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This introductory chapter begins with a brief history of alchemy. It then discusses the alchemical revival in occult circles, which helped inform and was profoundly shaped by the emerging science of radioactivity and radioactive transformation. An overview of the chapters included in the volume is presented.

There is a broad spectrum (approximately 1700) of radioactive isotopes (or radionuclides) that are useful tools for measuring rates of processes on Earth. The term nuclide is commonly used interchangeably with atom. The major sources of radionuclides are: (1) primordial (e.g., 238U, 235U, and 234Th-series radionuclides); (2) anthropogenic or transient (e.g., 137Cs, 90Sr, 239Pu); and (3) cosmogenic (e.g., 7Be, 14C, 32P). These isotopes can be further divided into two general groups, the particle-reactive and non-particle-reactive radionuclides. Transport pathways of non-particle-reactive radionuclides in aquatic systems are more simplistic and primarily controlled by water masses. Conversely, particle-reactive radionuclides adsorb onto particles, making their fate inextricably linked with the particle. Consequently, these particle-bound radionuclides are very useful in determining sedimentation and mixing rates, as well as the overall fate of important elements in estuarine and coastal biogeochemical cycles. Radioactivity is defined as the spontaneous adjustment of nuclei of unstable nuclides to a more stable state. Radiation (e.g., alpha, beta, and gamma rays) is released in different forms as a direct result of changes in the nuclei of these nuclides. The general composition of an atom can simply be divided into the atomic number, which is the number of protons (Z) in a nucleus. The mass number (A) is the number of neutrons (N) plus protons in a nucleus (A = Z + N). Isotopes are different forms of an element that have the same Z value but a different N. Instability in nuclei is generally caused by having an inappropriate number of neutrons relative to the number of protons. Some of the pathways by which a nucleus can spontaneously transform are as follows: (1) alpha decay, or loss of an alpha particle (nucleus of a 4He atom) from the nucleus, which results in a decrease in the atomic number by two (two protons) and the mass number by four units (two protons and two neutrons); (2) beta (negatron) decay, which occurs when a neutron changes to a proton and a negatron (negatively charged electron) is emitted, thereby increasing the atomic number by one unit; (3) emission of a positron (positively charged electron) which results in a proton becoming a neutron and a decrease in the atomic number by one unit; and (4) electron capture, where a proton is changed to a neutron after combining with the captured extranuclear electron (from the K shell)—the atomic number is decreased by one unit.

This chapter surveys the intellectual and geographical terrain of early nuclear energy and introduces themes that will be at the core of the book. In setting the scene, it argues that international nuclear science became a fertile and attractive field from the turn of the twentieth century, and one that quickly encouraged a close intermingling with application and commerce. But the technical environments seeded by the Second World War brought scientists into closer contact with engineers and gestated new expertise, allowing it to grow rapidly into exotic forms at a few locations. These wartime hot-houses fostered unique national visions and specialists collaborating in a domain variously dubbed ‘atomic energy’, ‘nucleonics’, and ‘nuclear engineering’.

For practising engineers, the most pragmatic expression of technical identity was defined in the workplace. This chapter focuses on nuclear specialists via their jobs. During the 1950s, workers from a spectrum of disciplines expanded at sites specializing in reactor development, plutonium production, and power generation. By the early 1960s these specialists were emerging as a recognized occupational speciality in the USA, but not in Britain. For early nuclear workers, representation by American labour unions was a problem for security reasons, and existing British unions aligned with chemical industry traditions, but new occupational labels were supported in Canada. The characteristics that defined the work of the specialists were disputed, although the risks of radioactivity shaped working identities in each country.

This chapter presents Part II of a paper by Niels Bohr on systems containing a single nucleus. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 deals with the configuration and stability of the systems. Sections 3 and 4 show that, of the formation of the atoms, it is indicated that the arrangement of the electrons in rings is consistent with that which is suggested by the chemical properties of the corresponding element. Section 5 shows that it is possible to calculate the minimum velocity of cathode rays. Section 6 briefly considers the phenomena of radioactivity in relation to the theory.

This chapter examines crises and disasters that resulted from environmental pollution. It deals with pollution related to radioactivity and chemical wastes. In each of the pollution crises, people evacuated their homes temporarily or permanently, voluntarily or by force, but only after a lengthy exposure to the hazard. It describes key examples of these types of environmental pollution disasters, which include the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine, the Nevada Test Site, and the Love Canal in New York. This chapter provides tips for preventing disasters and crises from environmental pollution.

Adam awoke on the eighth day of creation, measuring his newly gained creative powers. In a harsh, forbidding world, somewhere to the east of Eden, Adam flexed new muscles and smiled. “That garden was nothing,” he chuckled. “We’re well rid of it. I’ll build a garden that’ll put it to shame.” That eighth day of creation was, in fact, very late in time. Adam had hunted and gathered in the garden for four million years. Then, just the other day—only about thirty thousand years ago—he came into the dense, self-reinforcing, technical knowledge that has, ever since, driven him further and further from the garden. We are a willful, apple-driven, and mind-obsessed people. That side of our nature is not one that we can dodge for very long. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the eleventh-century Christian church was that it forged a tentative peace with human restlessness. All the great monotheistic religions of the world have honored God as Maker of the world, but the medieval Christian church went much further: It asserted that God had manifested himself in human form as a carpenter—a technologist, a creator scaled to human proportions. It seemed clear that if we are cast in God’s image, then God must rightly be honored as the Master Craftsman. The peace forged between the medieval Church and Adam’s apple was wonderfully expressed by an anonymous fourteenth-century Anglo-Saxon monk who sang: . . . Adam lay ibounden, bounden in a bond. Four thousand winter, thought he not to long. And all was for an appil, and appil that he tok, As clerkès finden, written in their book. Ne had the appil takè ben, Ne haddè never our lady, a ben hevenè quene. Blessèd be the time that appil takè was Therefore we moun singen, Deo Gracias! . . . In the mind of that monk, taking the apple of technological knowledge was the first step in spinning out the whole tapestry of the biblical drama that had left him at last with the comfort of his Virgin Mary. So he sang “Deo Gracias,” picked up his compass and square, and went to work. No wonder medieval Christianity was such a friend to the work of making things.

Texas Utilities is a big company. Through its subsidiary, TU Electric, it provides electric service to a large chunk of Texas, including the Dallas- Fort Worth metropolitan area. It employs some 10,000 people. Its sales are around $5 billion a year. It has assets near $20 billion. Yet this corporate Goliath was brought to its knees by a single determined woman, a former church secretary named Juanita Ellis. For nearly a decade, Ellis fought Texas Utilities to a standstill in its battle to build the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant. During that time the cost of the plant zoomed from an original estimate of $779 million to nearly $11 billion, with much of the increase attributable, at least indirectly, to Ellis. Company executives, who had at first laughed at the thought of a housewife married to a lawn-mower repairman standing up to their covey of high-priced lawyers and consultants, eventually realized they could go neither around her nor through her. In the end, it took a negotiated one-on-one settlement between Ellis and a TU Electric executive vice president to remove the roadblocks to Comanche Peak and allow it to begin operation. No one was really happy with the outcome. Antinuclear groups denounced the settlement as a sellout and Ellis as a traitor. Texas Utilities bemoaned the years of discord as time wasted on regulatory nit-picking with no real improvement in safety. And the utility’s customers were the most unhappy of all, for they had to pay for the $11 billion plant with large increases in their electric bills. So it was natural to look for someone to blame. The antinuclear groups pointed to the utility. TU Electric, they said, had ignored basic safety precautions and had built a plant that was a threat to public health, and it had misled the public and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The utility, in turn, blamed the antinuclear groups that had intervened in the approval process and a judge who seemed determined to make TU Electric jump through every hoop he could imagine. The ratepayers didn’t know what to believe.

Nuclear energy is one of the most significant sources of low carbon energy in use in the power sector today. In 2013, nuclear energy represented roughly 11% of the global electricity supply, with growth projected to occur in China, India, and Russia (International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], n.d.a; NEA, n.d.). As a stable source of electricity, nuclear energy can be a stand-alone, base-load form of electricity or complement more variable forms of low carbon energy, like wind and solar power. Among the energy technologies considered here, nuclear energy is complex not only for the science behind it, but also for its societal, environmental, and economic dimensions.This chapter explores the rapid rise of French nuclear energy in the civilian power sector. It considers what a national energy strategy looks like under conditions of high concern about energy supply security when limited domestic energy resources appear to exist. The case reveals that centralized planning with complex and equally centralized technology can be quite conducive to rapid change. However, continued public acceptance, especially for nuclear energy, matters in the durability of such a pathway. France is a traditional and currently global leader in nuclear energy, ranking the highest among countries for its share of domestic electricity derived from nuclear power at 76% of total electricity in 2015 (IAEA, n.d.b). France is highly ranked for the size of its nuclear reactor fleet and amount of nuclear generation, second only to the United States. In 2016, this nation of 67 million people and economy of $2.7 trillion had 58 nuclear power reactors (CIA, n.d.; IAEA, n.d.b). Due to the level of nuclear energy in its power mix, France has some of the lowest carbon emissions per person for electricity (IEA, 2016a). France is also one of the largest net exporters of electricity in Europe, with 61.7 TWh exported (Réseau de Transport d’électricité [RTE], 2016), producing roughly $3.3 billion in annual revenue (World Nuclear Association [WNA], n.d). This European country has the largest reprocessing capacity for spent fuel, with roughly 17% of its electricity powered from recycled fuel (WNA, n.d.).

In January 1975, the magazine Popular Electronics trumpeted the beginnings of a revolution. “Project Breakthrough,” the cover said: “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models.” Inside, a six-page article described the Altair, an unassembled computer that could be ordered from MITS, a company in Albuquerque originally founded to sell radio transmitters for controlling model airplanes. To the uninitiated, it didn’t look like much of a revolution. For $397 plus shipping, a hobbyist or computer buff could get a power supply, a metal case with lights and switches on the front panel, and a set of integrated circuit chips and other components that had to be soldered into place. When everything was assembled, a user gave the computer instructions by flipping the panel’s seventeen switches one at a time in a carefully calculated order; loading a relatively simple program might involve thousands of flips. MITS had promised that the Altair could be hooked up to a Teletype machine for its input, but the circuit boards needed for the hookup wouldn’t be available for a number of months. To read the computer’s output, a user had to interpret the on/off pattern of flashing lights; it would be more than a year before MITS would offer an interface board to transform the output into text or figures on a television screen. And the computer had no software. A user had to write the programs himself in arcane computer code or else borrow the efforts of other enthusiasts. One observer of the early computer industry summed up the experience like this: “You buy the Altair, you have to build it, then you have to build other things to plug into it to make it work. You are a weird-type person. Because only weird-type people sit in kitchens and basements and places all hours of the night, soldering things to boards to make machines go flickety-flock.” But despite its shortcomings, several thousand weird-type people bought the Altair within a few months of its appearance. What inspired and intrigued them was the semiconductor chip at the heart of the computer.

Things used to be so simple. In the old days, a thousand generations ago or so, human technology wasn’t much more complicated than the twigs stripped of leaves that some chimpanzees use to fish in anthills. A large bone for a club, a pointed stick for digging, a sharp rock to scrape animal skins—such were mankind’s only tools for most of its history. Even after the appearance of more sophisticated, multipiece devices—the bow and arrow, the potter’s wheel, the ox-drawn cart—nothing was difficult to understand or decipher. The logic of a tool was clear upon inspection, or perhaps after a little experimentation. No longer. No single person can comprehend the entire workings of, say, a Boeing 747. Not its pilot, not its maintenance chief, not any of the thousands of engineers who worked upon its design. The aircraft contains six million individual parts assembled into hundreds of components and systems, each with a role to play in getting the 165-ton behemoth from Singapore to San Francisco or Sidney to Saskatoon. There are structural components such as the wings and the six sections that are joined together to form the fuselage. There are the four 21,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines. The landing gear. The radar and navigation systems. The instrumentation and controls. The maintenance computers. The fire-fighting system. The emergency oxygen in case the cabin loses pressure. Understanding how and why just one subassembly works demands years of study, and even so, the comprehension never seems as palpable, as tangible, as real as the feel for flight one gets by building a few hundred paper airplanes and launching them across the schoolyard. Such complexity makes modern technology fundamentally different from anything that has gone before. Large, complex systems such as commercial airliners and nuclear power plants require large, complex organizations for their design, construction, and operation. This opens up the technology to a variety of social and organizational influences, such as the business factors described in chapter 3. More importantly, complex systems are not completely predictable.

Sometimes a crisis tests one's mettle and fires one's soul. This chapter presents a story of coping with fallout, Chernobyl-style. These reflections are offered from the author's journal, written while living in Germany during the Chernobyl disaster, which rained radioactivity throughout Europe, and especially in southern Germany. It was his American nuclear epiphany in Europe, which caused him to consider the whole culture of radiation he had been raised in since birth.

This chapter discusses the conflicting views of male and female writers on the Cold War nuclear programme. It looks at the mothers's concern that the nuclear tests were releasing radioactivity into the air. Men, on the other hand, feature a different form of the gendered viral properties of the nuclear paranoia. The chapter takes a detailed look at the works of Grace Paley, William Burroughs, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath that feature nuclear testing and radioactivity. It also provides an alternative view, which is the metaphorical substantiation of the Cold War links between genetic research and nuclear energy.

The first of our seven elements, protactinium, was one of the many elements correctly predicted by Mendeleev even in his early publications. This is not true of the famous 1896 paper, where Mendeleev used incorrect values for both thorium (118) and uranium (116). A mere two years later, in 1871, Mendeleev corrected both of these values and indicated a missing element between thorium and uranium. But Mendeleev did not just indicate the presence of a missing element; he added the following brief paragraph in which he ventured to make more specific predictions: . . . Between thorium and uranium in this series we can further expect an element with an atomic weight of about 235. This element should form a highest oxide R 2 O5, like Nb and Ta to which it should be analogous. Perhaps in the minerals which contain these elements a certain amount of weak acid formed from this metal will also be found. . . . The modern atomic weight for eka-tantalum or protactinium is in fact 229.2. Mendeleev was somewhat unlucky regarding this case since he was not to know that protactinium is a member of only five “pair reversals” in the entire periodic table. This situation occurs when two elements need to be reversed, contrary to their atomic weights, in order to classify them correctly. The most clear-cut case of this effect was that of tellurium and iodine, as discussed in chapters 1 and 2. It was not until the work of Moseley in 1914 that a clear understanding of the problem was obtained. As Moseley showed, the more correct ordering principle for the elements is atomic number and not atomic weight. The justification for placing tellurium before iodine, as demanded by their chemical properties, is that tellurium has a lower atomic number. Returning to protactinium, it appears that Mendeleev’s brief predictions were broadly fulfilled since the element does indeed show an analogy with tantalum in forming Pa2 O5 as its highest and most stable oxide.

Frédéric Joliot discovered artificial radioactivity on January 11, 1934, when he bombarded aluminum with polonium alpha particles and produced a radioactive isotope of phosphorus that decayed by emitting a positron. He detected it with a Geiger–Müller counter that Wolfgang Gentner had constructed for him. Two months later, Enrico Fermi, motivated in part by an insight of his first assistant, Gian Carlo Wick, decided to see if neutrons also could produce artificial radioactivity. The transformation of a neutron into a proton in a nucleus should create an electron, so to increase their number and hence the probability of creating an electron, he bombarded various elements with intense sources of neutrons, and on March 20, 1934, with aluminum he observed the created electrons and thereby discovered neutron-induced artificial radioactivity. Less than four months later, Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934, at age sixty-six.

Until nearly the end of the Nineteenth century, nobody was particularly interested in the age of the earth except a few theologians. In the second century A.D., the rabbi Yose ben Halafta wrote a tract known today as the Seder Olam (meaning Order of the World) in which he divided the history of the world into four parts: first, from the creation until the death of Moses; second, up to the murder of Zachariah; third, up to the destruction of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, in 586 B.C.; and finally, from then to his present day. The Bible gives the ages of the patriarchs at the time of the birth of their offspring: “This is the roll of Adam’s descendants … When Adam was a hundred and thirty years old he became the father of Seth … When Seth was a hundred and five years old he became the father of Enosh …” So by adding the ages of the people listed in the Bible, ben Halafta calculated the passage of years in each period, concluding that the world was created 3,828 years before the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 68 B.C. (an event now assigned to the year 70 B.C.); that is, creation took place in the year 3896 B.C. (3898 if we include the new date for the Second Temple). There was little mention of his calculation until the Jews moved from Babylonia to Europe, and it then gradually came into use, replacing the then usual method of assigning dates as so many years after the beginning of the Seleucid era in 312 B.C. By the eleventh century it had been slightly revised so that the world was created in 3761 B.C., a date which became the basis of the Jewish calendar; as I write this (2009) we are in the year 5770 A.M., or Anno Mundi.

This chapter focuses on the initiatives of various physicists and chemists to explore the strange new rays called X-rays that were discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895. The decade of the 1890s was a time of great progress in science. No year in that decade was more eventful than 1895. In Sweden, Svante Arrhenius was calculating the effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide on global temperature, while in Britain John Perry was exposing the fallacy of Kelvin's assumptions about the age of the Earth. The Scottish chemist William Ramsay discovered helium, previously known only from the Sun's spectrum, in an earthly mineral. That same year, at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, Röntgen was investigating the properties of cathode rays that led to his discovery of X-rays. This chapter also looks at the work of Marie Curie on radioactivity and of Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy on radioactive decay.

This chapter takes a historical look at the experiments carried out by Ernest Rutherford to determine the age of the Earth. In 1903, Rutherford performed an experiment in which he separated the alpha and beta particles and measured the velocity of the alphas, finding that they travel at the fantastic speed of 24,000 kilometers per second, or about 54 million miles per hour. Rutherford was able to calculate the energy of the alphas, which he found to be far greater than that of the beta and gamma rays combined. By measuring the amount of uranium and helium in a mineral and by knowing the half-life of uranium, Rutherford had the amount of parent atom, the amount of daughter atom, and the rate at which parent changed to daughter: he had an hourglass. He presented the results of his experiments on radioactivity at the 1904 meeting of the Royal Society of London. The discovery of radioactivity both falsified Kelvin's calculations for the age of the Sun and provided the means of making a correct calculation of the age of the Earth.