Unclear Bomb!!   

Dear GT readers,

Thanks for your enthusiastic response to the first issue of GT. There are many of you out there who want to be better informed and be involved. Gobar Times...mmm...now what sort of a name is that for an environment magazine? Some have been puzzled, amused, or just curious. You have read the first issue on the many things that gobar means. We hope you’ve realised the need to look at environment while standing on your head, differently, from another angle. And just as GT began telling you to do that, suddenly, BOOM!!...a nuclear blast.

Now what’s the connection between this bomb business and the world of Gobar Times? Our Pandit Gobar Ganesh is very upset. Says he, “You all making laugh at gobar and me, by jumping joy with these bomb-wallahs! I am giving warning... many problematics and danger to this nuclear stuff.” The kind of world we want to live in, develop, is also built by the kind of attitudes we have.

So in this issue we present some facts about the nuclear debate. Why is making a bomb that kills millions something great? What kind of energy use is this? Do we need such dangerous technology?

Or is there some other way? Well, stand on your head and read on...

Feb 2, 1976. Three nuclear scientists resigned today. All three worked at General Electric, a US-based power corporation. “We could no longer justify devoting our energies to the continuing development and expansion of nuclear fission power — a system we believe to be so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on this planet”, they said.

Our world is nothing but atoms of elements, with light or heavy nuclei.

unstable

A lot of elements are unstable. Due to the way protons and neutrons are arranged in the nucleus of atoms of these elements.

radioactive

All unstable elements, light or heavy, are radioactive. Atoms of such elements give off bursts of energy, and try to change to another element that’s more stable.

fertile

Uranium-238, Thorium-232 and Plutonium-240, are also called fertile elements. It is easy to make them fissile.

fissile

These are elements that can be easily used in nuclear reactions, because they are very unstable, and can easily be made to produce nuclear energy. Uranium-235, Plutonium-239 are fissile elements. Hence they are used in atomic power stations and in bombs.

fission BOOM!!

The process in which a neutron hits a heavy nucleus, and splits it into two. Energy is released. Happens naturally. And in a lab., reactor, or bomb.

fusion BOOM!!

The process in which two light nuclei ‘fuse’ or join together, and energy is released. The sun’s heat is the energy it releases because of the fusion of light elements Deuterium and Tritium that’s always taking place in it. Good for a bomb, too.

chain reaction

When a heavy nucleus splits, it releases neutrons. These neutrons hit other atoms of the element, which also split. And so on. In an atomic power reactor, nuclear chain reaction is controlled. In a bomb, it is not. BOOM!!

binding energy

In an atom, the electron is controlled by three forces. The force of gravity, electromagnetic force, and the ability to interact. These forces are also there in the nucleus, and one more called the ‘strong force’. This force keeps the nucleus from flying apart. It is like a rope, and the strength of the rope is the binding energy of a nucleus. Atoms with more binding energy are stable. Those with less are unstable.

Nuclear binding energies are 1,000,000 times stronger than the ability of electrons to interact . This means that the amount of energy released when the nucleus of an atom changes (or fuses or is made to fission) is much, much more than the chemical energy released when atoms combine by sharing electrons. Electrons give you electricity. From nuclear energy, you can also get a bomb.

BOOM!!

Science loves nuke physics.
Industry loves nuke energy.
Military loves nuke bomb.

Do people have to?

The atomic age began as laboratory science. In 1898 Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity. In 1931 Urey discovered Deuterium (later to be used in an H-bomb). Next year, Chadwick discovered the neutron. 1940: Seaborg and Mcmillan discover plutonium.	August 6, 1945. American plane Enola Gay appears over Hiroshima city in Japan. With two more planes. Japanese thought the planes had come just to look around. Then Little Boy dropped out of Enola Gay, a Uranium-235 fission bomb. It exploded at 8:15 a.m, 570 mts above ground. 70,000 killed immediately. Thousands die of radiation illness.		February 1958. 10,000 people gather outside the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Alderston, England. To protest, of course.  Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is founded. April 1958. Scientists based at University of Washington, St Louis in the US band together. They form Committee for Nuclear Information. They offer to inform the public of anything they want to find out about nuclear ‘problems’.		The atomic age is also an age of people’s protests against nuclear energy. It began as outrage against weapons testing. In the late 1960s and then through the 1970s, it widened to include nuclear power generation. At first, people thought nuclear power was ecofriendly, since it didn’t pollute like fossil fuels did. (Some still think so.) Then, as information appeared about accidents in reactors, especially after 1979, attitudes changed. Early 1960s-1980. Protests become inseparable from expansion in nuclear power programmes.
The first nuclear bomb test was in Alamogardo in the desert in New Mexico, USA.	Little Boy August 9, 1945. A 22-kiloton plutonium-239 bomb Fat Man explodes 510 metres above Nagasaki. 40,000 dead immediately this time. Both blasts lasted from 0.5 to 1 seconds and produced intense heat: 3000-4000°C.	1954. US launch USS Nautilus, a nuclear submarine. On March 1, first true H-bomb burst at Bikini Atoll. In April, Robert Oppenheimer is put on trial as suspected spy. The ‘father’ of the nuke bomb will no longer be allowed access to any nuclear information.		April 16, 1955. Two days before he died, Albert Einstein signs a letter along with Bertrand Russell to protest nuke testing.	1961. US announces Operation Ploughshare, nuke for peace programme. In August, the Berlin Wall begins to be built. July 6, 1962. As part of Ploughshare, the US test a 100-kiloton bomb in the Nevada desert. It makes a crater 320 feet deep. It is 5 times more powerful than Little Boy.