Enter the Atom

Let's return for a short graduate course from Hormesis U. about "splitting the atom."

We've already seen that U238 is an isotope of uranium with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. [I realize I said I was going to refer to isotopes in the form of 238U or uranium 238. But U235 and U238 are such commonly used abbreviations to denote these isotopes that I will be using them in this chapter.]

With a lump of this element and the proper instruments, you would find there is another isotope, U235, which amounts to only 0.7% of the total mass. Yet it is this tiny fraction that makes uranium the tremendous source of safe and reliable energy - not to mention the fearful master - that it has become.

U235, like its more plentiful sibling, is an alpha emitter - but has a considerably shorter half-life... a mere 3,800,000 years, meaning that it was considerably more plentiful a billion or so years ago. [U235 is sometimes referred to as "actinium" or "uranoactinium."] It, along with plutonium 239 and U233, are the only isotopes that are fissionable - a phenomenon described below.

Under normal conditions, we can expect to see a U235 atom occasionally decay into an isotope of thorium and a helium nucleus (an alpha particle) similar to all radioactive isotopes experiencing alpha decay. ["Occasionally" takes on a new meaning in the atomic world. Our roughly penny-sized gram of U235 would experience approximately 80,000 nuclear disintegrations per second.]

But let us suppose that a stray neutron smacks into the nucleus of an unsuspecting U235 atom. If the energy of the neutron is within a certain range, our U235 target atom fissions, that is, breaks into pieces. [This was first observed by an unbelieving Lise Meitner in December 1938. She had observed barium, with an atomic number of 56, arising when she bombarded "actinium" with neutrons.]

It usually splits into two roughly equal parts, and most important, ejects about two neutrons. Obviously no atom could eject or emit about two neutrons, but, on average, that is what a fissioning U235 atom sends out of its nucleus.

Imagine, then, one of these neutrons hitting another U235 atom, which emits two neutrons with at least one of these splitting another atom... and so on, and so on. As you have no doubt already figured out, this is what is known as a chain reaction. When the ratio of fissioned atoms in successive generations is equal to one - that is, when one splitting atom causes exactly one more to split - the reaction is said to go critical. What happens to the other neutrons? They either escape from the volume of uranium, or they are absorbed - either unintentionally by structural material, or purposely by control rods made of boron, aluminum, cadmium, or several other neutron-absorbing materials - in order to keep the reaction under control (that is, to keep it from going super-critical). Does a super-critical reaction cause a bomb-like explosion? Not at all; if it did, bomb development by the Manhattan project would have been relatively simple rather than requiring the best theoretical physics minds on two continents. But super-criticality is no picnic. It causes rapid rises in fission reactions, leading to very high temperatures that cause structural damage, torrents of neutrons, and "steam explosions." Bad, yes, but still light years away from the mushroom-shaped cloud.

Let's look at a few different types of reactors, with an eye for those that might allow decentralization of electric power generation.