The Chernoblog

Wunderland Kalkar

In 1972, construction on what was going to be Germany’s first fast breeder reactor, SNR-300, began in North Rhine-Westphalia. The reactor was designed to use plutonium as fuel, be cooled by sodium, and output around 327 megawatts of energy. At the time, fast breeder reactors were still a very new and strange technology, but Germany was determined to limit importing energy and, since the uranium supply in the country was very limited, a breeder facility to use the limited resources as efficiently as possible was required.

In 1979, disaster struck at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, causing one of its two reactors to experience a partial meltdown. By that time, public protests of the facility in Germany reached new heights, but despite the opposition, construction continued and the facility was completed in 1985. By that time, roughly USD $4,000,000,000 had been spent on the facility. In 1986, disaster struck again, this time at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. One of its 4 completed reactors exploded, underwent a total meltdown, and spewed radioactive waste across Europe for 10 days while its graphite moderators were on fire. Following this disaster, SNR-300 never came online and the project was officially cancelled in 1991.

Safer Storage for Nuclear Waste Nuclear waste is piling up in our backyard—and it’s not stored as safely as it could be.

"Given the remarkable developments in nuclear technology in the 1950s and 1960s, it is only natural that consideration would be directed toward the development of a nuclear-powered pacemaker."

"In the spring of 1955, as the Cold War intensified and the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated at a shocking pace, America — as it had many times before — detonated an atomic weapon in the Nevada desert. The test was not especially noteworthy. The weapon’s yield was not dramatically larger or smaller than that of previous A-bombs. The brighter-than-the-sun flash of light, the mushroom cloud and the staggering power unleashed by the weapon were all byproducts familiar to anyone who had either witnessed or paid attention to coverage of earlier tests.

And yet today, six decades later, at a time when the prospect of nuclear tests by “rogue states” like North Korea and Iran is once again making headlines and driving international negotiations and debate, the very banality of one long-forgotten atomic test in 1955 feels somehow more chilling than other more memorable or era-defining episodes from the Cold War. After all, whether conducted in the name of deterrence, defense or pure scientific research, the May 1955 blast was in a very real sense routine.

This is not to suggest that the scientists, engineers and other professionals involved at Yucca Flat were somehow cavalier about detonating atomic weapons. But it’s worth remembering that, in the first half of 1955, the U.S. conducted more than a dozen nuclear test explosions in Nevada alone. After a while, the mushroom clouds from these tests, visible from Las Vegas 60 miles away, had become tourist draws. One needn’t be a pacifist, an anti-nuclear crusader or a modern-day Luddite to shudder at the thought of nuclear explosion after nuclear explosion after nuclear explosion — and the lethal aftermath of what such explosions entail — ripping through the dry desert air of the starkly gorgeous American southwest.

Made in the Nevada desert by photographer Loomis Dean shortly after a 1955 atomic bomb test, these are not “political” pictures. They are eerily beautiful, unsettling photographs made at the height of the Cold War, when the destructive power of the detonation was jaw-droppingly huge — but positively miniscule compared to today’s truly terrifying thermonuclear weapons. As LIFE told its readers in its 16 May 1955 issue:

A day after the 44th nuclear test explosion in the U.S. rent the still Nevada air, observers cautiously inspected department store mannequins which were poised disheveled but still haughty on the sand sand in the homes of Yucca Flat. The figures were residents of an entire million-dollar village built to test the effects of an atomic blast on everything from houses to clothes to canned soup.

The condition of the figures — one charred, another only scorched, another almost untouched — showed that the blast, equivalent to 35,00 tons of TNT, was discriminating in its effects. As one phase of the atomic test, the village and figures help guide civil defense planning — and make clear that even amid atomic holocaust careful planning could save lives.

There is, in such words and in such sentiments, an almost unrecognizable optimism — it’s tempting to say, an innocence —that is no longer available to us when it comes to honest discussions of, as LIFE put it, “atomic holocaust.” With conversations about nuclear tests (both theoretical and real) so very much in the news these days, these pictures from more than half a century ago might serve as a quiet reminder of just how horrific and insane the very notion of nuclear warfare really is.”

This graphic shows the secondary process by which XFEL light can drive the energy release from a sample containing a nuclear isomer. In the first step (top), photons knock electrons out of inner atomic shells. leading to a plasma of free electrons and ionized atoms. This interaction does not directly affect the nucleus, as it remains in the metastable isomeric state (top right). However, when electrons from the plasma are later captured in the inner-shell vacancies, their excess energy can excite the nucleus to a higher, but less stable, energy state (middle). In the last step, the nucleus relaxes to its ground state, releasing photons in a cascade (bottom).

Source: Free-Electron Lasers Trigger Nuclear Transitions (American Physical Society)

Source: NNSA/NSO/Area 51—Black Jets

Military personnel casually observe a 22-kiloton blast at Frenchman Flat in Area 5 of the Nevada Test Site on April 15, 1955.

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