93. Neptunium: Great Expectations

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To the person who said, “the episodes are never too long,” I’m terribly sorry.

Featured above: The Landscape Of Thorns, by Michael Brill and Safdar Abidi via the DOE. Doesn’t it just make you want to visit?

Show Notes

Corrections Dept.: I accidentally say that both Hahn and Meitner were Austrian. Meitner was, but Hahn was born in Germany and working in Berlin at the time. Thanks go to Billy Walsh for bringing this to my attention; I regret the error.

Please do let me know if you ever hear me say something incorrect in an episode!

Calls And Echoes: The music of Kai Engel has been an integral part of this program since before episode 0. I have no personal connection to the artist, I just happened to be lucky enough to stumble upon his work when I first started putting the show together. I was delighted to see that just last month, he released Farewells, a new album of Creative Commons music that fits just as perfectly as anything he’s made before. If you think his music might be a good fit for your project, or just want some lofi science beats to chill to, check out his music on Bandcamp. (Just make sure to check the licensing on a particular track if you’re going to use it in your own work.)

A Totally Normal And Reasonable Idea: I very much wanted to talk about the Ray Cats in the nuclear semiotics section. It was an idea even wilder than the atomic priesthood: A special breed of housecat would be genetically designed to change color after exposure to a certain amount of radiation, a living, breathing dosimeter. If the cat’s eyes flash purple, you’re in trouble.

Ultimately, two solid reasons kept me from including anything about this: The episode is very long already — the longest yet, actually — and another podcast has already told that story better than I could if I tried to squeeze it in here. 99% Invisible released an episode on long-term nuclear waste warning messages ten years ago, and it’s such a classic, I actually avoided it while writing this episode.

They also enacted a little “ritual-and-legend” of their own, too. In order to make sure knowledge of the ray cats was passed down through the generations, they commissioned singer-songwriter Emperor X to write and perform a future folk classic: 10,000-Year Earworm To Discourage Resettlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty), presented here for your listening pleasure.

I gotta say, I think this number does have the staying power to last a hundred centuries. Now if only someone would figure out those cats!

They’re Planets, But They’re Also Gods, But They’re Also Places That Are Not Planets: In English (and many other languages), Uranus is the only planet with a name that’s Greek in origin, although referencing one of the member of the pantheon that’s shared with Roman mythology. Partly this is because Uranus wasn’t discovered until much later than Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury, and partly this is because the naming of Uranus was a big mess.

Another fun little tidbit I didn’t know until relatively recently: The Roman equivalent of Uranus was called Caelus, and was the father of Saturn, who in turn was the father of Jupiter, who was in turn the father of Mars.

Of course, many languages, like Korean, Hindi, and Navajo, have very different origins for the names of the planets!

I’d Commute: “Via Panisperna” probably translates to something like “Ham Sandwich Street,” but I don’t feel confident enough in this assertion to include it in the episode.

Il Ragazzo di Via Stige: Almost all the Panisperna Boys lived full lives. A couple others followed Fermi to the United States, others stayed in Italy, and I believe one moved to the Soviet Union. Orso Corbino died in 1937 at the age of 60. Ettore Majorana, “The Grand Inquisitor,” met a far more mysterious end than any of his colleagues did. One of his last acts was to write the following letter:

Dear Carrelli,

I made a decision that has become unavoidable. There isn’t a bit of selfishness in it, but I realize what trouble my sudden disappearance will cause you and the students. For this as well, I beg your forgiveness, but especially for betraying the trust, the sincere friendship, and the sympathy you gave me over the past months.

I ask you to remember me to all those I learned to know and appreciate in your Institute, especially Sciuti: I will keep a fond memory of them all at least until 11 pm tonight, possibly later too.

— E. Majorana

What would a new episode be without the promise of more show notes to come at a later time? Old habits die hard!

Episode Script

Elements 92, 93, and 94 constitute a concisely cute course of chemical cognomina: they’re named in order after three of our solar system’s farthest known bodies. It’s a pleasing little arrangement, but almost wasn’t possible. Each name can only be used once, and “neptunium” was almost claimed long before the table’s 93rd entry.^{1 2}

In 1886, Clemens Winkler discovered element 32, which had been predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev. Similarly, the planet Neptune was predicted to exist to explain the strange orbit of Uranus before anyone actually found it. Winkler thought this echo of predictive powers would make “neptunium” an appropriate name.

Unfortunately, the planet had been discovered forty years prior, and scientist Hans Rudolph Hermann already used “neptunium” for the name for the element he discovered.^{3 4} Thus, Winkler was forced to go with his second choice of name — germanium.

As for Hermann’s neptunium, it didn’t stick. His “discovery” was one of the many false starts that litter the footnotes of textbooks. Turns out he just had a particularly perplexing sample of tantalum and niobium.

So when element 93 was discovered 54 years after all that, “neptunium” was once again eligible as an element name, and the opportunity was as perfect as it could ever get. Without Hermann’s mistake, we wouldn’t have this planetary alignment with the periodic table. It was a near miss — and not the only mistake ever made in the name of neptunium.

You’re listening to The Episodic Table Of Elements, and I’m T. R. Appleton. Each episode, we take a look at the fascinating true stories behind one element on the periodic table.

Today, we’re going transuranic with neptunium.

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For the rest of our tabular travels, we’ll be dealing with the transuranium elements — those on the periodic table that are heavier than element 92, uranium. For a while, these elements were purely hypothetical, and some scientists wondered if they could exist at all.

Mendeleev didn’t predict any elements heavier than uranium, and neither had anyone else, really, until they started discovering them. Partly this is because uranium is the heaviest element that can be found the ground. Neptunium and plutonium are technically out there, but only in microscopically trace amounts, and elements 95 through 118 have only ever been seen in a laboratory setting.

So before anyone could discover new elements in the lab, they had to discover a method by which they could do so, and one of the most promising efforts was led by Enrico Fermi.

That name might ring a bell. He’s popped up in prior episodes — it would be hard to avoid him, since he was one of the twentieth century’s most renowned scientists. He actually received that rarest of accolades when element 100 was named in his honor. For that reason, we’ll save most of his story for that future episode. All we need to know for now is that by 1934, Fermi was at the forefront of the rapidly accelerating field of particle physics.

Fermi was a popular professor and researcher at the University of Rome, personally attracting some of Italy’s brightest minds to work in his lab. Said laboratory was located on Panisperna Street, so Fermi and his team came to be known as “i ragazzi di via Panisperna” — roughly meaning “the guys from Panisperna Street,” or simply, “The Panisperna Boys.”

As their leader, Fermi naturally became known as “The Pope.” Fermi’s right-hand man was a friend from undergrad named Franco Rasetti, but people called him “the Cardinal Vicar.” Sternly critical Ettore Majorana was “the Grand Inquisitor.” Not everyone’s moniker was so ministerial, though. Episodic Table alum Emilio Segre was part of the group, and his withering glare earned him the name “Basilisk,” after the mythological beast whose gaze can turn a person to stone. Standing beside these intimidating figures was Edoardo Amaldi, mockingly called “the Little Boy.” Sounds like a bad beat, but that’s just what one gets for having such cherubic cheeks. Amazingly, he did not have the team’s most demeaning nickname, because when young Bruno Pontecorvo came aboard in 1934, he was dubbed “Cucciolo,” aka, “Puppy Dog.”^{5 6}

Orso Mario Corbino supervised the lab, but he wasn’t really a part of the daily goings-on. Nonetheless, the ragazzi gave him a tongue-in-cheek sobriquet, too. He was called “God Almighty,” due to his miraculous ability to make funding appear.

Clearly a playful spirit permeated the air on Via Panisperna, but make no mistake: when it came to science, these boys meant serious business.

The neutron had only been discovered two years earlier, and Fermi’s team quickly became experts in the particle’s behavior and use. They aimed their neutron beam at every known element, hoping to find never-before-seen isotopes — especially radioactive ones. They went about this monumental task in the most systematic way possible: Starting with hydrogen, they traversed the periodic table one element at a time. (Just like us!)

Initial results were discouraging. Nothing came from their experiments with hydrogen, nor helium, nor lithium, nor beryllium… they saw no success at all until their ninth experiment, when their neutron-addled sample of fluorine set the Geiger counter abuzz. Aluminum did, too, and soon neutron radiation was lighting up the periodic table left, right, and center.^{7 8}

The most spectacular result came from the series’ final experiment, number 92. Blasting uranium with neutrons created new radioactive products the world had never seen. The going theory was that the uranium nuclei absorbed some of the neutrons fired upon them, becoming something heavier in the process. Supervisor Orso Corbino proudly announced the team’s discovery of not just element 93, but element 94, too, at a prestigious gathering of intelligentsia, where the King of Italy was also in attendance.^{9 10}

So momentous was this discovery that it earned Fermi the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics, celebrating “his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.”

There’s just one problem: Fermi and his team did not synthesize element 93, nor element 94, nor any other element heavier than uranium.

The Panisperna Boys’ investigation just wasn’t thorough enough. After firing neutrons at uranium, they looked for evidence of smaller atoms, but they only looked for elements lighter than uranium and heavier than lead. They believed that if their reaction yielded any results, they would definitely be among that set. Finding no such evidence, they concluded that they must have produced all-new elements. If only they had upheld the systematic rigor that defined the experiment, they would’ve found barium and krypton among the remains.¹¹

It’s worth emphasizing that the announcement of newly discovered elements was not the result of some braggadocio on Fermi’s part. He was famously meticulous with his work, and he cautioned that these findings were preliminary, with nothing certain until the team could confirm their results. In all likelihood, the experimenters would have discovered their error, and we wouldn’t be talking about any of this at all.

But Fermi didn’t have a say in the matter. It was Orso Corbino, the lab’s supervisor, who decided to share the news, and he didn’t so much as send Fermi a telegram. Corbino was not just a scientist, you see. He was also a politician who held important roles in the Italian government from 1920 until his death in 1937. He was even appointed to some of those positions personally by Benito Mussolini.^{12 13 14}

I should mention that Corbino never officially enrolled in Italy’s Fascist Party. Whether or not serving in Mussolini’s government for fifteen years makes one a fascist, then, is a matter of opinion. Regardless, he was a fervent proponent of Italian supremacy.

In fact, that was the entire justification for the Panisperna lab’s existence. The lab was part of The Royal Academy Of Italy, an organization explicitly founded as “a living center of the national culture, which fuels and promotes the intellectual movement according to the genius and tradition of our people, and spreads its effectiveness beyond the borders of the Homeland.” ^{15 16}

The landmark science performed by Fermi and his team was a critical part of this. Corbino yearned for an earlier time — as all fascists do^{18 19}What better jewel in Italy’s intellectual crown than an entry on the periodic table of elements?

Fermi didn’t really buy into all this bunk, but neither did it seem to particularly bother him. As long as funding kept pouring in, he gladly looked the other way. Fermi considered himself “apolitical.”^{20 21}

Italian bureaucrats dreamed of giving the new elements names like mussolinium, or perhaps ausonium or hesperium, references to ancient names for Italy the same way “gallium” refers to France. They ultimately decided against that, worried that the elements’ short half-life might suggest a similarly short lifetime for their regime.^{22 23}

The scientific community accepted Fermi’s findings with near-unanimity. Only one notable voice rang out criticizing Fermi’s work, the voice of Ida Noddack.

If that name doesn’t sound familiar, it might be because in previous episodes I mispronounced her name as Aye-duh Noddack. If you do remember Mrs. Doctor Noddack from previous episodes, it won’t shock you to hear that she continued ruffling feathers all across Europe.

Soon after the Italians announced their “discovery,” Noddack published a paper in the Journal of Applied Chemistry simply titled, “On Element 93,” in which she candidly panned Fermi’s work. His method of proof was “not valid,” she wrote, and it was “not clear why he chose to stop at lead.” She said that Fermi “ought to have compared his new radioelement with all known elements.”^{24 25}

You’d think that somewhere out there, some curious mind would look beyond the harsh tone to recognize the validity of Noddack’s criticism. But apparently no such soul was out there. The paper went completely unacknowledged.

There were a few reasons for the frigid non-response to Noddack’s paper. She never exactly made friends easily. She offered criticism frequently and directly to everyone she met. In personal correspondence, physicist Lise Meitner once wrote that she always knew that Noddack was “a disagreeable thing.”²⁶ Aside from her devoted husband, Noddack didn’t really have allies in the scientific community.

On the other hand, Fermi was a world-renowned experimenter and theoretician, widely influential, and a convivial conversationalist with charismatic charm.

In a purely empirical sense, none of that should really matter — but we are not purely empirical beings.

Noddack was married to a prominent chemist, Walter Noddack. The two had met while working in Berlin’s Physical Chemistry lab many years earlier. But rather than recognize the duo as the Arbeitsgemeinschaft they were, Ida was commonly written off as just a chemist’s wife.²⁷ Academics still debate the degree to which misogyny played a role in silencing Noddack, but historian Naomi Oreskes summed it up nicely in the August 2003 edition of Science: “Many factors affect the reception of new scientific claims. Gender happens to be one of them. This is not an either/or choice.”²⁸

Indeed, we are well aware that other factors played a role in this particular case. The Noddacks displayed an enthusiastic zeal for German nationalism, further complicating their relationship with the international community. But perhaps most importantly, by this time the Noddacks had already demolished their public reputation. For years, they insisted they had discovered an element called masurium, even though their research didn’t back that up. Episode 43 tells that story more completely, but in short, many scientists permanently lost any respect or trust they had for Walter and Ida Noddack.²⁹

One such scientist was Otto Hahn, who spent his time between 1934 and 1938 replicating Fermi’s results successfully — and thoroughly. He did find the barium and krypton that Fermi neglected to look for, but neither he nor his partner Fritz Strassman could not explain their presence.

Hahn used to work closely with Lise Meitner. However, things had become complicated by 1938. They were both Austrian, but Meitner was Jewish. So she fled to Sweden while Hahn remained in German territory.^{30 31} They continued collaborating long-distance, though, with Meitner writing letters almost daily and Hahn occasionally taking quick jaunts to meet in person. Relying upon her ability to divine results from his fastidious results, in December of ’38 he wrote, “Perhaps you can come up with some sort of fantastic explanation. We knew ourselves that [uranium] can’t actually burst apart into [barium].”^{32 33}

Meitner was enjoying a visit from her nephew, Otto Frisch, yet another brilliant nuclear physicist named Otto. While enjoying an afternoon ski, Meitner pitched Frisch a hypothesis: when stuck by a neutron, uranium atoms flew apart into smaller atoms — like barium, element 56, and krypton, element 36, which both Fermi and Hahn had produced. Coincidentally, 56 plus 36 equals 92, the atomic number of uranium.³⁴

She also predicted that a few neutrons would fly loose, and a little mass would be converted to energy, in neat and tidy accordance with the most famous formula in all of physics: E equals m c squared.³⁵

Fermi and Hahn thought they were performing nuclear addition or subtraction, when really they were doing division — or, as it’s called in this context, fission.

So Meitner and Frisch had figured it all out theoretically, but Hahn and Strassman had the experimental data to back it up — and, they published first. January 6, 1939, to be exact.^{36 37}

Meitner received no mention whatsoever in the publication of this historic finding. Perhaps that’s understandable, since Hahn and Strassman were working directly under Hitler’s rule — crediting a Jewish physicist could have resulted in political complications. But Hahn never gave Meitner her due, including when he accepted the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of nuclear fission.^{38 39}

It was a betrayal that wounded Meitner deeply, but she never lost her cool. Hahn had a strained relationship with the Nazis, and it only grew more so when Germany lost the war and all the regime’s crimes came to light. “He suppresses the past with all his might,” Meitner once wrote. “As I am part of that suppressed past, Hahn never, in any of his interviews about his life work, mentioned our long years of working together, nor did he even mention my name.”⁴⁰

We will find justice for Meitner, but not today, I’m afraid.

Incredibly, though, Meitner was not the first person to figure out what happens when uranium gets blasted with neutrons. That would be, once again, Ida Noddack. In the same paper that so ruthlessly criticized Fermi’s work, Noddack wrote, “When heavy nuclei are bombarded by neutrons, it is conceivable that these nuclei break up into several large fragments, which would of course be isotopes of known elements, but would not be neighbors of the irradiated element.”^{41 42 43}

Noddack published that five years before Hahn and Meitner came to the same conclusion empirically. During the interim, Walter Noddack once attended a lecture by Hahn, and asked why he had never responded to Ida’s ideas. Allegedly, Hahn responded that he “didn’t want to embarrass [Walter’s] wife.”^{44 45}

The whole situation was an awkward, mansplainery mess from top to bottom, and yet, it might have turned out the best way possible.

Fermi’s Nobel wasn’t awarded entirely in error. While he didn’t discover any new elements, he was also recognized “for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.”⁴⁶ That method of handling neutrons paved the way for future important discoveries, and was probably worth the prize on its own.⁴⁷

Winning the Nobel also offered a priceless travel opportunity for Fermi.

By 1938, Mussolini’s government instituted discriminatory laws against its own Jewish citizens — including Enrico Fermi’s wife and children. Winning the Nobel provided an excuse for the whole family to travel to Stockholm, Sweden, and from there they continued to the United States, which they made their new home. It’s not certain whether this was a planned life change or a surreptitious escape, but either way, the result was the same — the genius mind belonged to Italy no longer.^{48 49 50 51}

Now consider an alternate version of history where the Panisperna team did realize the significance of their experiment. That’s a world in which Italy learns how to conduct nuclear fission in 1934. Maybe they would share that technology with their German allies… or maybe not. Either way, that would be an enormous head start over the rest of the world. The following ten years — the following hundred years! — might play out quite differently in that scenario.⁵²

Ironically, in this reality, the actual discovery of neptunium stood in stark contrast to the festive exultations surrounding the Italians’ sham announcement.

In 1940, Berkeley Edwin McMillan and Philip H. Abelson were doing a little neutron bombardment of their own. But while Fermi and Hahn had been zapping uranium-235, McMillan and Abelson were using uranium-238, and that makes a pretty big difference.^{53 54}

(Just as a refresher, the isotope’s number, like 235 or 238, is the total number of protons plus neutrons within the nucleus. So both U-235 and U-238 have 92 protons, because that’s what defines the atom as uranium. But one contains more neutrons than the other.)

While U-235 reacts to neutron bombardment by splitting into lighter atoms, U-238 actually can absorb that neutron, turning into U-239.

Not for long, though. Uranium-239 is quite unstable. The combination of 92 protons and 147 neutrons simply can’t hold itself together very effectively. So it breaks down, emitting beta radiation and rearranging itself slightly: 146 neutrons, and 93 protons.

You might have noticed that’s one more proton than there was before, and an element is defined by its number of protons. McMillan and Abelson were the first to find element ninety-three, and they named it neptunium.

Alas, neptunium-239 isn’t terribly stable either, so it also decays into something else — something in much higher demand — but we’ll pick up that story another time.

So why no press tours or ticker-tape parades for the first transuranic element? Well, the world had changed between 1934 and 1940. A war was on now, and even though the United States wasn’t yet officially involved, the whole situation was tense enough to chill the scientific community’s typically balmy air of collaboration. So McMillan and Abelson might not have enjoyed as much fanfare as there was for Fermi, but there was a Nobel in it. Eleven years later. For McMillan only.

Speaking of Fermi: Later in life, he and a few colleagues were reviewing architect’s sketches for the University of Chicago’s new Institute For Nuclear Science. A bas-relief above the entrance showed a person-shape that was a little hard to make out. When the group wondered just what that guy was doing, Fermi quipped that it was probably “a scientist not discovering fission.”⁵⁵

Ha! Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s a delightful wisecrack, but please, let’s all remember that while toiling away in that lab on via Panisperna, Enrico Fermi was also not discovering neptunium.

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Bad news, element collectors! A sample of the mineral aeschynite, which probably contains a few atoms of neptunium at any given time, is likely your best bet for acquisition.⁵⁶ The most prominent source of concentrated neptunium might also be the single most unwanted material on Earth. Lots of very smart people have spent a lot of time considering just how to get this stuff as far away from everybody as possible. You guessed it — we’re talking about nuclear waste.

Ninety-three isn’t just neptunium’s atomic number, it’s also the number of commercially operating nuclear reactors in the United States. Or at least, that was true when I started writing this script. In April 2024, another one went online in Georgia.^{57 58 59} Alas! Time waits for no podcast.

Those 94 reactors run very clean, but they do generate some amount of waste, and it’s a strong contender for “most hazardous material on Earth.” It’s packed full of toxic heavy metals, corrosive and alkali materials, and it’s occasionally prone to spontaneous combustion, but most infamously, it’s highly radioactive.^{60 61 62 63}

Most nuclear waste is managed with relative ease. But about 5%, mainly byproducts of commercial power generation, weapons production, and lab research, provides more cause for concern. Even after it’s been sitting idle for years, this High-Level Waste can dole out a fatal dose of radiation twenty times over.

Element 93 accounts for about one tenth of one percent of spent nuclear fuel.⁶⁴ That might not sound like a lot, but that represents over 50 tonnes of fresh neptunium-237 produced every year.^{65 67}

Neptunium is one of the longest-lived components of nuclear waste. Strontium-90 has a half-life around thirty years, and plutonium-239’s is about 24,000 years, but neptunium-237’s half-life is well over two million years.^{68 69 70}

So it remains radioactive for a very long time, but there’s a twist, too: It decays slowly but constantly into protactinium-233, which has a half-life of 27 days. With such a brief half-life, even a brief or small dose could subject a person to a lethal radiation — and neptunium-237 is always leaking a small supply.⁷¹

Might I remind you, that’s happening alongside the plethora of other elements variously irradiating, burning, poisoning, corroding, and otherwise polluting their surroundings over the course of days, decades, and millennia.

Clearly this is a serious matter requiring careful and deliberate handling. Our brightest minds have spent more than a century unraveling the secrets of the atom, so what solutions have they devised for dealing with waste?

A surprisingly old technique is used by almost everyone: They’ve sequestered the toxic substance within a special canister, then taken that can, and kicked it, down the road.

See, nuclear waste is hot. Metaphorically, as in, it’s highly radioactive, but also literally, it can reach very high temperatures. When it’s fresh out the atomic oven, spent fuel is so hot that it could melt straight through most materials.^{72 73 74 75}

Thankfully, water provides a simple solution to both kinds of heat. After radioactive fuel is spent, it’s deposited at the bottom of a deep pool of water. Automated systems ensure the water stays at a low temperature, to act as an effective coolant, and water naturally absorbs radiation quite well. Usually around twelve meters deep, these pools shield radiation so well that a person at the surface would be exposed to less radiation from the submerged waste than from distant stars in outer space.⁷⁶

After a few years, the spent fuel cools down enough to be safely removed from the cooling pond and transferred to a “dry cask.” The waste is sealed off from the outside world by thick layers of metal, gas, and concrete.⁷⁷

Theoretically, this is the point when spent fuel would be disposed of permanently. There’s just one problem: with the sole exception of Finland, no country has any place to permanently dispose of nuclear waste.

It’s not just temperature-hot and radioactive-hot. Nuclear waste is also politically hot, and very few people want to touch it. The U.S. government has been so slow to figure this out that it pays nuclear power plants to hold their waste in “temporary storage,” for now… and for the foreseeable future. In fact, almost all the world’s spent nuclear fuel is kept in temporary onsite storage, awaiting a permanent solution that isn’t being built.

One metaphor bandied about for the past fifty years likens the situation to “building a mansion without a toilet.”⁷⁸

But others will tell you this is no big deal. Those dry casks are exceptionally secure, so temporary storage becoming de facto permanent is fine, actually. Who needs a toilet when we have all these mason jars?^{79 80}

And they’re not entirely wrong! Modern cooling ponds and dry casks are extremely safe, designed to withstand earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, explosions, and any other disaster imaginable.^{81 82 83} As long as nothing unexpected happens, there’s nothing to fear.⁸⁴

But it would be quite foolish to presume that nothing unexpected will happen for the next hundred centuries. We haven’t even managed that well for the past few decades.

Since cooling ponds hold fresh nuclear waste, they require constant attention. If the temperature is not carefully maintained, the water keeping everything cool can evaporate, laying bare the material within. So exposed, the waste becomes much more likely to break through its container, possibly even bursting into flames and spreading clouds of radioactive smoke.^{85 86}

That’s how the Kyshtym Disaster happened, which we heard about back in episode 44. This was also a concern following the partial meltdown at  Fukushima, but quick and brave work prevented that from happening.^{87 88}

In Humboldt County, California, casks of spent fuel are buried in a bluff on the Pacific coast. Each year, the waves encroach upon the shore a few meters more, and rise a few centimeters higher. Nearby, three tectonic plates converge at the Mendocino Triple Junction, making this the most seismically active area in California.^{89 90}

Most nuclear waste is located in less precarious places – for now. But we can’t guarantee they’ll stay that way on geological time scales. And I haven’t even mentioned the thousands of square kilometers we’ve accidentally saturated with radioactive waste, like at Hanford, Washington and Savannah River, South Carolina.^{91 92 93 94 95 96}

The problem won’t go away just because we keep ignoring it. Remember, we don’t have a toilet, but we do have an awful lot of crap. So what should we do?

Well, what if we… shot our nuclear waste into outer space? That would get it far away from everyone, forever, right?

The idea has come up before, but there are some big problems with it. We’ll look at two of them.

First, it’s very, very difficult to launch stuff into distant space. The vast majority of space flight happens in or below Earth orbit.^{97 98} To go anywhere else requires much more energy, highly impractical for a regular garbage pickup.

So flinging all our nuclear waste into space would be roughly akin to getting rid of our “household sewage” by dumping it on the front lawn.

Except not quite, because of that second big problem: it’s very, very difficult to launch stuff into space at all. About four percent of rocket launches fail in some way.⁹⁹ Sometimes they disintegrate in the high atmosphere over vast swaths of civilization. That’s bad enough when the payload is a communications satellite, but a fireworks display of radioactive trash would be decidedly worse.¹⁰⁰

To stretch our metaphor, then, sending our nuclear waste to space would be kind of like unloading our “personal wastewater” on the front lawn… by bailing it out the upstairs window. Even if you have incredible aim, you’re going to make a much worse mess in the process.

Right then. Okay. Well, hey, if water does such a great job shielding radiation, why don’t we just dump all our nuclear waste in the ocean?

We have actually done that before, so I can give you more concrete reasons why that’s a terrible idea.

First and foremost, things live in the ocean, and none of it benefits from a booster of ionizing radiation. That should be reason enough, but if I must make it personal, sometimes we live near the ocean, and eat the things that live in it.

Also, ocean water moves in currents, so waste dumped in it has a tendency to likewise move — but move in a way that pollutants can accumulate in certain areas. Salt water and high pressure would wear away whatever containment was designed to hold the waste, and again, we’re talking about stuff that needs to remain safe for tens of thousands of years.¹⁰¹

In the mid-twentieth century, countries around the world dumped low-level radioactive waste in the ocean.^{102 103 104 105} For a brief period, the U.S. Navy rolled barrels of nuclear waste right over the side of a ship’s deck. When they bobbed back to the water’s surface, aircraft strafed them with machine gun fire until they finally sank.^{106 107 108}

Thankfully, we came to our senses relatively quickly, before we could deal irreparable damage to the seas’ ecosystems. International treaties have banned ocean disposal of radioactive waste for thirty years, so even if you think the environmental concerns are overblown, the personal consequences would be undeniable.^{109 110 111}

So no, the ocean is not our toilet.

Having ruled out air and sea, we return to dry land in our search. And we must find a place that will not only resist the water, wind, and shifting earth, but also the inquisitive probations of far-future life forms — primarily for their own safety.

The question is, how could we possibly warn future generations? We cannot assume that any modern language will still be in use tens of thousands of years in the future. Anyone who’s read Beowulf knows just how much a language can change even within a single millennium. It’s even possible that future interlopers might belong to a young civilization, or even some newly sapient species.

The multidisciplinary field of “nuclear semiotics” exists to try to answer that question. This discipline aims to find effective ways to tell the distant future about the dangers we’ve left behind. When considering ways to communicate with unknowable life forms a hundred thousand years from now, ideas tend to focus more on vibes than on words, attending to a sense of fear or dread that’s common among animals.^{112 113}

For instance, you may know that housecats have a peculiar quirk — well, not just one; their behavior consists solely of quirky peculiarities. But one of them is a propensity to react with agitated fear, often expressed through tremendous vertical leaps and discordant yowling, when confronted with an unexpected floor cucumber. One theory¹¹⁴ — a poorly substantiated theory,¹¹⁵ but a theory nonetheless — is that the elongated dark green shape, lying on the ground in peripheral vision, might be mistaken for a snake. (Experts recommend not repeating this experiment, as it can cause undue stress to the cat.)¹¹⁶

Experts across the decades have tried to figure out the best cucumber to warn any future cats away from radioactive landfills… so to speak.¹¹⁷ Usually, these groups included individuals from staggeringly diverse fields — not just physics and chemistry, but linguistics, engineering, archaeology, climatology, psychology, and even science fiction.¹¹⁸

One such group summarized the message they wished to convey without words like so:

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. … This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.”¹¹⁹

The Human Interference Task Force, formed by the U.S. Department of Energy in 1981, came up with several designs for an appropriate “anti-memorial,” all of them massive, foreboding, and austere landscapes. Most of them are vast fields of dark, broken stone, nigh-impossible to traverse and even worse at sustaining life, clearly signalling from a distance that this is not a place worth exploring. The most dramatic of all is probably the “Plain of Thorns,” featuring basalt spikes twenty-five meters tall, jutting out from the earth at all angles and hopefully instilling a proper sense of apprehension in any would-be explorers, no matter what species they might be.

There’s just one problem: A miles-wide domain of black spikes erupting from the earth for no apparent purpose is compelling! Such a place would practically beg onlookers to approach and learn more.

Or, as Reddit user Nerindil remarked, “Damn, that looks like a place of honor. Like some highly esteemed deed is being commemorated or at least something valued is being stored there.”

We have a pretty consistent history of blowing straight past ominous warnings etched in ancient stone — even when we really should have listened.

For hundreds of years, stone markers along the Japanese coast have warned locals of the ever-present threat of tsunamis. Their messages are quite clear, like, “Always be prepared for unexpected tsunamis. Choose life over your possessions and valuables.” At least one warns people not to build homes below its elevation. Nonetheless, these warnings are often disregarded eventually. Following the 2011 tsunami, one resident said, “It takes about three generations for people to forget. Those that experience the disaster themselves pass it to their children and their grandchildren, but then the memory fades.”¹²⁰

Other semiotic suggestions surpassed the Field of Thorns in impracticality and folly. One leveraged the lasting power of “ritual-and-legend.” Ancient religious customs around hygiene and diet offered more than just spiritual fulfillment. They often helped prevent disease, ward off danger, and strengthen social bonds.¹²¹ With similar goals in mind, the aforementioned HITF recommended a system of beliefs and practices that would keep its congregation far from the sites of any radioactive vaults — without bothering to fuss with any of the matter’s scientific details.¹²²

As the authors explain:

The legend-and-ritual, as now envisaged, would be tantamount to laying a “false trail”, meaning that the uninitiated will be steered away from the hazardous site for reasons other than the scientific knowledge of the possibility of radiation and its implications; essentially, the reason would be accumulated superstition to shun a certain area permanently.

A ritual annually renewed can be foreseen, with the legend retold year-by-year … The actual “truth” would be entrusted  exclusively to — what we might call for dramatic emphasis — an “atomic priesthood”…¹²³

This idea has been almost universally criticized in the decades since. For instance, a 2021 paper dedicated to this topic concluded that “the development of the Atomic Priesthood is not foreseeable, and unexpected events could derail its intended purpose.”¹²⁴ Nearly thirty years prior, a similar work asserted that “[these] recommendations … seem devoid of an ethos.”¹²⁵

It’s all a bit moot, anyway. Even if the Department of Energy fell head over heels for this Church of the Atom, the author had no idea how to make it happen. The very next paragraph reads, “The best mechanism for embarking upon a novel tradition, along the lines suggested, is at present unclear.” So, for all we know, maybe the research group just really liked A Canticle For Leibowitz.

I can tell you that the government of Finland did not ordain an atomic priesthood when they built the world’s very first permanent repository for high-level radioactive waste. Yes, finally, there is some place on Earth for the ultimate disposal of spent nuclear fuel.

The place is called Onkalo, because anyone who visits will need to see an ONCOLO-gist! … Okay, not really. It’s actually the Finnish word for “cavity,” which the place technically is, but that word doesn’t begin to describe the sprawling, billion-euro complex hidden half a kilometer underground.¹²⁶

It’s a fitting place for the first facility of its kind. Nuclear power provides 9% of the world’s electricity,¹²⁷ but in Finland that figure is closer to 33% — recently boosted after the country’s fifth nuclear reactor came online in April 2023. ^{128 129}

Onkalo is technically not yet open for business, but it’s licensed and ready to accept deliveries practically any day now. The Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency calls it a “game changer.”¹³⁰ Hopefully it does change the game, because the world sorely needs many more disposal sites like Onkalo.

There’s no technical obstacle preventing their construction, and proper site selection can forestall geological concerns, even on geological timescales. The problem is, as it so often is, human in nature.

It’s hard to find a community willing to provide a home for nuclear waste that will outlast their grandkids (and possibly our entire civilization). The U.S. government tried to solve that problem by designating Yucca Mountain, Nevada as the nation’s deep waste repository in 1987. However, the Nevada state government was not fond of that idea whatsoever.

Twenty-five years earlier, the country’s very first radioactive waste site opened in Beatty, Nevada — located in the same county as Yucca Mountain.¹³¹

Only low-level radioactive material was ever sent to Beatty, but it was handled carelessly. Waste containers routinely leaked, and a truck of radioactive cargo caught fire at the gate. Astonishingly, the people responsible for those mishaps were also negligent record-keepers, so no one’s really sure what’s buried at the 40-acre site. After several employees got caught stealing some of the radioactive items meant for disposal, the Environmental Protection Agency conducted a door-to-door search of hundreds of homes and businesses, confiscating wall clocks, compasses, and anything else that was found to be radioactive.^{132 133} No one was found to be in any danger, but that is the kind of experience that leaves an impression on the voting public.

Nevadans had also been dealing with the literal fallout of weapons tests for decades, which added to citizens’ apprehensions to host further atomic projects.

Furthermore, Yucca Mountain is technically not part of any Nevada county, according to the land’s native Shoshone people. The 1863 Treaty Of Ruby Valley allowed Americans to pass through the land, but also acknowledged Shoshone ownership of that land. At no point was it ever granted to the United States government. In 2014, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that the Department Of Energy did not meet the requirements for land ownership necessary to proceed with the Yucca Mountain project.¹³⁴

No such impediments blocked the site in Finland. The power company and national government met directly with residents of the nearest town, promising jobs, tax revenue, and a newly built senior center downtown. The townsfolk had the right to veto disposal in the area, but they saw no reason to do so. The equivalent would be if the U.S. government met with some community in Nevada and all parties agreed to open a waste processing plant without the state government getting involved.

When Onkalo does begin operations, it will receive spent fuel rods contained within cast-iron tubes, themselves inside copper canisters as tall as a double-decker bus. The canisters will then be sealed in “bentonite”, a type of water-absorbent clay. When a section has been filled to capacity, that entire tunnel will be filled with bentonite, then walled off with concrete. With tunnels stretching fifty kilometers, the complex has enough space to store about one century’s worth of nuclear waste. Upon hitting that limit, the entire thing will be paved over. If all goes according to plan, it will remain there, undisturbed, until the end of time — or at least until the waste it contains no longer presents a radioactive hazard.¹³⁵

The site is several hundred meters below sea level, ensconced in nonporous bedrock that’s far from any earthquake zones. Some people are concerned whether those copper canisters will last as long as advertised, but even if they were to break down, the layers of bedrock and bentonite should keep any waste from escaping to pollute waterways. Unlike everywhere else nuclear waste is currently held, these matters have been accounted for at Onkalo.¹³⁶

But wait! Aren’t we forgetting something terribly important? How are the Finns going to warn future generations about the location’s danger? Its creators concede that Finns of the future will have the final say on that matter, but for now, the plan is to leave the site completely unmarked.¹³⁷

As mentioned, the facility is located very, very deep underground, in a place that no one is likely to go looking for valuable materials. With no indication that anything at all is below the surface, why would anyone want to dig there?

A few years ago, at an industry conference in Sweden, there were no discussions about unnerving landscapes or a liturgy of the nucleus. One attendee later recalled, “The idea that we should go to these elaborate extremes to put a warning marker for people 10,000 years from now is something so crazy that only Americans would think of doing [it].”¹³⁸

Indeed, for all this consideration of the far future, Onkalo is the creation of a society that also places a high value on its present-day citizens. That nuclear waste will steadily become less hazardous over time, so presumably, we have the most to gain by its secure disposal. The highly disciplined protocol and thoughtful design on display here, the rational self-interest, is highly encouraging. Counterexamples are all too frequent and recent.

For instance: Around 1am on December 22, 2008, the wall holding back a waste pond collapsed at Tennessee’s Kingston power plant. In sixty seconds, four point one billion liters of thick, radioactive sludge flooded the surrounding area, covering railways and roads, toppling trees, and despoiling the river. Dozens of homes were damaged; one was entirely swept off its foundation. Miraculously, no one was killed in the flood — but the real damage came from the aftermath.

A crew of nine hundred workers spent years cleaning the site, but their employer them refused to provide any protective equipment, even basic dust masks. They actually told their workers that there was no need for protection, because the waste was “safe enough to eat.”¹³⁹ In the years since, hundreds of those workers have fallen ill, and over sixty have died because of the conditions they endured.¹⁴⁰

If you think this all sounds eerily similar to the Church Rock disaster we discussed in episode 92, you’re right. But there are at least two major differences: This accident released ten times more toxic material than the one at Church Rock; and this is not a nuclear facility. Kingston is a coal-fired power plant.

We talk a lot about emissions, and sometimes mining, but coal also has a waste problem that’s seldom mentioned. You might know that coal is made of carbon from organic matter that’s undergone some intense geological processes over a very long time. But that is, quite literally, a very dirty phenomenon, so coal also contains a lot of contaminants — toxic elements like arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury. Also less stable ones like uranium and radon.^{141 142}

Coal doesn’t get purified like nuclear fuel does — it’ll burn just fine whether it’s contaminated or not. The problem is, after the coal gets used, all the carbon from the rock is gone. That’s what gets pumped into the atmosphere. But those heavy contaminants get left behind. So while the combusted carbon floats off to become everyone else’s problem, the coal plant is left with this thick slurry of distilled, slightly radioactive poison.

Crucially, the Kingston Plant is far from abnormal. The United States has no place to permanently store its spent nuclear fuel, but  it does have thousands of coal ash ponds all over the country. Over a hundred million tons of fresh waste is pumped into them every year.¹⁴³ The ponds usually don’t collapse and flood the countryside so dramatically, but a 2019 analysis found that over 90% of the ponds quietly contaminate local water supplies.^{144 145}

When nuclear power comes up in popular discourse, it’s often in an abstract, almost hypothetical way. Conversations tend to focus on whether nuclear waste is or is not dangerous; whether more reactors should or should not be built; whether nuclear power is good or bad. Framing the conversation this way can be frustrating, because everyone has different definitions for the words “dangerous,” “should,” “bad,” and “good.”

We forget that we’re talking about energy we’re already using, energy that’s already being produced in other ways, and those ways have costs worth considering. Often, the costs we already bear far exceed any hypothetical ones under debate. But by comparing nuclear power against nothing but itself, the status quo skates by unexamined.

Any discussion around the future of energy production would stand to benefit by acknowledging the present reality of energy production — at least, in my humble opinion.

Well, since I’ve just described that present reality, I suppose I can now tell some of the exciting possibilities the future holds — which is a huge relief, because I’d hate to end this long, long episode on a down note.¹⁴⁶

In America and around the world, there’s been a renewed focus on transparency, stewardship, and public involvement in the nuclear power industry, alongside a commitment to increase nuclear capacity over the next few decades.¹⁴⁷

Much of that increased capacity could be delivered by Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs, which are exactly what they sound like. A traditional nuclear plant, the kind featuring that classic hyperboloid cooling tower that dominates the horizon, has an output around one thousand megawatts electric, occupies about five hundred acres of land, and can cost over ten billion dollars to build.^{148 149 150}

SMRs are smaller in every regard. Their capacity ranges from ten to three hundred megawatts electric, they take up a fraction of the land, and would cost far less to build and operate. All that should allow them to provide electricity more flexibly and reliably, and serve areas that older reactors can’t reach.^{151 152 153 154 155}

Or at least, that’s the plan. SMRs are such a new idea that, as of June 2024, there are only four operational SMRs in the world, two in Russia and two in China.¹⁵⁶ But dozens more have been designed, and SMRs capable of outputting hundreds of gigawatts electric are slated for construction all over the world in the next several years.

It’s not yet clear whether waste from SMRs will pose any new challenges.^{157 158 159} But it is clear that the industry has made great strides and conducted exciting research when it comes to dealing with radioactive waste in general.

For starters, Onkalo seems to be providing a good example for others to follow. Sweden has approved construction of a very similar facility,¹⁶⁰ Lithuania just began site selection for their own High-Level Waste,¹⁶¹ and Norwegian teams are investigating a different option for permanent, deep geological disposal.¹⁶² Canada’s government has had some success in preliminary planning for such a site partly by engaging directly with local communities, much like the government of Finland did.¹⁶³

Several other countries are pursuing deep geological repositories.¹⁶⁴ The U.S. lags a little farther behind in the process, but finally letting go of Yucca Mountain means other, more feasible alternatives can finally be explored.¹⁶⁵ The House Subcommittee On Energy, Climate, And Grid Security held a hearing on the matter this past April.^{166 167}

And perhaps we can dispose of much less nuclear waste than we previously thought. We’ve known since the dawn of the atomic age that nuclear fuel can be recycled rather effectively. It’s actually kind of a misnomer to call it “spent” fuel, because in many places, including America, there’s plenty of good radioactivity left in that fuel. As much as 90% of the potential energy goes unused by the time the fuel gets discarded.^{168 169}

There are a few reasons why. In the U.S., most plants were built without the technology required to use reprocessed fuel, due to fears of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Many now consider those fears to be unfounded, or at least outdated, and popular opinion about recycling nuclear fuel seems to be shifting.

Just a few months ago, two prominent companies in the industry announced plans to build a pilot plant for recycling spent nuclear fuel in the United States. They hope to find a location before the end of 2024, and facilities like this could reduce the volume of nuclear waste requiring deep geological storage by 90 percent.^{170 171} Meanwhile, the U.S. Department Of Energy is working on a recycling project titled “Converting UNF Radioisotopes Into Energy,” which gives it the very cute acronym “CURIE”.¹⁷² What little waste is left would be far less harmful, potentially only radioactive for two or three hundred years.¹⁷³

Of course, this isn’t exactly unknown territory. France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and other countries around the world have already been recycling their nuclear fuel.^{174 175} Still, any progress at all is laudable, late or otherwise. We have a long way to go before this problem is solved, but let’s not chastise ourselves if we finally install a toilet in this mansion.

Some of the good news specifically involves today’s element. In 2020, researchers at Texas A&M University found a method by which americium, plutonium, and neptunium can be separated from other waste products much more cheaply than before. That’s useful whether the end goal is recycling or permanent disposal.¹⁷⁶ Techniques like this could ensure that neptunium, one of the longest-lived components of high-level radioactive waste, could also be one of the easiest to remove.

Who knows what will happen to that neptunium after it’s been plucked from spent fuel? I suspect it won’t be much easier to acquire than it is right now, but maybe I’m wrong. Much like the exact handling of the waste buried at Onkalo, that’s something to be figured out by future humans.

Thanks for listening to The Episodic Table of Elements. Music is by Kai Engel. To learn about the plan to use housecats as living Geiger counters, visit episodic table dot com slash N p.

Next episode, we’ll dip into the underworld one last time with plutonium.

Until then, this is T. R. Appleton, reminding you that any claim to be “apolitical” is functionally an endorsement of the status quo.

 

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