The idea of nuclear power began in the s , when physicist Enrico Fermi first showed that neutrons could split atoms. Fermi led a team that in achieved the first nuclear chain reaction, under a stadium at the University of Chicago. This was followed by a series of milestones in the s: the first electricity produced from atomic energy at Idaho's Experimental Breeder Reactor I in ; the first nuclear power plant in the city of Obninsk in the former Soviet Union in ; and the first commercial nuclear power plant in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in Take our quizzes about nuclear power and see how much you've learned: for Part I, go here ; for Part II, go here.
Nuclear power isn't considered renewable energy , given its dependence on a mined, finite resource, but because operating reactors do not emit any of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming , proponents say it should be considered a climate change solution.
National Geographic emerging explorer Leslie Dewan, for example, wants to resurrect the molten salt reactor , which uses liquid uranium dissolved in molten salt as fuel, arguing it could be safer and less costly than reactors in use today.
Others are working on small modular reactors that could be portable and easier to build. Innovations like those are aimed at saving an industry in crisis as current nuclear plants continue to age and new ones fail to compete on price with natural gas and renewable sources such as wind and solar. The holy grail for the future of nuclear power involves nuclear fusion, which generates energy when two light nuclei smash together to form a single, heavier nucleus.
Fusion could deliver more energy more safely and with far less harmful radioactive waste than fission, but just a small number of people— including a year-old from Arkansas —have managed to build working nuclear fusion reactors. When arguing against nuclear power, opponents point to the problems of long-lived nuclear waste and the specter of rare but devastating nuclear accidents such as those at Chernobyl in and Fukushima Daiichi in The deadly Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine happened when flawed reactor design and human error caused a power surge and explosion at one of the reactors.
Large amounts of radioactivity were released into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes. Today, the area surrounding the plant—known as the Exclusion Zone—is open to tourists but inhabited only by the various wildlife species, such as gray wolves , that have since taken over. In the case of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi, the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami caused the plant's catastrophic failures. Several years on, the surrounding towns struggle to recover, evacuees remain afraid to return , and public mistrust has dogged the recovery effort, despite government assurances that most areas are safe.
Other accidents, such as the partial meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island in , linger as terrifying examples of nuclear power's radioactive risks.
The Fukushima disaster in particular raised questions about safety of power plants in seismic zones, such as Armenia's Metsamor power station.
October — The Windscale plutonium production reactor catches fire spreading approximately 20, curies of radioactive iodine across Great Britain and northern Europe.
December — Shippingport, Pennsylvania is the site of the first full-scale nuclear power plant in the U. The plant was able to generate 60 megawatts of electricity after reaching full power 21 days after going on-line. January — The SL-1 reactor, located at Idaho Falls, goes out of control causing a rupture of the building.
The damaged core was reported to have emitted radiation at a rate of more than rems per hour. The company contended that its research indicated that nuclear power would generate energy less expensively than fossil fuels.
Although a runaway reaction was prevented, the reactor was permanently disabled. Failing to achieve that result, Saudi Arabia decided days later to cut oil production by 25 percent and joined with other oil-producing nations in an embargo of oil shipments to the United States.
An "Energy Crisis" gripped the U. The two new bodies were charged with the task of regulating the nuclear industry. A series of events led to the worst nuclear accident in U. The Reagan administration went on to introduce a policy calling for the need for a high-level radioactive waste storage facility. The act established a timetable for designating permanent underground facilities for the storage of nuclear waste.
April — The Atomic Industrial Forum, a pro-nuclear power group, publishes a statement that the accident at Three Mile Island did not fundamentally change its otherwise unblemished safety record. In its bulletin, the AIF contended that, "No member of the public has been injured or killed from a reactor accident at a commercial nuclear power plant. In , he theorizes the existence of a neutral particle in the nucleus called a neutron, though there is no evidence that neutrons exist yet.
Soon enough, Hahn and Strassman shoot them at uranium atoms and see some strange behavior which Lise Meitner and her nephew Frisch identify as the splitting of the atom, releasing much energy.
They name it fission, after binary fission in biology. Szilard recognizes fission as a potential way to form a chain reaction which he had been considering for a long time.
He and Fermi do some neutron multiplication studies and see that it is indeed possible. They go home, knowing that the world is about to change forever. Szilard, Wigner, and Teller write a letter to President Roosevelt, warning of nuclear weapons, and have Einstein sign it and send it he was more famous.
Roosevelt authorizes a small study into uranium. In , Fermi successfully created the first man-made nuclear chain reaction in a squash court under the stadium at the University of Chicago. The Manhattan project kicked into full gear. Two types of bombs were pursued simultaneously, one made with enriched uranium, and the other made with plutonium. Giant secret cities were built very quickly. The one in Oak Ridge, TN had a reactor that created the first gram-quantities of plutonium for study, but its main task was to enrich uranium.
The one in Hanford, WA is the site of plutonium production reactors the first high-power nuclear reactors and plutonium extraction chemistry plants.
Another, in Los Alamos, NM is the site where the technology that turns weapons materials into weapons is developed. Both paths to the bomb are successful. The more uncertain design, the plutonium implosion device like Fat Man is successfully tested at the Trinity site in New Mexico in July, The cities are devastated, with up to , people dead.
Japan surrenders unconditionally 6 days later, on August 15th, The Americans were pursuing three enrichment processes in parallel: Professor Lawrence was studying electromagnetic separation at Berkeley University of California , E.
Murphree of Standard Oil was studying the centrifuge method developed by Professor Beams, and Professor Urey was coordinating the gaseous diffusion work at Columbia University.
Responsibility for building a reactor to produce fissile plutonium was given to Arthur Compton at the University of Chicago. The British were only examining gaseous diffusion. In June the US Army took over process development, engineering design, procurement of materials and site selection for pilot plants for four methods of making fissionable material because none of the four had been shown to be clearly superior at that point as well as the production of heavy water.
With this change, information flow to Britain dried up. This was a major setback to the British and the Canadians who had been collaborating on heavy water production and on several aspects of the research program.
Thereafter, Churchill sought information on the cost of building a diffusion plant, a heavy water plant and an atomic reactor in Britain. After many months of negotiations an agreement was finally signed by Mr Churchill and President Roosevelt in Quebec in August , according to which the British handed over all of their reports to the Americans and in return received copies of General Groves' progress reports to the President.
Construction of production plants for electromagnetic separation in calutrons and gaseous diffusion was well under way. An experimental graphite pile constructed by Fermi had operated at the University of Chicago in December — the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.
A full-scale production reactor for plutonium was being constructed at Argonne, with further ones at Oak Ridge and then Hanford, plus a reprocessing plant to extract the plutonium. Four plants for heavy water production were being built, one in Canada and three in the USA. The outcome of the huge effort, with assistance from the British teams, was that sufficient Pu and highly enriched U from calutrons and diffusion at Oak Ridge was produced by mid The uranium mostly originated from the Belgian Congo.
The first atomic device tested successfully at Alamagordo in New Mexico on 16 July It used plutonium made in a nuclear pile. The teams did not consider that it was necessary to test a simpler U device. The first atomic bomb, which contained U, was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August The second bomb, containing Pu, was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August. On 10 August the Japanese Government surrendered.
Initially Stalin was not enthusiastic about diverting resources to develop an atomic bomb, until intelligence reports suggested that such research was under way in Germany, Britain and the USA.
Consultations with Academicians Ioffe, Kapitsa, Khlopin and Vernadsky convinced him that a bomb could be developed relatively quickly and he initiated a modest research program in Igor Kurchatov, then relatively young and unknown, was chosen to head it and in he became Director of Laboratory No.
Overall responsibility for the bomb program rested with Security Chief Lavrenti Beria and its administration was undertaken by the First Main Directorate later called the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Research had three main aims: to achieve a controlled chain reaction; to investigate methods of isotope separation; and to look at designs for both enriched uranium and plutonium bombs.
Attempts were made to initiate a chain reaction using two different types of atomic pile: one with graphite as a moderator and the other with heavy water. Three possible methods of isotope separation were studied: counter-current thermal diffusion, gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in May , German scientists were "recruited" to the bomb program to work in particular on isotope separation to produce enriched uranium.
This included research into gas centrifuge technology in addition to the three other enrichment technologies. The test of the first US atomic bomb in July had little impact on the Soviet effort, but by this time, Kurchatov was making good progress towards both a uranium and a plutonium bomb. He had begun to design an industrial scale reactor for the production of plutonium, while those scientists working on uranium isotope separation were making advances with the gaseous diffusion method.
It was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following month which gave the program a high profile and construction began in November of a new city in the Urals which would house the first plutonium production reactors -- Chelyabinsk Later known as Chelyabinsk or the Mayak production association. This was the first of ten secret nuclear cities to be built in the Soviet Union. The first of five reactors at Chelyabinsk came on line in This town also housed a processing plant for extracting plutonium from irradiated uranium.
As for uranium enrichment technology, it was decided in late to begin construction of the first gaseous diffusion plant at Verkh-Neyvinsk later the closed city of Sverdlovsk , some 50 kilometres from Yekaterinburg formerly Sverdlovsk in the Urals. Support was provided by a group of German scientists working at the Sukhumi Physical Technical Institute. In April design work on the bomb was shifted to Design Bureau — a new centre at Sarova some kilometres from Moscow subsequently the closed city of Arzamas More specialists were brought in to the program including metallurgist Yefim Slavsky who was given the immediate task of producing the very pure graphite Kurchatov needed for his plutonium production pile constructed at Laboratory No.
The pile was operated for the first time in December Support was also given by Laboratory No. Work at Arzamas was influenced by foreign intelligence gathering and the first device was based closely on the Nagasaki bomb a plutonium device. In August a test site was established near Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan and was ready for the detonation two years later of the first bomb, RSD Even before this was tested in August , another group of scientists led by Igor Tamm and including Andrei Sakharov had begun work on a hydrogen bomb.
By the end of World War II, the project predicted and described in detail only five and a half years before in the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum had been brought to partial fruition, and attention could turn to the peaceful and directly beneficial application of nuclear energy. Post-war, weapons development continued on both sides of the "iron curtain", but a new focus was on harnessing the great atomic power, now dramatically if tragically demonstrated, for making steam and electricity. In the course of developing nuclear weapons the Soviet Union and the West had acquired a range of new technologies and scientists realised that the tremendous heat produced in the process could be tapped either for direct use or for generating electricity.
It was also clear that this new form of energy would allow development of compact long-lasting power sources which could have various applications, not least for shipping, and especially in submarines.
The reactor started up in December
0コメント