Thursday, March 24, 2022

 

Tickling the Dragon's Tail: Of Neutrons and Wilderness

Boyd Norton

 One of the legendary stories of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos was about famed physicist Richard Feynman. A risky experiment had been proposed by physicist Otto Frisch which entailed sliding a piece of fissionable Uranium 235 through a sub-critical mass of the same material, making it supercritical for an instant. This would cause a burst of fissions which would help refine calculations for the critical mass needed for the atomic bomb. At the meeting where the presentation was made for the experiment, Feynman chuckled, saying “That’s like tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.” Thereafter it was named the Dragon Experiment.

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.

 

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