The World of Uranium with Tom Zoellner

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to AMSEcast. It’s my pleasure to be joined in this episode by Tom Zoellner. Tom is an award-winning writer of nine books, and a frequent contributor to publications like The Atlantic, Time, and Scientific American.

0:48 He previously served as a staff writer for The Arizona Republic and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other papers. In addition to his writing, Tom currently teaches at Chapman University, and serves as editor at large of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Today we’re going to talk about his terrific book, Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World. Tom, thanks so much for joining us on AMSEcast. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you. I really enjoyed Uranium. I learned a lot. I feel like I’ve been in this job now, five years as director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and I thought I knew a lot about uranium, but you taught me a lot. So, thank you for this really fascinating book. Very nice of you to say, thank you. Let’s start with some basics.

1:31 I think most people know that uranium is radioactive. What does that mean? Why is uranium radioactive? Yeah, that’s the basic question about uranium. And if you don’t mind, I’m just going to read out loud from the book, just a paragraph that tries to explain this to non-scientists because I’m a non-scientist, and this is knowledge about the physical workings of the universe that I think is just fascinating. So— Yes— If you’ll indulge me. Please. Yeah. This is from the introduction here. “A uranium atom is simply built too large. It’s the heaviest element that occurs in nature, with 92 protons jammed into its nucleus. This approaches a boundary of physical tolerance.

2:14 The heart of uranium, its nucleus, is an aching knot held together with electrical coils that are as fragile as sewing thread, more fragile than in any other atom that occurs in nature. Just the pinprick of an invading neutron can rip the whole package apart with hideous force. The subatomic innards of U-235”—that’s an isotope that we can talk about later—“Spray outward like the shards of a grenade. These fragments burst the skin of neighboring uranium nuclei, and the effect blossoms exponentially, shattering a trillion, trillion atoms within the space of one orgiastic second. A single atom of uranium is strong enough to twitch a grain of sand, a sphere of it the size of a grapefruit, can eliminate a city.” Yeah, just amazing what power there is within that single atom of uranium, and a fact that we started to realize in the early-20th century, to both a good and bad effect.

3:08 So, tell me this, when we go out to look for uranium—well, let’s first talk about when it was discovered. When did we realize that an element named uranium, or that was going to be named uranium, existed? And how common is it here on earth? Well, it’s been with us since the formation of the Earth, obviously, but it wasn’t realized as a discrete element unto itself until 1769. This is when silver miners in Bohemia, currently the border in between Germany and the Czech Republic in a particular valley called Joachimsthal, they were encountering this layer of thick black rock that they called pitch blend.

3:50 And the kind of slang term that they used was the bad luck rock. It meant that whatever silver they were looking for was playing out, and so they just sort of treated this black stuff as trash, you know, tossed it aside. And there was a chemist named Martin Klaproth who took a closer look at this and realized, no this actually is an element. And he had every opportunity, as scientific tradition had it in the day, to name this after himself. He could have called it klaprothium, which is the name that would have devolved to us today, except he modestly decided to name it after a Greek God Uranus, and hence the name uranium. Do we know how prevalent uranium is elsewhere in the universe?

4:33 Is it? Is it found elsewhere in the solar system? Or do we see it in— Oh, yeah. Created when two neutron stars merge, so we know that it’s in the supernovas, and we know it’s common throughout the universe. So, when prospectors are here on earth looking for that uranium, how do they know where to search? Well, we’re probably familiar with the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, and the folklore of the 1950s which is when the uranium rush really happened in the United States, and elsewhere, where they would use the handheld Geiger counters, simply going out there and listening for clicks. But the more high tech, the more corporate way to look for it is with airborne geophysical surveys, which can look forward at a depth of over a kilometer.

5:14 And what they’re doing is high resolution electromagnetic surveys, and looking for those structural zones that speak to the presence of uranium. So, how’s it then taken out of the earth? Is it like coal mining? Or how is it mined out? Used to be, yeah, your old fashioned Appalachian coal mining methods, you know? The block-and-pillar methods used in the American Southwest. That proved tremendously hazardous, very hard to ventilate these mines, deadly, eventually, to those who would work in them if you didn’t blow what are called the radon daughters out of there. The common way to do it today is simply by strip mining. What about you mentioned the uranium rush in the US, and it happened elsewhere as well.

5:57 But where in the US did that happen? And then, if you went today, where is the majority of uranium mining happening here in the States? Radium, which is closely related with uranium, as we all know, Marie Curie was the first to isolate radium, which became a kind of a faddish product used in somewhat deleterious ways for health purposes, also for luminescent dials, and so forth. This is before properties of uranium were really understood, in the 1930s. So, there was a radium rush on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado; a lot of radium mines there. And when it became clear that uranium was an important product unto itself, they started to mine what are called the tailings piles, the waste rock of some of those radium mines.

6:46 And it turns out that the geology of the Colorado Plateau, a gorgeous physical expanse that generally maps over the Four Corners region of the United States, but that was particularly rich in uranium. And so, in the 1950s when—the dawn of the nuclear arms race, the United States government paid huge bonuses for guys, prospectors, to go out there and locate new uranium deposits. So, you really saw it in Utah, Arizona, parts of Colorado. Most uranium mining today in the US is really minuscule. We produce domestically less than a percent of the fuel requirements of our nuclear power reactors. We’re obviously not making nuclear weapons anymore, so this production comes from what’s called in-situ leaching.

7:32 This is injecting—crudely put—water into the ground and then sucking it back up with mineralized content, uranium. There’s some of this going on in Wyoming, Some in Nebraska, there was some in Texas, and they’re mining Some tailings out of the mill at White Mesa, Utah. And a new operation just went online in Arizona, the Pinyon Plain Mine is an underground mine, actually, the old fashioned variety. This is not too far from the Grand Canyon, and that itself has caused some controversy, unhappiness. I assume, with what’s called the nuclear renaissance going on now, which we live, frankly, in the middle of here in Oak Ridge, with some almost 200 companies looking at the future of nuclear energy, I assume that uranium mining would be on the uptick.

8:20 Is that not the case? We really haven’t seen the kind of price excitement with what’s called yellowcake that would really justify expanded mining operations. Certainly, there’s been renewed interest in nuclear power, given the question of European energy independence. A lot of people want to cut themselves off from Russia, given the Ukraine war, and there’s a lot of hand-wringing going on right now in Germany over the decision to phase out their nuclear power infrastructure, and some are asking, Hey, is this really a good idea to lash ourselves to this potentially hostile petroleum giant to our east. As you call it, the nuclear renaissance that we really saw in the first decade of the 21st Century, which came to a crashing halt with the Fukushima disaster, the excitement has not quite gotten to those levels of, for example, around 2008, 2009, when the price of yellowcake was really going up.

9:12 What about let’s go back in history from the nuclear renaissance, back to the Manhattan Project. Where did the uranium used here in Oak Ridge, which is where we process uranium, where did that uranium come from? Yeah and now that is a really fascinating story. Some of it, as previously stated, did come from the waste product of those radium mines out in Colorado, but the majority of it, more than two thirds, came from a freakishly rich deposit in the middle of Africa, a place called Shinkolobwe, which sat then in what was called the Belgian Congo, and is now, of course, the Democratic Republic of Congo since independence. And the Belgians, the Belgian company called Union Minière, after the Nazi invasion of Belgium, and concurrent with this rising scientific understanding that uranium could be a powerful weapon of war, the Belgian company took steps to not just seal off Shinkolobwe from potential German spies, but also make sure that existing supplies of yellowcake, uranium oxide, were safely removed from Europe.

10:23 And so, the head of the company, Edward Sengier, shipped it secretly to Bayonne, New Jersey, where it sat pretty much underneath what’s called the Bayonne Bridge, next to a waterway called Kill Van Kull, sat there in a vegetable oil warehouse for a couple years before the company got approached by Lieutenant Kenneth Nichols of the Manhattan Project, offering to buy this substance. And the visit was not entirely unexpected. The Belgian executive knew that—he kept up with the science, and knew that he was sitting on a potentially explosive product there. I read at some point as well that the Northwest Territories in Canada provided some uranium for the Manhattan Project.

11:09 Is that correct, too? That’s correct. But yeah, the story of the Belgian Congo is just a really fascinating part of your book, and an important part of our history. Let’s talk about for a moment you put a lot of focus on efforts of non-proliferation around the world. How are uranium supplies, and power plants, and other sources around the world controlled right now? And what’s the role of the IAEA in those efforts? The key to understanding this is that national sovereignty is really the guiding principle here. And the International Atomic Energy Agency is there to provide guidelines, provide support for member nations, offer scientific expertise, but there is no one world body that controls uranium.

11:55 It was recognized immediately, in the days after Hiroshima, that the United States was not going to have a monopoly on this, that it couldn’t last forever, and certainly within four years, thanks to a crash program of its own, and you know, some very good espionage, Russia was able to—the Soviet Union was able to become a nuclear power. Today we have nine of them: Russia, the United States, China, France, Pakistan, Britain, India, Israel, and now, of course, North Korea. This genie couldn’t be kept in the bottle for long. And so, the International Atomic Energy Agency is there to try and detect who’s got a nuclear program going on.

12:37 Iran is, of course, on the threshold of becoming the world’s 10th nuclear power, but no one can go in there and prevent them from doing it, you know? We can wag fingers from a distance, and we can attempt to use diplomacy to stop nations from becoming nuclear capable, but it’s not like there’s some sort of international criminal court about this. And many, though not all, have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. How useful has that treaty been? Pretty useful, actually. I mean, it’s got holes in it. It let Israel, and North Korea, and Pakistan, and India slip through the fence, but it has largely kept nations, by their own agreement, not to engage in nuclear weapons development.

13:20 Two nations have been persuaded to give it up after they got pretty far down the line, South Africa and Libya. So, it has been effective. Not perfect, but no one should say that the NPT was a failure. It most certainly was not. I know there are a lot of work done here in Oak Ridge by Y-12 National Security Complex and Oak Ridge National Lab on non-proliferation. Very important efforts. And you talk about a nation I spent some time in, Tbilisi, and the Republic of Georgia. You say it became an atomic crossroads in the frightening world of uranium smuggling. Can you tell us a bit about that very frightening scenario playing out there? Sure. Well, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, for a period of time in the 1990s and to some extent still today, Russia became a big garage sale.

14:08 Anyone who had access to the goods of the former Soviet Union could sell them on the black market, and this happened with a number of technologies, the nuclear product among them. There was an enormously successful program, Swords into Plowshares. The idea being that, you know, the United States would actually buy the enriched uranium of the Soviet Union. And a really unheralded figure named Thomas Neff, a professor at MIT, if I remember correctly, has just passed on, but it was his idea to essentially pay the former Soviet Union for that really hazardous product, and that we would put it into our electrical infrastructure, we would essentially use it for nuclear fuel, an amazing way to reduce those stocks.

14:51 That isn’t to say that there weren’t opportunists and thieves that got a hold of some of this, and realized, well, we could make quite a bit of money by simply selling it to actors who will then take it to Dubai, which also became sort of a nuclear bazaar of its own right, and sell it to either non-state figures or state apparatuses like North Korea for their own nuclear program. Certainly a scientist who helped Pakistan find its way to the bomb, a guy named A. Q. Khan was an expert at running a black market nuclear network, and without him, I don’t think the North Koreans would have been able to have become a nuclear nation. Stepping back into the nuclear renaissance right now, we talked about mining.

15:34 The other area where the United States has fallen behind and is now catching up, is with uranium enrichment. We just had a major announcement here in Oak Ridge, where the firm Orano is moving into, I think, a billion dollar-plus investment to enrich uranium. So, where is uranium enriched today, and how is that whole calculus factoring into American national security? Yeah, we’re talking here about enrichment, which involves taking uranium oxide, which you get out of the back end of a mill. It’s essentially a stable, relatively safe product to handle, U-308, and what you do is you take it from U238 to U235, which is the really more unstable product that’s used in nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons.

16:27 And these are super sensitive facilities, obviously. Everything has to be counted five times, more than that, intense security around the facility. There’s a worldwide industry that does this, and there’s only about six countries, if I’m not mistaken, that have these operating out in the open: France; Germany; there’s one in the Netherlands, where I believe A. Q. Khan was able to steal some of that technology for [North Korea] ; there’s one in Britain; Russia, of course; and then the United States. And there’s really only three major worldwide concerns that run these places. You mentioned Orano. There’s Rosatom, which is the Russian nuclear program, and a company called Urenco.

17:12 Currently, two of these facilities—leaving Oak Ridge out of the question temporarily—there’s one in Eunice, New Mexico, that I’ve visited. It’s in a section of New Mexico called Little Texas. It’s down there in the oil patch. The whole area is dedicated to energy production, and it’s operated by a small company called—well, relatively small called—Louisiana Energy. And then there’s one that does lower enriched uranium for nuclear power plants in Piketon, Ohio, that’s run by a company called Centrus. And it looks like you guys there in Tennessee are getting one near you. Yeah. I think it is symbolic, or emblematic, or whatever the word is, Tom of what we’re facing now in terms of restarting this renaissance of nuclear energy here in America, in part to address the climate change concerns that we’re all very much worried about.

18:02 Tell me what’s next for you? You’re a prolific writer. What are you working on right now? What can we expect next, from Tom? Oh, thank you. I’m working now on a book about Western water, some of the gigantic dams in the southwest, which were built during a period of technological and scientific exuberance, as it happens, right, around the time that intense weaponization capacities of uranium were being discovered, that is to say, the 1930s and ’40s, dams went up all over the South, the Southwest. Some of them probably should not have been built. And how can we think about taking some of them down? There’s one thing, of course, that any watcher of government or business will know is that once a program gets started, people’s careers start to depend on it, there’s big budgets to defend.

18:51 Whatever you think of Ronald Reagan’s legacy, he did have a pretty memorable line here about, “The closest thing to eternal life is a government program.” And we certainly saw that with uranium, where, for me, beyond question, that enormous production line that we had on nuclear weapons really spun out of the bounds of military necessity, and that there was a tremendous overproduction of these weapons. We had enough to level the Soviet Union 20 times over. It just became sort of a self-sustaining, I mean, we call it a monster, that no one wanted to close down the shop. You got to find a new line of work.

19:31 You got to find a new stream for that federal appropriation. This isn’t to say there’s anything unique about uranium here, but it does illustrate this principle, I think, pretty vividly, that sometimes things just keep on going and going and going beyond the need for their commercial or military use. I’m really fascinated with your next topic, for sure. I lived in Southern California for a little while. I worked at the Reagan Library. I was thinking of your Reagan quote, as you said that, by the way, so [laugh] I’m glad you brought that up, but in terms of, you know, a very dry, arid area, you know, sustaining, in LA, over ten million people. So, I’d be very curious to see if we’re doing away with dams, how those communities are still sustained.

20:14 Not not every dam, you know, obviously was useless, and, you know, did a lot of good. But, you know, I think we can argue—and here’s a uranium link again—that there was a federal overproduction that we now need to contend with that legacy. Excited to read that when it comes out. Tom, when do you think that will see the press? We’re looking at that in probably 2027. These things, unfortunately, take a while. I try and write as fast as I can. [laugh] . I understand. Well, you’ve been very successful in that, sir, and I encourage all of our listeners to read Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World. And Tom, when you finish that book, come back on AMSEcast. We’d love to have you. I’d be delighted. Thank you so much. Thank you.

20:59 Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I invite you to visit the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center in person. You can also shop at our online store and become a member at AMSE.org. Thanks to our production team with Matt Mullins, plus our supportive colleagues at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Office of Environmental Management, and Office of Legacy Management, as well as Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, NNSA, and the AMSE Foundation.

21:41 And of course, thanks to our wonderful guests today, and to all of you for listening. I hope you’ll join us for the next episode of AMSEcast. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, I would like to ask that you consider becoming a member of the 117 Society, the newest membership opportunity offered by the American Museum of Science and Energy Foundation. By joining the 117 Society, you will help us continue this podcast and our other innovative programming. You will support the expansion of our vitally important educational outreach, including virtual classes, and you will help ensure that both the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center can continue to provide world-class exhibits to our community and to the world.

22:25 Benefits of membership includes special access to video and audio content, and 117 Society merchandise, as well as all the benefits of our Atom Splitter Membership Level. To learn more, go to AMSE.org. The 117 Society is vital to the future of AMSE and the K-25 History Center. I hope you will consider joining, and thank you very much.