Tickling
the Dragon's Tail: Of Neutrons and Wilderness
Boyd
Norton
Not
long after the initial tests, modified versions of the Dragon Experiment killed
two physicists at Los Alamos.
In 1960 I went to work in a project
that was a direct descendant of that Dragon Experiment.
My
program was called SPERT, one of those Atomic Energy Commission acronyms that
translated to Special Power Excursion Reactor Tests. The location was the
National Reactor Testing Station in the vast desert of southern Idaho. The
research was about supercritical power excursions. [Note: it was a power excursion that initially triggered the tragic
Chernobyl accident and fire.] In all nuclear reactors it takes just a hundredth
of a second or less for the power, or fission rate, to leap from zero to
billions of watts, with the potential for severe core damage. That is a known
property of the fission process: the lightning speed of nuclear chain reactions
– neutrons causing fissions causing more neutrons causing more fissions, causing
…. summa celeritate.
In
recent years one journalist called us “The Right Stuff” of nuclear research. We
were pushing the outside of the envelope of nuclear reactor safety and I was at
the forefront of it all. My project had four reactors, all operated by remote
control from a half mile away - they had no radiation shielding or safety
systems of any kind. Like test pilots, our task was to shake ‘em out, push them
to their limits, push “the outside of the envelope,” all in the cause of
science. No sound barrier here, but we were in an unknown, unexplored territory
of nuclear technology and I had the honor of breaking through by blowing up one
of those reactors.
In
1962 it was decided to conduct the ultimate test on the SPERT I reactor. It
would be an attempt to answer the major safety question of that time: How far
could you push a highly enriched reactor core in a power excursion? And I had
the honor of running the test. I was 26 years old and only two years out of
college. The dragon roared. (See The
Kenyon Review Fall 2016 issue )
In 1963, at the age of 27, I was promoted
to Group Leader of the project and put in charge of the research and operations
of two of the four reactors.
Just
a few years later I gave it all up, pursuing a new career as photographer and
writer documenting and fighting to save the world’s last wild places and
wildlife
* *
*
I’ve had 18 books published, ranging in topics from
African elephants and mountain gorillas to Alaska wilderness to Siberia’s Lake
Baikal and more. Two of my books were collaborations – one with Peter
Matthiessen and another with Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
Tickling
the Dragon's Tail: Of Neutrons and Wilderness is my story of a life with neutrons and wilderness. I have over 50,000
words completed in draft.
We were a new generation of
physicists and engineers, different from those who preceded us in the Manhattan
Project. We were not under the pressure of building a nuclear weapon to end a
terrible world war. We were young, rambunctious and rowdy, fresh out of college
and drawn to the wild beauty of the country in and near Idaho. We hiked,
backpacked, climbed many mountains, rafted the wild rivers and discovered a few
unknown and secret places. But the work, especially, was a great attraction -
cutting edge science, studying the safety of nuclear reactors without
constraints. “Pushing back the foreskin of science,” as one of my colleagues
irreverently put it. Above all, it was
fun!
The main story deals with the work,
told with humor and lively narrative. I recall vividly the first time I sat at
the controls of a reactor, raising the control rods and unleashing the fission
process. This was no ordinary operation. This was splitting atoms and giving
birth to neutrons and gamma rays and beta particles - forces from the very core of the universe. For a twenty-five-year-old
kid a year just out of college, it was unbelievably exciting.
In a parallel narrative, there was
the joy of exploring the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. I grew up in Rhode
Island, one of the most densely populated regions of the country. Very quickly
I became fiercely protective of this new-found wild country in Idaho and
Wyoming. It was mine goddammit. I
discovered it and I wanted it kept wild and pure. Soon, however, there were certain
threats looming darkly over parts of the region. Some folks wanted to dam up
the wild rivers, cut down the pristine forests, dig huge, destructive mines in
the heart of the mountains. What madness.
This had to be stopped. But how?
I discovered the power of
photographs, coupled with forceful writing, that could impact public opinion
and help protect wild places. Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club were doing just
that and so could I. Embracing photography and writing with the same passion I
had for splitting atoms, I began publishing photographs and articles in
national magazines. With that I acquired a national reputation for my
conservation work.
At the time I had no
idea that all this would later lead to meetings and friendship with Arthur
Godfrey, Pete Seeger, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Tom Brokaw, Michio Kaku, Joe
McGinniss, Jim Fowler, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Leakey, two people who were
Secretary of the Interior, and - writing a screenplay with Mason Williams, head
writer for the Smothers Brothers. I became friends with America’s conservation
guru, David Brower, who later invited me to join him for a meeting in the
Kremlin with the Soviet Union’s Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, to save Siberia’s Lake Baikal as a
World Heritage Site.
Who
would have thought?
I quit my physics career in 1969. My
work had become a nightmare. One man in the Atomic Energy Commission
stifled and killed this, the world’s most important program studying nuclear
reactor safety. (This was so serious that the prestigious journal Science
ran a series of four major articles about it.) The
Wilderness Society had offered me a job in their Denver office, with promise to
continue my writing and photography along with my conservation work. It was an
agonizing decision - I would be giving up a career in science that I had
dreamed about since I was in grade school. Also, we would be leaving our
beloved Tetons and Yellowstone and Salmon River and those secret wild places we
had found over the years. In the end I decided I could do more to save
wilderness. I left. Many of my colleagues left also and, like me, a few made
radical career changes.
As a parting shot, I suggested to my
SPERT colleagues remaining behind that our project be renamed the Facility for
Uranium Criticality Kinetics and Irradiation Tests. Project FUCKIT seemed appropriate.
I worked for the Wilderness Society
for eighteen months. We had a falling out over tactics in conservation efforts.
I was too radical for them. I was fired. At that juncture the Sierra Club
offered me a contract for my first book. So I embarked on freelancing as writer
and photographer.
It’s been a fun ride, with crazy
adventures in Siberia, Alaska, Antarctica, Borneo, Africa, South America. From
my bio in The Kenyon Review: Boyd
Norton
is no stranger to risks. Since blowing up a nuclear reactor he has had close
encounters with charging grizzly bears, poisonous snakes (he was bitten once),
crazy bush pilots, snorting Cape buffaloes, rhino and elephant poachers,
whitewater rapids, vertical mountain walls, Borneo headhunters, mountain
gorillas, and Moscow taxi drivers.
My YouTube video
(me blowing up the reactor) has 54,000 views.
Another link of interest: American Association for
the Advancement of Science
profile. I am a member of AAAS. For promotion of the book, they have a very
literate and book-buying membership of over 130,000.
