The Apocalypse Factory

by Steve Olson

  In September 1963, President John Kennedy spoke at the dedication of the final plutonium production reactor built at Hanford. Courtesy of the Tri-City Herald.

  “The atomic age is a dreadful age,” Kennedy began, after recognizing the assembled Washington State dignitaries. “No one can speak with certainty about whether we shall be able to control this deadly weapon.” But Kennedy did not dwell on the traumas of the previous year, when the United States and Soviet Union almost engaged in full-scale nuclear war over the Soviets’ installation of nuclear weapons in Cuba. He was there to express his gratitude to the people of Hanford for their hard work and to tout the peaceful applications of nuclear power. Today, said Kennedy, “we begin work on the largest nuclear power reactor for peaceful purposes in the world, and I take the greatest satisfaction for the United States being second to none.” He praised the role played by Washington’s powerful congressional delegation in getting the N Reactor approved. He spoke about the need to conserve America’s natural resources, to “set aside land and water, recreation, wilderness, and all the rest now, so it will be available to those who come in the future.” He urged the state of Washington to use every drop of water in the Columbia River for human benefit, “to make sure that nothing runs to the ocean unused and wasted.” Then Kennedy, who would be assassinated just two months later in Dallas, took a pointer tipped with a piece of uranium from the B Reactor, lowered it toward a wildly clicking Geiger counter, and activated a nearby clamshell loader, which dropped a load of dirt into an empty field. “I assume this is wholly on the level and there is no one over there working it,” he joked to a nearby dignitary.

  In the crowd, three-year-old Kathleen Dillon, who would eventually become a Washington State poet laureate, was sitting on her father’s shoulders to watch the president. Many years later she wrote about the experience in a poem entitled “My Earliest Memory Preserved on Film”:

  . . . Today the wind is at your back, like a blessing.

  Our long-dead senators applaud

  As you touch a uranium-tipped baton to a circuit

  and activate a shovel atomically.

  This is the future.

  Dad holds me up to see it coming.

  BY THE MID-1960S, the postwar fears of the atomic scientists had been realized. The United States had more than 30,000 nuclear warheads that it could use against the Soviet Union and its allies. The Soviet Union had far fewer nuclear bombs—about 6,000—but it was increasing the number rapidly after what it saw as the humiliation of the Cuban missile crisis. Within a few years, the total number of warheads in the world would exceed 65,000, representing almost a million times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. As is the case today, the warheads were stacked in the weapons depots of military bases around the world, ready to be dropped by long-range and tactical bombers. They tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles in underground silos, waiting to be launched at the first sign of an incoming attack. They lurked in submarines cruising the world’s oceans, a final unassailable reserve with which to wreak vengeance after an exchange of land-based missiles.

  By the time of the Kennedy administration, it had become clear that a nuclear war could not be won. Any use of nuclear weapons would likely trigger a large nuclear response from the other side. And even after absorbing a large nuclear attack, either the United States or Soviet Union would have enough weapons left to destroy the other. This standoff came to be known as mutually assured destruction, or MAD. Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, described the situation in a pivotal 1965 speech. The security of the United States, he said, depends on its ability “to absorb the total weight of nuclear attack on our country—on our retaliatory forces, on our command and control apparatus, on our industrial capacity, on our cities, and on our population—and still be capable of damaging the aggressor to the point that his society would be simply no longer viable in twentieth-century terms. That is what deterrence of nuclear aggression means. It means the certainty of suicide to the aggressor, not merely to his military forces but to his society as a whole.”

  Even as they were building up their arsenals in the 1950s and 1960s, the United States and Soviet Union—along with other countries working to build nuclear weapons—were seeking to develop peaceful uses of nuclear energy, in part to offset the terror induced by their growing nuclear arsenals. Potential uses included research, medicine, and industrial applications—all of which would be realized in the years ahead—but the application that got the most attention was electrical generation.

  In 1954, Soviet scientists in the town of Obninsk used an experimental graphite-moderated reactor to generate electricity and feed a trickle of current into the grid. On December 2, 1957—fifteen years to the day after Fermi’s pile at the University of Chicago went critical—operators powered up the United States’ first commercial nuclear reactor. Located in the town of Shippingport, Pennsylvania, on the east bank of the Ohio River, the reactor was based partly on designs developed for nuclear ships and submarines. The successful startup was a public relations coup for the Atomic Energy Commission, which was otherwise devoting most of its energy to building nuclear weapons. But even then, some of the drawbacks of nuclear energy were becoming apparent. The reactor had to have multiple containment structures and emergency cooling systems in case anything went wrong. Originally budgeted at $47.7 million, it ended up costing $84 million to build.

  The Atomic Energy Commission never succeeded in separating the peaceful uses of atomic energy from military uses. Part of the problem is that it oversaw both endeavors, even though it tried to keep them separate in the public’s mind. In the 1950s, the AEC sponsored advertisements, school programs, and public relations campaigns to present the peaceful side of atomic energy. In the 1956 book Our Friend the Atom from Walt Disney Productions, a genie vows that the atom is “our friend and servant” and that nuclear power will bring peace to the world—even as America’s nuclear buildup was at its peak.

  Another part of the problem is that the AEC had the job of both promoting and regulating nuclear power generation, a fundamental conflict of interest that would plague the commission for decades. The same problem was occurring elsewhere. In Britain, France, and China—the first three countries after the United States and Soviet Union to build atomic bombs—commercial applications of nuclear power were inevitably tied up with bomb-making activities. In the Soviet Union, the connection was even more explicit. Much of the nuclear power in the Soviet Union came from a type of reactor designed to produce both electricity for the grid and plutonium for weapons. Moderated by graphite, these reactors were based on the ones used to build the Soviets’ initial atomic bombs, which in turn were based on Hanford’s reactors. Among these Soviet reactors were four built in northern Ukraine a few miles from the town of Chernobyl.

  ONE OF THE PEOPLE who encouraged Kennedy to personally bless the N Reactor was the man he had chosen to head the Atomic Energy Commission—Glenn Seaborg.

  By 1963, Seaborg had lived a life most scientists can only dream about. Even as he was doing research at the Met Lab during the war, Seaborg was beginning to explore the nuclear chemistry that goes on in reactors. The absorption of an additional neutron by plutonium-239, which creates plutonium-240, had caused the crisis that required the development of implosion. Plutonium-240 decays by emitting an alpha particle rather than by converting a neutron to a proton, so it does not transform into an element with 95 protons. But what if plutonium-240 absorbed another neutron in a reactor before it decayed, yielding plutonium-241? Seaborg had reason to believe that plutonium-241 might convert a neutron to a proton, which would produce a new element never seen before. The challenge for an element hunter would be figuring out how to isolate tiny quantities of such an element from a jumble of other highly radioactive atoms.

  In the end, discovering elements heavier than plutonium required nothing less than a reorganization of the periodic table. The table of elements mounted on the walls of science classroo
ms has a row of elements that don’t seem to fit. Labeled the lanthanide series, they go from element 57 (lanthanum, which was named after the Greek word meaning to lie hidden) through element 71 (lutetium, which was named after the Latin word for Paris). Their forlorn position in the periodic table has to do with the way electrons occupy spaces around ever larger nuclei. With the first 56 elements, each time a proton is added to a nucleus, the corresponding electron gets added essentially to the outermost surface of the atom. With lanthanum, the situation changes. In that element, the final electron gets added not to the surface of the atom but to its interior, in the midst of the cloud of electrons surrounding the nucleus. Only with element 72, hafnium—derived from the Latin name for Copenhagen, after Neils Bohr’s hometown—do additional electrons once again get added on the outside.

  At the Met Lab in Chicago, Seaborg began to think that the same thing was happening with the elements heavier than uranium. They seemed to be forming a new series of elements, like the lanthanides, with electrons being added to the interior rather than the exterior of atoms. But where did the new series start? The chemistry he and his colleagues had developed to isolate plutonium suggested that it might start with element 89, actinium (named after the Greek word for beam or ray because of its radioactivity). But that element already had a well-established place in the family of elements. Suggesting otherwise would require the heretical act of modifying the periodic table.

  When Seaborg suggested the idea to his colleagues, they scoffed. Wendell Latimer, who had provided the clue Seaborg needed to isolate plutonium in 1941, told him that his scientific reputation would be ruined if he made such a proposal. “Fortunately,” Seaborg later quipped, “that was no deterrent because at the time I had no scientific reputation to lose.” His proposal that actinium begins a new series like the lanthanides, later known as the actinides, was the breakthrough that would win Seaborg a Nobel Prize in 1951, when he was just 39 years old.

  In 1944 he and a handful of colleagues in Chicago began looking for new elements in plutonium that had been bombarded with alpha particles in Berkeley’s 60-inch cyclotron. They soon isolated an element with 96 protons, followed shortly thereafter by one with 95. Seaborg was about to announce the discovery of the new elements at a meeting of the American Chemical Society when he was scheduled to appear on a radio program called The Quiz Kids. One of the Quiz Kids asked him if any new elements had been discovered. Well, since you asked, Seaborg said, yes, you can tell your teachers that we have discovered two new elements—though he later recalled that the students listening to the show were “not entirely successful in convincing their teachers” that they would have to buy new periodic tables.

  As with all new elements, Seaborg and his colleagues now had the right to name their discoveries. Because element 95 was chemically related to element 63, europium, they named it americium, after the continent in which it was discovered. Americium is a dangerously radioactive and toxic element. Americium-241 has a half-life of 433 years, which contributes to the long-lasting hazards of spent nuclear fuel. But americium has also saved countless lives. The most common type of smoke detector contains a very small amount of americium-241. The low-energy alpha particles given off by the element ionize the air inside the detector, and the ionized air maintains an electric current between two electrodes. When smoke enters the detector, it interferes with the current, setting off the alarm.

  Element 96 is chemically related to element 64, gadolinium, which was named after a Finnish chemist who had worked on the element. Seaborg and his colleagues decided to name their new element curium, after Pierre and Marie Curie.

  After World War II, Seaborg stayed at the Met Lab for a year, working on the chemistry of plutonium, americium, and curium. He then returned to Berkeley as a full professor with as much research funding as he would ever need. Over the next 12 years at Berkeley, he and his colleagues discovered six more elements. Element 97, which they also produced by bombarding heavy elements in Lawrence’s cyclotrons, is chemically analogous to terbium—a name loosely derived from a town in Sweden. Seaborg and his associates therefore named their new element berkelium, though when Seaborg called Berkeley’s mayor to tell him that his town would be immortalized in the periodic table, the mayor greeted the news “with a complete lack of interest.”

  The chemical equivalent of element 98 is dysprosium, from a Greek word meaning hard to get. This did not suggest an appropriate name, so Seaborg and his colleagues named element 98 californium. The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” chided them on April 8, 1950. “While unarguably suited to their place of birth, these names strike us as indicating a surprising lack of public-relations foresight on the part of the university, located, as it is, in a state where publicity has flourished to a degree matched perhaps only by evangelism. California’s busy scientists will undoubtedly come up with another atom or two one of these days, and the university might well have anticipated that. Now it has lost forever the chance of immortalizing itself in the atomic table with some such sequence as universitium (97), ofium (98), californium (99), berkelium (100).”

  Seaborg and his colleagues wrote back:

  “Talk of the Town” has missed the point in their comments on naming of the elements 97 and 98. We may have shown lack of confidence but no lack of foresight in naming the elements “berkelium” and “californium.” By using these names first, we have forestalled the appalling possibility that after naming 97 and 98 “universitium” and “ofium,” some New Yorker might follow with the discovery of 99 and 100 and apply the names “newium” and “yorkium.”

  The New Yorker responded: “We are already at work in our office laboratories on ‘newium’ and ‘yorkium.’ So far we just have the names.”

  The discovery of the next two elements came from an unexpected source. When Seaborg and his Berkeley colleagues heard that a new isotope of plutonium had been discovered in the test debris from the United States’ first hydrogen bomb, they wondered if the power of the bomb could also produce heavy elements. They acquired from friends working in the weapons program a piece of filter paper from a plane that had collected samples after the blast. From the dust on the paper they identified element 99 and then element 100—discoveries that were made at about the same time by separate groups at laboratories outside Chicago and in Los Alamos. The codiscoverers named element 99 einsteinium and element 100 fermium.

  Fermi got the news that his name would be added to the periodic table on his deathbed. After the war he had moved back to the University of Chicago to become a professor, though he continued to advise the government on its nuclear weapons program. In the summer of 1954, Fermi returned to Europe for just the second time since receiving the Nobel Prize in 1938. While giving a series of lectures and hiking through the Alps and Dolomites with friends, he began to have troubles with his digestion. He and Laura ascribed it simply to the stress of recent years, but his friends were troubled by how thin he looked. Back in Chicago, he went to a doctor, who told him that the cause was psychological, which he doubted. By October, doctors began to suspect something more serious. Exploratory surgery revealed metastatic stomach cancer. Nothing could be done.

  Laura rented a hospital bed so he could spend his remaining time at home. Enrico told her to rent it only until the end of November, since he wouldn’t need it after that. In his last few weeks, Leona Woods visited often. She, too, had moved back to Chicago after the war to continue working with Fermi. In his final days, they talked about writing one more paper together. He joked that his name would have to be followed by a black cross directing the reader to a footnote saying, “Care of St. Peter.” After each visit, Woods drove home in tears.

  Fermi died on November 29, 1954. Because his illness was so sudden, he never had a chance to write his memoirs or otherwise reflect on the role his discoveries play in the development of atomic bombs. Then again, he never betrayed much emotion about the implications of his work, beyond the excitement he felt in discovering new things. The s
cience came first.

  Fermi was just 53 when he died. Did his frequent exposures to radiation have anything to do with his early death? It’s possible, but it can’t be determined with certainty. None of his colleagues from Italy, with whom he had done his early work on radioactive substances, died from cancer. Almost 5,000 people under the age of 55 are diagnosed with stomach cancer every year in the United States, very few of whom have worked around radioactivity.* Fermi may just have gotten unlucky. But questions about radiation exposures and health would be asked with increasing frequency—and with increasing vehemence—in the years ahead.

  IN ADDITION TO DISCOVERING new elements, Seaborg became an accomplished administrator in the years after World War II. He served on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission during the 1940s and 1950s, advising the government on the expansion of the US nuclear weapons program. At the same time, he was rising up the academic ladder at the University of California, Berkeley. First he became faculty athletic representative, a job he enjoyed immensely because of a lifelong interest in sports. Then he became head of the university, which he later described as “the most difficult job I ever had.” Given his accomplishments, he must not have been terribly surprised when President-Elect Kennedy called him on January 9, 1961, to ask if he would chair the Atomic Energy Commission. That evening, he asked Helen and their six children whether they wanted to move from California to Washington, DC. They unanimously said no, they all wanted to stay in Berkeley (though Seaborg later wrote that he had “doubts about the validity of fourteen-month-old Dianne’s vote”). Still, he overruled them, figuring that a few years in the nation’s capital would be a good experience for them all.