I N T R O D U C T I O N PEACE AND WAR WEALTH AND POVERTY PROGRESS AND SETBACKS HISTORY HAS BROUGHT HUGE SWINGS IN THE HUMAN CONDITION AND WITH EVERY CHOICE PEOPLE MAKE THERE IS THE POTENTIAL TO MOVE FORWARD OR STEP BACKWARD AT THE CORE OF THIS CONTINUAL STRUGGLE HAS BEEN THE QUEST FOR ENERGY ENERGY GAVE HUMANS POWER AND MOTIVATED THEM TO DO GREAT THINGS WITH BOTH POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EFFECTS WITHOUT ENERGY PEOPLE WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO DRIVE CARS OPERATE COMPUTERS OR POWER FACTORIES WARS ARE FOUGHT TRYING TO DOMINATE SOURCES OF ENERGY FORTUNES ARE MADE AND LOST DEPENDING ON HOW THAT ENERGY IS MANAGED THE LAWS OF PHYSICS STATE THAT ENERGY CANNOT BE CREATED OR DESTROYED THAT IS TRUE BUT ENERGY CAN BE HARNESSED AND DIRECTED IT CAN BE WASTED OR IT CAN BE COAXED INTO EFFICIENCY CIVILIZATIONS AND TECHNOLOGIES HAVE LEAPED FORWARD AND SOMETIMES BACKWARD AS HUMANS HAVE TAPPED INTO EARTH’S SOURCES OF ENERGY Nuclear power’s explosive nature has made it controversial 4
Collectively the energy stored in side trillions of atoms and released through trillions of collisions has the ability to power cities send spacecraft billions of miles from Earth and even to heal cancer Yet it can also kill the people who use it If something goes wrong the consequences can be dead ly Nuclear energy literally exploded onto the world stage in 1945 when the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan to effectively end World War II The aggressive nature of nuclear power would forever influence its future Some people wanted to use it for electricity generation transporta tion and medicine Others saw it as a force of destruction or even evil that was best left alone Such controversy haunts nuclear power today 5
CHAPTER ONE TWO BIG BANGS EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN That saying is especially true when it comes to nuclear energy Of all the types of energy that people use today nuclear is both the oldest and the newest The first nuclear reactions likely happened billions of years ago when many scientists think the universe was created in a hot dense state of expansion called the Big Bang But it’s been less than a century since the second big bang when people learned how to generate nuclear energy on their own According to the Big Bang theory the universe burst into particles of energy from a single point in space 6
In the 1800s scientists were studying the idea that all matter consisted of tiny particles called atoms They started to research these atoms how they combined with other atoms and how they moved Some atoms it turned out were more energetic than others Marie Curie was a French-Polish chemist and physicist who noticed that when atoms of elements such as uranium and thorium decayed they changed into other elements and gave off tiny particles of energy in a process called radiation In Britain nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford speculated that if that energy could be harnessed Some fool in a laboratory might blow up the universe unawares Scientists made great strides toward understanding nuclear energy during the 1920s and 1930s They worked to figure out how to split atoms on purpose This is called fission The nucleus or center of an atom contains protons and neutrons In a fission reaction with a radioactive substance such as uranium extra neutrons bombard the nuclei of its atoms The nuclei become too heavy and unstable and they break apart When these atoms split it frees up the neutrons that were bound inside the nuclei These neutrons then collide with the surrounding uranium atoms in a chain reaction This releases a tremendous amount of energy in the form of heat One atom’s splitting doesn’t provide much energy but many splitting at the same time do Nuclear energy actually comes from billions of fission reactions that happen within a fraction of a second The number of fissions that occur during the explosion of a nuclear bomb numbers more than all the grains of sand in the world Marie Curie’s discoveries made her a pioneer for women in science 7
