Today, a story about fear. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
Since 1986, engineers at Los
Alamos have been planning a nuclear waste dump at
Yucca Mountain, in Nevada. They hope to cast
plutonium in glass blocks and bury it underground.
One expert, Charles Bowman, offered a competing
plan. He would use the plutonium in a sub-critical
reactor -- one that wouldn't run by itself but
would have to be driven by a proton beam. That
would degrade the plutonium and generate power on
Then Bowman went a step further. He and a colleague
wrote a paper criticizing simple burial. Maybe
plutonium could leach out of the glass and cause a
nuclear explosion. When colleagues read the paper,
they asked him to slow down. The suggestion was,
may I say, incendiary; and it was based on a long
string of ifs.
Nuclear fission goes on all the time in uranium and
plutonium. Fission releases energy and neutrons.
The neutrons cause more fission. The process is
gentle because only a few neutrons hit anything.
Atoms are too far apart. Neutrons are too small.
Imagine two magnetic bullets fired toward each
other on parallel paths, a half-inch apart. Bullets
move too fast to be drawn into a collision. They'd
have to move slowly to collide.
In a nuclear reactor, engineers surround uranium
with water. Neutrons enter the water and are slowed
down. Those that ricochet back into the core can
easily hit uranium atoms. That's when fission takes
So, said Bowman, if groundwater reached that
nuclear waste, an explosion might occur. Colleagues
attacked his fabric of assumptions. You reach a
point in Bowman's logic -- one said -- where, to
get an explosion, a miracle has to occur. Actually,
such reactions do occur in nature. But when they
do, they simply boil the groundwater away and turn
themselves off. They fizzle out. But public fear
doesn't fizzle out -- not by a long shot!
As the fuss went on at Los Alamos, the New
York Times got wind of it. The next day a
Nevada senator showed up in Congress waving the
headline: "Scientists Fear Atomic Explosion of
So Los Alamos commissioned a Red Team to attack
Bowman's idea; a Blue Team to defend it; and a
White Team to summarize the findings. Bowman's work
did not stand up to that scrutiny.
Now Science magazine tells how DOE
studies the problem to death. They react to
politicians instead of getting the dump built and
the material put away. Meanwhile, Apaches in New
Mexico are saying, "Put the dump on our
reservation. We need the jobs."
We all crave theater, and, ever since the first
Frankenstein movie, technology has provided
theater. But this is no place for the theater of
politics. This real problem needs a real solution.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds