Controlled Nuclear Chain Reaction; The First 50 Years

La Grange Park, IL: American Nuclear Society, 1992. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good. xii, 193, [3] pages. Footnotes. Illustrations (a few with color). Tabular data. Bibliography. Illustrated front cover. No dust jacket present. It's been 50 years since the Chicago Pile experiment and the first controlled chain reaction. Anonymous volunteer contributors from the ANS have put together this history, which ends with a celebration of the future of nuclear power (but does not talk of what to do with radioactive waste). This book was prepared by a volunteer effort of a large number of people over several months. The authors take responsibility for the choice of material on the many possible issued covered. It was the belief of the authors that the beneficial impacts of nuclear energy, while already enormous, represent only a small fraction of the benefits yet to be gained and that this brief history of the first 50 years of the controlled nuclear chain reaction represents only the first phase of the nuclear era. The contents include Introduction, Chicago Pile No. 1: The First Controlled Nuclear Chain Reaction; Development of Nuclear Power Plants in the United States; Development of Nuclear Power Plants in Canada and Europe; Status of Nuclear Power Development; Other Peaceful Applications of Nuclear Energy; Nuclear Fuel Technology; Nuclear Safety; and Working Toward a Nuclear Future. Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) was the world's first artificial nuclear reactor. On 2 December 1942, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated in CP-1 during an experiment led by Enrico Fermi. The secret development of the reactor was the first major technical achievement for the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to create nuclear weapons during World War II. Developed by the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, CP-1 was built under the west viewing stands of the original Stagg Field. Although the project's civilian and military leaders had misgivings about the possibility of a disastrous runaway reaction, they trusted Fermi's safety calculations and decided they could carry out the experiment in a densely populated area. Fermi described the reactor as "a crude pile of black bricks and wooden timbers." After a series of attempts, the successful reactor was assembled in November 1942 by a team of about 30 that, in addition to Fermi, included scientists Leo Szilard, Leona Woods, Herbert L. Anderson, Walter Zinn, Martin D. Whitaker, and George Weil. The reactor used natural uranium. This required a very large amount of material in order to reach criticality, along with graphite used as a neutron moderator. The reactor contained 45,000 ultra-pure graphite blocks weighing 360 short tons and was fueled by 5.4 short tons of uranium metal and 45 short tons of uranium oxide. Unlike most subsequent nuclear reactors, it had no radiation shielding or cooling system as it operated at very low power - about one-half watt. The success of Chicago Pile-1 provided the first vivid demonstration of the feasibility of the military use of nuclear energy by the Allies, as well as the reality of the danger that Nazi Germany could succeed in producing nuclear weapons. Previously, estimates of critical masses had been crude calculations, leading to order-of-magnitude uncertainties about the size of a hypothetical bomb. The successful use of graphite as a moderator paved the way for progress in the Allied effort. The Germans had failed to account for the importance of boron and cadmium impurities in the graphite samples on which they ran their test of its usability as a moderator, while Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi had asked suppliers about the most common contaminations of graphite after a first failed test. They consequently ensured that the next test would be run with graphite entirely devoid of them. In 1943, CP-1 was moved to Red Gate Woods and reconfigured to become Chicago Pile-2 (CP-2). There, it was operated for research until 1954, when it was dismantled and buried. The stands at Stagg Field were demolished in August 1957; the site is now a National Historic Landmark and a Chicago Landmark.