peak at 1800 metres above sea level, 150 km from the nearest railhead, the ability to run two years between refuelling was seen as a great advantage.

The PM-1 reactor was a pressurised water design, producing 1.25 megawatts of electrical power, plus space heating for the installation. The reactor, designed and built by the Martin Company, was shipped in 16 packages, each transportable by a C-130 cargo plane or by road or rail and assembled on site. The reactor was fuelled by uranium enriched to 93% U-235 and would run two years on a fuel load. The reactor and power plant was designed to operate with a staff of two: reactor operator and maintenance technician.

The reactor went critical on site on 1962-02-25 and the plant remained in operation until 1968. It served as a pilot plant for the similar PM-3A reactor installed at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, as described in the post here on 2023-02-24, “Nuclear Power for Antarctica”. https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/nuclear-power-for-antarctica/2796

When uranium was discovered in 1789 by Martin Heinrich Klaproth, it’s likely the German chemist didn’t know how important the element would become to human life.

Used minimally in glazing and ceramics, uranium was originally mined as a byproduct of producing radium until the late 1930s. However, the discovery of nuclear fission, and the potential promise of nuclear power, changed everything.

Life cycle emissions are the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted throughout a product’s existence, including its production, use, and disposal.

To compare these emissions effectively, a standardized unit called metric tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) is used, which accounts for different types of greenhouse gases and their global warming potential.

Here is an overview of the 2021 life cycle emissions of medium-sized electric, hybrid and ICE vehicles in each stage of their life cycles, using tCO2e. These numbers consider a use phase of 16 years and a distance of 240,000 km. //

1. The production emissions for BEVs are approximately 40% higher than those of hybrid and ICE vehicles. According to a McKinsey & Company study, this high emission intensity can be attributed to the extraction and refining of raw materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel that are needed for batteries, as well as the energy-intensive manufacturing process of BEVs.
2. Electricity production is by far the most emission-intensive stage in a BEVs life cycle. Decarbonizing the electricity sector by implementing renewable and nuclear energy sources can significantly reduce these vehicles’ use phase emissions.

Many have forgotten that we are standing on the shoulders of legends such as Teller and Oppenheimer.

Recently the Oppenheimer grandson rallied in favor of nuclear:

"New Manhattan Project for Carbon-free Energy"

https://tucoschild.substack.com/p/oppenheimer-nuclear-energys-moment

Also note the energy density of nuclear vs other energy containers:

Li abttery : 0.5 MJ/kg

Diesel/gas : 46 MJ/kg

Nuclear, U-235, E=mc^2 : 79,390,000 MJ/kg

Jack Devanney
Jun 9
Teller like most of us was a bundle of contradictions. He was certainly aware that a major release from an NPP would provide ammunition to those who wanted to shut down weapon testing, which he thought was absolutely necessary to keep up with the Soviets.

Here's a mind-blowing fact. Teller, Leo Szilard, John vonNeumann and Eugene Wigner, a sizable proportion of the American WWII brain trust, all graduated from the same Budapest high school within a few years of each other. That must have been a hell of a high school.

No wonder Teller wanted to upgrade American education.

Rod Adams
Jun 9
Jack - Didn't some of the other members of the Manhattan project refer to the Hungarians as "The Martians", implying that their skills were out of this world?

Jack Devanney
Jun 9
The story is that the Manhattan Project greats were having lunch at the University of Chicago. Fermi is speculating about earth being visited by a master race, possibly from Mars. Szilard chimes in "They are already here, disguised as Hungarians". He had a point, but apparently the Martians used this one high school as a staging point.

In 1959, the AEC and the nuclear power establishment made a momentous policy change. They abandoned the concept of a tolerance dose rate below which harm is undetectable, and adopted the Linear No Threshold hypothesis, which claims that harm is proportional to cumulative dose, regardless of how rapidly or how slowly that dose is received. In other words, radiation harm is unrepairable. It just builds up. The tolerance dose rate model assumes our bodies can repair radiation damage. As a result, harm does not build up as long as we stay below the tolerance dose rate, which up to 1950 was 1 mSv/d.

What's really perplexing about this foundational transformation is that it apparently was done with no discussion. There seems to be no official decision from the AEC. No meeting minutes. No dueling memos. The official history of the AEC, Mazuzan and Walker, 511 tedious pages covering the period 1946-1962, makes no mention of the decision.1
The book makes no mention of LNT at all.

Why is it that greens want everyone to drive electric cars but don’t want people to have electricity? Or, it seems, the cars.

I noted last week in these pages how the people who want everyone to have an electric car in the garage have also been pursuing policies that, per the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s latest report, are likely to result in rolling blackouts this summer. //

Fossil and nuclear plants are being taken offline (bye, Indian Point!) while their replacement with “renewables” like wind and solar lags and often fails to produce power when it’s most needed.

Nothing has improved on that front. But the thing about electric cars is that they don’t just need electricity, they also need batteries to store it in. And electric motors.

That’s awkward because those cars and batteries require lots of copper and other metals, plus the extraction of “rare earth” minerals that come mostly from China and Africa, where they’re often produced by child or slave labor.

(We used to mine rare earths in America, but the enviros basically got that shut down. It’s easier for companies to get the stuff out of the ground in places where there aren’t sandal-wearing scolds everywhere.) //

These organizations are much quieter about the exploitation of minerals — and people — in places like China and Africa. //

But the bottom line is: If you endorse the spread of electric cars, you by extension endorse the extraction of the resources it takes to build and charge them. //

If you support a policy but oppose its prerequisites, then you’re either a fool or a fraud. Or maybe both.

A realistic and sensible electric-car policy would support reliable, safe, environmentally friendly power to charge them — which means plants fired by nuclear power and fracked gas. //

Honestly, when people start working to bring us cheap energy and metals from the Moon and the asteroids, environmentalists will probably complain about that too. And they’re entitled to complain if they want.

What they’re not entitled to is to be taken seriously.

The first of two nuclear reactors in Georgia is generating electricity and could be days away from achieving full-power operation

Prescription for the Planet -- Tom Blees

Robert Hargraves
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rx: nuclear power + boron fuel + plasma waste gasification

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 7, 2008

This is a book about three world-wide problems and three technologies to solve them. It's a book about technologies written by an Alaskan fisherman for understanding by the general public.

Nuclear power can solve global warming primarily by eliminating CO2 emissions from coal power plants, and secondarily by enabling new vehicle fuels. Nuclear power reactors in the US have not changed design in decades, and the public's perception seems to be acceptance of the mysterious domed plants, but with concern for the spent nuclear fuel waste.

There are newer, better nuclear technologies than these solid fueled, water-cooled reactors, which are generally unknown to the public. Tom Blees describes one: The Integral Fast Reactor consumes spent fuel reactor waste, generates power from the 95% of potential energy left in the waste, and does not involve any transport of weapons-proliferation-sensitive plutonium outside the plant. The IFR project, developed and tested for a decade at Argonne National Laboratories, was two years from fruition when it was killed in 1984 by President Bill Clinton, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, and Senator John Kerry.

The IFR would have solved the coal-burning energy crisis, consumed existing nuclear power plant waste, and not isolated inventories of plutonium (as does the French power program.) I nearly cried when I first heard of the death of the IFR, and Blees tells the story well. Since Blees wrote this book he has learned about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, which has these same advantages at lower cost.

Boron fuels were completely new to me. Cars, trucks, and airplanes require portable energy supplies, such as gasoline, diesel oil, or natural gas (the Pickens Plan). Electric batteries can provide this stored energy for cars. Liquid or compressed hydrogen is another (impractical) energy carrier. Blees points out that boron metal can be a portable fuel. Boron metal is combined with oxygen in a special engine to generate power. The resulting boron-oxide is later brought to a refueling station to be exchanged for a new supply of boron metal fuel. The refueling station uses electricity to convert the boron oxide back to boron metal fuel.

Boron fuel eliminates carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, and it eliminates dependence on foreign oil. (I think there is much more boron fuel R&D work to be done.)

Plasma arc gasification of waste is another technology new to me. Four states of matter are solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Plasma is so hot (4,000 - 17,000 C) that electrons are torn free, molecular bonds are broken, and elemental nucleii are freed. Toxic chemicals are destroyed. The cooled plasma becomes a glass-like slag. It takes a lot of electric power to operate a plasma arc torch, but in the case of municipal solid waste, the process can generate 28x more natural gas energy than electric energy consumed.

There are solutions for our environmental and energy problems! Blees' Prescription for the Planet is nuclear power + boron fuel + plasma waste gasification.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1419655825/R2X21JGKLSMBBY

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1419655825/

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is a fast reactor system developed at Argonne National Laboratory in the decade 1984 to 1994. The IFR project developed the technology for a complete system; the reactor, the entire fuel cycle and the waste management technologies were all included in the development program. The reactor concept had important features and characteristics that were completely new and fuel cycle and waste management technologies that were entirely new developments.

An end to greenhouse gas emissions, a global framework to control nuclear proliferation, a preemptive remedy to looming water wars, and unlimited energy worldwide are just a few of the concrete solutions offered up in Tom Blees's brilliant and timely Prescription for the Planet. Everyone is worried about global warming, energy wars, resource depletion, and air pollution. But nobody has yet come up with a real plan to resolve these problems that can actually work-until now. Prescription for the Planet proposes a workable blueprint to virtually eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of this century and solve a host of other seemingly intractable global problems.

Jag Levak
Smack-Fu Master, in training
1m
20
Yesterday at 8:14 PM
#104
violaceous said:
It's a bad idea due to one and only one reason:
Solid/liquid radioactive waste pollution stream
We have no where to put that crap!

Do you think this is an issue which is merely not presently solved, or one which cannot be solved?
Do you reject all options that have wastes?
Do you oppose the development of kinds of nuclear which could consume the spent fuel we already have?
If waste is contained, is it really pollution?
If there are fission products we can find uses for, would those still count as waste?

We did launch nuclear power before we had a real plan for what to do with the spent fuel, but because we didn't wait we also got some benefits, like:
nearly 2 million people avoided choking deaths, millions more avoided serious illness, many hundreds of billions in health care costs were avoided; around 60 billion tons of CO2 were displaced, thousands of tons of mercury and other heavy metal poisons were not released; and our power plants gave us the means to destroy the fuel from 20,000 nuclear warheads. And in exchange for all those benefits, we now have some spent fuel which has never killed anyone. Do you feel that was a bad trade? //

JohnDeL
Ars Praefectus
7y
4,952
Yesterday at 4:40 PM
#93
ranthog said:
Fusion plants may be practical for several reasons.

They can help displace coal and natural gas faster than just building wind and solar.

Let's check that, shall we?

Right now, the US has approximately 360 coal-fired plants with a total nominal capacity of 260 GW. And in this year alone, there will be about 27 GW of solar or wind power added to the US grid. So, even if the pace of solar and wind power plant building doesn't increase (and there is every reason to think that it will), renewables will be able to completely replace coal in under a decade.

Any bets on fusion being ready for commercial-style plants in a decade?

There is roughly three times as much power produced from natural gas-fired plants in the US, so it would take another three decades at the current rate of adoption for solar and wind to replace natural gas.

Will fusion be ready in four decades? Maybe?

Should we keep researching into fusion power? Heck, yeah. If nothing else, fusion is the best way to move around the solar system. But count on it as an alternative to solar and wind? Heck, no. Not unless there are a lot of advances in a very short time - but I wouldn't bet on that happening.

Unimportant Smack-Fu Master, in training
3y
96
Admiral Rickover's 1953 paper reactors memo:

http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf

Still a classic.

Excerpt:

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:

It is simple.
It is small.
It is cheap.
It is light.
It can be built very quickly.
It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”)
Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.
The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics:

It is being built now.
It is behind schedule.
It is requiring an immense amount of development an apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem.
It is very expensive.
It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems.
It is large.
It is heavy.
It is complicated.
Click to expand...
That said, some PWR and BWR modular designs are very far along and should be started soon. //

panton41 Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
13y
8,509
Subscriptor
One thing I keep in mind is that there's a few companies in the United States that install 3-4 reactors a year and generally on-time and under budget - General Dynamics Electric Boat Company, Huntington Ingalls Industries and Newport News Shipbuilding.