https://theconversation.com/atomic-age-began-75-years-ago-with-the-first-controlled-nuclear-chain-reaction-87154
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Fortunately, the Nazi’s couldn’t figure out an A-bomb before Hitler nuked himself.
There’s a small monument on a sidewalk near the center of the campus of the University of Chicago marking the spot where this experiment took place (or actually, took place directly below it, in an underground laboratory)
Once the fusion process is safely harnessed, we’ll have clean nuclear energy. Fusion is the energy of the future IMO.
“The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes is a tremendous book. The period from the early 1920s to the mid 40s was perhaps the most incredible period in human scientific endeavor starting with the Bohr model of the atom and continuing to the use of nuclear weapons.
Another good book is “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin .
Hard to believe they made it from discovery to deployment in less than 3 years
Hard to believe my Grandpa worked at Hanford in support of it in those 3 years, and Dad began working in the Hanford reactors in 1955.
Hard to believe I was in Nuke Weapons Tech school 46 years ago.
Third generation nuclear biz in 1971?
Likely not many of us.
Approaching half a century myself, striking how nuclear power (and practically anything in history) really isn’t that old. Mankind has achieved a LOT in a very short time.
If I remember correctly, Disney had a program every Sunday night. They would introduce us to science. A man had 1000 spring type mouse traps in an enclosed room each with 2 ping pong balls resting on them. The man tossed a ping pong ball into the room and Pop! two ping balls were launched, then four, and a second later, the room exploded with ping pong balls. Hence, a simulated nuclear explosion.
The drive of Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi to produce a sustained nuclear fission reaction was more than just to produce electricity after the war.
Kept secret at the time was the fact that already in 1941, Art Wahl, a graduate student of Glenn Seaborg, had isolated plutonium from bombarded uranium, and they, along with others at the University of California had discovered that plutonium-239 was significantly more fissionable than uranium-235. Thus began the Manhattan Project, with Fermi and Wahl going to Los Alamos, Seaborg going to the Met Lab in Chicago, and others going to Hanford, WA, in the enormous Manhattan Project to build a plutonium bomb. (Oak Ridge was primarily responsible for working to enrich U-235 for a uranium bomb.)
Less than three years after the first controlled nuclear chain reaction under the University of Chicago football stadium, a plutonium bomb was tested near Alamagordo, NM, on July 16, 1945. Less than a month later, a uranium bomb had exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, another plutonium bomb had exploded over Nagasaki, and Japan had surrendered.
A little known fact about CP-1:
Brian Williams was standing right behind Enrico Fermi’s right shoulder double-checking Fermi’s slide rule calculations on his HP=35 hand calculator. He later confirmed that it was his approval that allowed Fermi to pull the rod out the last few millimeters to attain criticality.
#ThanksBrian
Thanks for posting. Great short history.