The Atomic Age , also known as The Atomic Era , is a historical period after the first atomic bombing ("atom"), Trinity , on July 16 1945, during World War II. Although the nuclear chain reaction was hypothesized in 1933 and the first nuclear chain reaction (Chicago Pile-1) occurred in December 1942, the Trinity test and subsequent bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II represented the use of large-scale nuclear technology first and bring about major changes in sociopolitical thinking and the direction of technological development.
While atomic power is promoted for time as a symbol of progress and modernity, entering the era of nuclear power also brings frightening implications of nuclear war, Cold War, mutual conviction, nuclear proliferation, nuclear disaster risks (extreme potential as anthropogenic global nuclear winter, useful in nuclear medicine It is not easy to completely separate peaceful use of nuclear technology from military or terrorist use (such as dirty bombing of radioactive waste), complicating the development of the global nuclear power export industry from the start.
In 1973, about the growing nuclear power industry, the United States Atomic Energy Commission predicted that, at the turn of the 21st century, a thousand reactors would generate electricity for homes and businesses across the United States. However, the "nuclear dream" falls short of what is promised because nuclear technology generates a variety of social problems, from nuclear arms races to nuclear crisis, and the unresolved difficulties of cleaning up bomb installations and disposal of civil plant waste and decommissioning. Since 1973, reactor orders have fallen sharply as electricity demand has fallen and construction costs have increased. Many orders and some factories finished canceled.
By the late 1970s, nuclear power had suffered tremendous international destabilization, faced with economic difficulties and widespread public opposition, came to the head with the Three Mile Island crash in 1979, and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, both of which were detrimental to influence the nuclear power industry for decades.
Video Atomic Age
Initial years
In 1901, Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford discovered that radioactivity is part of a process in which atoms change from one kind to another, involving the release of energy. Soddy writes in popular magazines that radioactivity is an "inexhaustible source of energy", and offers a vision of the future of the atom in which it is possible to "transform the desert continent, melt the frozen poles, and make the whole earth one smiling Garden." will be "atomic age", with nuclear energy as a global utopia technology to meet human needs, has been a recurring theme ever since. But "Soddy also noticed that atomic energy might be used to create terrible new weapons".
The concept of nuclear chain reaction was hypothesized in 1933, shortly after Chadwick's discovery of neutrons. Only a few years later, in December 1938, nuclear fission was discovered by Otto Hahn and his assistant, Fritz Strassmann, and proved by the radiookimia method of Hahn. The first self-made nuclear chain reaction (Chicago Pile-1, or CP-1) occurred in December 1942 under the leadership of Enrico Fermi.
In 1945, the Atomic Age pocket book touted the power of untapped atoms in everyday objects and described the future in which fossil fuels would not be used. A science writer, David Dietz, writes that instead of filling your car's gas tank two or three times a week, you'll travel for a year with an atom energy pellet the size of a vitamin pill. Glenn T. Seaborg, who heads the Atomic Energy Commission, writes "there will be a ground-to-month space shuttle, a nuclear-made nucleus, plutonium swimming pool for SCUBA divers, and more".
Maps Atomic Age
World War II
The phrase "Atomic Age" was created by William L. Laurence, a New York Times journalist who became an official reporter for the Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear weapon. He witnessed both the Trinity test and the Nagasaki bombing and went on to write a series of articles extolling the virtues of new weapons. Its reporting before and after the bombing helped spur public awareness of the potential of nuclear technology and partly motivated technological development in the US and in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union will test its first nuclear weapons in 1949.
In 1949, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal stated that "atomic energy is not just looking for new energy, but more significant as the beginning of human history where faith in knowledge can live human life."
1950s
This phrase gained popularity as a feeling of nuclear optimism emerged in the 1950s where it was believed that all future power plants would be atomic. The atomic bomb will make all conventional obsolete explosives and nuclear power plants will do the same for resources such as coal and oil. There is a general feeling that everything will use nuclear resources, in a positive and productive way, from illuminating food to preserve it, to the development of nuclear medicine. There will be a peaceful age and many where the atomic energy will "give the strength needed to remove the water salt for the thirsty, water the desert for the hungry, and push the interstellar journey deep into space". This use will make the Atomic Aton an important step in technological advancement as the first smelter of Bronze, Iron, or the start of the Industrial Revolution.
This included a car, which led Ford to showcase the Ford Nucleon concept car to the public in 1958. There were also pledges of invisible golf balls and nuclear-powered aircraft, which the US federal government even spent US $ 1.5 billion researching. The nuclear policy maker becomes almost like a collective technocratic fantasy, or at least driven by a fantasy:
The idea of ​​separating atoms has an almost miraculous grip on the inventor's imagination and policymakers. As soon as someone says - in a slightly credible way - that these things can be done, then people quickly convince themselves... that they will do.
In the US, military planners "believe that demonstrating atomic civil applications will also confirm the system of private American companies, showcase the skills of scientists, raise personal living standards, and maintain a democratic lifestyle against communism".
Some media reports predict that thanks to a giant nuclear power plant in the near future, electricity will soon become cheaper and the power meter will be removed, because electricity will be "too cheap to measure."
The fact is that Shippingport reactors began online in 1957 to generate electricity at a cost of about ten times that of coal-fired power plants. Scientists at the AEC's Brookhaven Laboratory themselves "wrote a 1958 report describing an accident scenario in which 3,000 people will die soon, with 40,000 injured."
Fear of the possibility of atomic attacks from the Soviet Union led US school children to participate in civil defense training "bowing and protecting".
In the late 1950s, there was a stadium in northern Las Vegas, Nevada where tourists gathered (wearing special sunglasses) to witness a ground-based nuclear test on the Nevada Test Site.
1960s
By exploiting the peaceful use of "friendly atoms" in medical applications, the abolition of the earth and, later, in nuclear power plants, the nuclear industry and governments seek to dispel the public's fear of nuclear technology and promote nuclear weapons acceptance. At the height of the Atomic Age, the United States government started Operation Plowshare, which involved a "peaceful nuclear explosion". The Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission announced that the Plowshares project is intended to "highlight the peaceful application of nuclear explosive devices and thereby create a more favorable world climate of opinion for weapons development and testing".
Project Plowshare "is named directly from the Bible itself, especially Micah 4: 3, which states that God will forge a sword into a plow, and pierce into a pruning hook, so that no country can take up arms against another." Proposed uses include the Panama Canal widening, constructing new sea surface waterways through Nicaragua dubbed the Pan-Atom Channel, bypassing routes through mountain areas for highways, and connecting inland river systems. Other proposals include blasting underground caves for storage of water, natural gas and petroleum. It is proposed to plant underground atomic bombs to extract shale oil in eastern Utah and western Colorado. Serious considerations are also given to use this explosive for various mining operations. One proposal suggests using a nuclear explosion to connect an underground aquifer in Arizona. Another plan involves surface blasting on the western slopes of Sacramento Valley California for a water transport project. However, there are many negative impacts from the 27 nuclear explosions of Project Plowshare. The consequences include degraded land, relocated communities, tritium-contaminated water, radioactivity, and the fall of debris high thrown into the atmosphere. This was ignored and underestimated until the program was terminated in 1977, largely due to public opposition, after $ 770 million had been spent on the project.
In the TV series Thunderbirds , a set of vehicles presented that are imaginally true nuclear, as shown in the cutaways presented in their comic book.
The term "atomic age" was originally used in a positive and futuristic sense, but in the 1960s the threat posed by nuclear weapons had begun to outperform nuclear power as the dominant motif of atoms.
1970 to 2000
French nuclear power advocates develop aesthetic vision of nuclear technology as an art to support technology. Leclerq compares the nuclear cooling tower with some of the grandest architectural monuments of western culture:
The age at which we live, for the public, has been marked by nuclear engineers and the gigantic buildings he created. For builders and visitors alike, nuclear power plants will be considered the cathedrals of the 20th century. Their syncretism combines awareness and unconsciousness, religious fulfillment and industry attainment, limitations on material use and unlimited artistic inspiration, utopia becomes a reality and a sustainable quest for harmony.
In 1973, the United States Atomic Energy Commission predicted that, at the turn of the 21st century, a thousand reactors would generate electricity for homes and businesses across the United States. But after 1973, reactor orders declined sharply as electricity demand fell and construction costs increased. Many orders and some factories finished canceled.
Nuclear power has proven controversial since the 1970s. High radioactive material can become overheated and out of the reactor building. Nuclear waste (spent nuclear fuel) needs to be regularly removed from the reactor and disposed of safely for up to a million years, so as not to pollute the environment. Recycling of nuclear waste has been discussed, but creating plutonium that can be used in weapons, and in any case still leaves a lot of unwanted waste to be stored and disposed of. Large facilities built for long term disposal of nuclear waste have been difficult to access, and have not achieved results.
In the late 1970s, nuclear power suffered tremendous international destabilization, faced with economic difficulties and widespread public opposition, who became head with the Three Mile Island crash in 1979, and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, both of which had a devastating effect. nuclear power industry for decades thereafter. A cover story in the February 11, 1985 issue of Forbes magazine commented on the overall management of nuclear power programs in the United States:
The failure of the US nuclear power program ranked as the biggest managerial disaster in business history, disasters on a monumental scale... only blind, or biased, can now think that money has been well spent. This is a defeat for US consumers and for the US industry's competitiveness, for utilities running the program and for the private enterprise systems that enable it.
Thus, over a period of more than 30 years, dramatic increases in initial nuclear power became equally reversed. With no other energy technology there has been a connection between rapid and revolutionary international emergence, followed so rapidly by the same transformative death.
21st century
In the 21st century, the label "Atomic Age" implies nostalgia or naÃÆ'¯vetÃÆ'Â ©, and is considered by many to have ended with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, although this term continues to be used. by many historians to describe the era after the end of the Second World War. Atomic and weapon energy continues to have a powerful effect on world politics in the 21st century. The term is used by some science fiction fans to illustrate not only the era after the end of the Second World War but also the contemporary history to this day.
The nuclear power industry has improved the safety and performance of the reactor, and has proposed a safer (but generally untested) reactor design but there is no guarantee that the reactor will be properly designed, built and operated. Mistakes do occur and the reactor designers at Fukushima in Japan did not anticipate that the tsunami generated by the earthquake would deactivate the reserve system that was supposed to stabilize the reactor after the earthquake. According to UBS AG, the Fukushima I nuclear accident has raised doubts as to whether even advanced economies like Japan can master nuclear safety. Catastrophic scenarios involving terrorist attacks can also be imagined. An interdisciplinary team from MIT estimates that if nuclear power uses triples from 2005-2055 (from 2% to 7%), at least four serious nuclear accidents will occur in that period.
In September 2012, Japan announced that it would actually stop nuclear power by 2030, although under the Abe government this is now impossible, with Germany, and other countries in reaction to the crash in Fukushima. Germany plans to completely stop nuclear energy by 2022.
Chronology
A large anti-nuclear demonstration was held on May 6, 1979, in Washington D.C., when 125,000 people including the California Governor attended marches and demonstrations against nuclear power. In New York City on September 23, 1979, nearly 200,000 people attended protests against nuclear power. The anti-nuclear power protests precede the closure of Shoreham, Yankee Rowe, Millstone I, Rancho Seco, Maine Yankee, and about a dozen other nuclear power plants.
On June 12, 1982, a million people demonstrated in Central Park of New York City against nuclear weapons and to end the cold war weapons race. It was the largest anti-nuclear protest and the biggest political demonstration in American history. The International Day of Nuclear Disarmament was held on June 20, 1983 at 50 locations throughout the United States. In 1986, hundreds of people traveled from Los Angeles to Washington DC in the Great Peace March for the Global Nuclear Disarmament. There have been numerous Nevada Desert Experience protests and peace camps at the Nevada Test Site during the 1980s and 1990s.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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