Boyd Norton's Blog

 

Ticklingthe Dragon's Tail: Of Neutrons and Wilderness

BoydNorton

 

Oneof the legendary stories of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos was about famedphysicist Richard Feynman. A risky experiment had been proposed by physicistOtto Frisch which entailed sliding a piece of fissionable Uranium 235 through asub-critical mass of the same material, making it supercritical for an instant.This would cause a burst of fissions which would help refine calculations forthe critical mass needed for the atomic bomb. At the meeting where thepresentation was made for the experiment, Feynman chuckled, saying “That’s liketickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.” Thereafter it was named the DragonExperiment.

Notlong after the initial tests, modified versions of the Dragon Experiment killedtwo physicists at Los Alamos.

            In 1960 I went to work in a projectthat was a direct descendant of that Dragon Experiment.

Myprogram was called SPERT, one of those Atomic Energy Commission acronyms thattranslated to Special Power Excursion Reactor Tests. The location was theNational Reactor Testing Station in the vast desert of southern Idaho. Theresearch was about supercritical power excursions. [Note: it was a power excursion that initially triggered the tragicChernobyl accident and fire.] In all nuclear reactors it takes just a hundredthof a second or less for the power, or fission rate, to leap from zero tobillions of watts, with the potential for severe core damage. That is a knownproperty of the fission process: the lightning speed of nuclear chain reactions– neutrons causing fissions causing more neutrons causing more fissions, causing…. summa celeritate.

               Inrecent years one journalist called us “The Right Stuff” of nuclear research. Wewere pushing the outside of the envelope of nuclear reactor safety and I was atthe forefront of it all. My project had four reactors, all operated by remotecontrol from a half mile away - they had no radiation shielding or safetysystems of any kind. Like test pilots, our task was to shake ‘em out, push themto their limits, push “the outside of the envelope,” all in the cause ofscience. No sound barrier here, but we were in an unknown, unexplored territoryof nuclear technology and I had the honor of breaking through by blowing up oneof those reactors.

               In1962 it was decided to conduct the ultimate test on the SPERT I reactor. Itwould be an attempt to answer the major safety question of that time: How farcould you push a highly enriched reactor core in a power excursion? And I hadthe honor of running the test. I was 26 years old and only two years out ofcollege. The dragon roared. (See TheKenyon Review  Fall 2016 issue )

               In 1963, at the age of 27, I was promotedto Group Leader of the project and put in charge of the research and operationsof two of the four reactors.

               Justa few years later I gave it all up, pursuing a new career as photographer andwriter documenting and fighting to save the world’s last wild places andwildlife

*     *    *

I’ve had 18 books published, ranging in topics fromAfrican elephants and mountain gorillas to Alaska wilderness to Siberia’s LakeBaikal and more. Two of my books were collaborations – one with PeterMatthiessen and another with Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Ticklingthe Dragon's Tail: Of Neutrons and Wilderness is my story of a life with neutrons and wilderness. I have over 50,000words completed in draft.

            We were a new generation ofphysicists and engineers, different from those who preceded us in the ManhattanProject. We were not under the pressure of building a nuclear weapon to end aterrible world war. We were young, rambunctious and rowdy, fresh out of collegeand drawn to the wild beauty of the country in and near Idaho. We hiked,backpacked, climbed many mountains, rafted the wild rivers and discovered a fewunknown and secret places. But the work, especially, was a great attraction -cutting edge science, studying the safety of nuclear reactors withoutconstraints. “Pushing back the foreskin of science,” as one of my colleaguesirreverently put it. Above all, it wasfun!

            The main story deals with the work,told with humor and lively narrative. I recall vividly the first time I sat atthe controls of a reactor, raising the control rods and unleashing the fissionprocess. This was no ordinary operation. This was splitting atoms and givingbirth to neutrons and gamma rays and beta particles - forces from the very core of the universe. For a twenty-five-year-oldkid a year just out of college, it was unbelievably exciting.

            In a parallel narrative, there wasthe joy of exploring the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. I grew up in RhodeIsland, one of the most densely populated regions of the country. Very quicklyI became fiercely protective of this new-found wild country in Idaho andWyoming. It was mine goddammit. Idiscovered it and I wanted it kept wild and pure. Soon, however, there were certainthreats looming darkly over parts of the region. Some folks wanted to dam upthe wild rivers, cut down the pristine forests, dig huge, destructive mines inthe heart of the mountains. What madness.This had to be stopped. But how?

            I discovered the power ofphotographs, coupled with forceful writing, that could impact public opinionand help protect wild places. Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club were doing justthat and so could I. Embracing photography and writing with the same passion Ihad for splitting atoms, I began publishing photographs and articles innational magazines. With that I acquired a national reputation for myconservation work.

At the time I had noidea that all this would later lead to meetings and friendship with ArthurGodfrey, Pete Seeger, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Tom Brokaw, Michio Kaku, JoeMcGinniss, Jim Fowler, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Leakey, two people who wereSecretary of the Interior, and - writing a screenplay with Mason Williams, headwriter for the Smothers Brothers. I became friends with America’s conservationguru, David Brower, who later invited me to join him for a meeting in theKremlin with the Soviet Union’s Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, to save Siberia’s Lake Baikal as aWorld Heritage Site.

Whowould have thought?

            I quit my physics career in 1969. Mywork had become a nightmare. One man in the Atomic Energy Commissionstifled and killed this, the world’s most important program studying nuclearreactor safety. (This was so serious that the prestigious journal Scienceran a series of four major articles about it.) TheWilderness Society had offered me a job in their Denver office, with promise tocontinue my writing and photography along with my conservation work. It was anagonizing decision - I would be giving up a career in science that I haddreamed about since I was in grade school. Also, we would be leaving ourbeloved Tetons and Yellowstone and Salmon River and those secret wild places wehad found over the years. In the end I decided I could do more to savewilderness. I left. Many of my colleagues left also and, like me, a few maderadical career changes.

            As a parting shot, I suggested to mySPERT colleagues remaining behind that our project be renamed the Facility forUranium Criticality Kinetics and Irradiation Tests. Project FUCKIT seemed appropriate.

            I worked for the Wilderness Societyfor eighteen months. We had a falling out over tactics in conservation efforts.I was too radical for them. I was fired. At that juncture the Sierra Cluboffered me a contract for my first book. So I embarked on freelancing as writerand photographer.

            It’s been a fun ride, with crazyadventures in Siberia, Alaska, Antarctica, Borneo, Africa, South America. Frommy bio in The Kenyon Review: BoydNortonis no stranger to risks. Since blowing up a nuclear reactor he has had closeencounters with charging grizzly bears, poisonous snakes (he was bitten once),crazy bush pilots, snorting Cape buffaloes, rhino and elephant poachers,whitewater rapids, vertical mountain walls, Borneo headhunters, mountaingorillas, and Moscow taxi drivers.

My YouTube video(me blowing up the reactor) has 54,000 views.

Another link of interest: American Association forthe Advancement of Scienceprofile. I am a member of AAAS. For promotion of the book, they have a veryliterate and book-buying membership of over 130,000.

 

 

Tickling the Dragon's Tail: Of Neutrons and Wilderness

Boyd Norton

 

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

Not long after the initial tests, modified versions of the Dragon Experiment killed two physicists at Los Alamos.

            In 1960 I went to work in a project that was a direct descendant of that Dragon Experiment.

My program was called SPERT, one of those Atomic Energy Commission acronyms that translated to Special Power Excursion Reactor Tests. The location was the National Reactor Testing Station in the vast desert of southern Idaho. The research was about supercritical power excursions. [Note: it was a power excursion that initially triggered the tragic Chernobyl accident and fire.] In all nuclear reactors it takes just a hundredth of a second or less for the power, or fission rate, to leap from zero to billions of watts, with the potential for severe core damage. That is a known property of the fission process: the lightning speed of nuclear chain reactions – neutrons causing fissions causing more neutrons causing more fissions, causing …. summa celeritate.

               In recent years one journalist called us “The Right Stuff” of nuclear research. We were pushing the outside of the envelope of nuclear reactor safety and I was at the forefront of it all. My project had four reactors, all operated by remote control from a half mile away - they had no radiation shielding or safety systems of any kind. Like test pilots, our task was to shake ‘em out, push them to their limits, push “the outside of the envelope,” all in the cause of science. No sound barrier here, but we were in an unknown, unexplored territory of nuclear technology and I had the honor of breaking through by blowing up one of those reactors.

               In 1962 it was decided to conduct the ultimate test on the SPERT I reactor. It would be an attempt to answer the major safety question of that time: How far could you push a highly enriched reactor core in a power excursion? And I had the honor of running the test. I was 26 years old and only two years out of college. The dragon roared. (See The Kenyon Review  Fall 2016 issue )

               In 1963, at the age of 27, I was promoted to Group Leader of the project and put in charge of the research and operations of two of the four reactors.

               Just a few years later I gave it all up, pursuing a new career as photographer and writer documenting and fighting to save the world’s last wild places and wildlife

*     *     *

I’ve had 18 books published, ranging in topics from African elephants and mountain gorillas to Alaska wilderness to Siberia’s Lake Baikal and more. Two of my books were collaborations – one with Peter Matthiessen and another with Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Tickling the Dragon's Tail: Of Neutrons and Wilderness is my story of a life with neutrons and wilderness. I have over 50,000 words completed in draft.

            We were a new generation of physicists and engineers, different from those who preceded us in the Manhattan Project. We were not under the pressure of building a nuclear weapon to end a terrible world war. We were young, rambunctious and rowdy, fresh out of college and drawn to the wild beauty of the country in and near Idaho. We hiked, backpacked, climbed many mountains, rafted the wild rivers and discovered a few unknown and secret places. But the work, especially, was a great attraction - cutting edge science, studying the safety of nuclear reactors without constraints. “Pushing back the foreskin of science,” as one of my colleagues irreverently put it. Above all, it was fun!

            The main story deals with the work, told with humor and lively narrative. I recall vividly the first time I sat at the controls of a reactor, raising the control rods and unleashing the fission process. This was no ordinary operation. This was splitting atoms and giving birth to neutrons and gamma rays and beta particles - forces from the very core of the universe. For a twenty-five-year-old kid a year just out of college, it was unbelievably exciting.

            In a parallel narrative, there was the joy of exploring the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. I grew up in Rhode Island, one of the most densely populated regions of the country. Very quickly I became fiercely protective of this new-found wild country in Idaho and Wyoming. It was mine goddammit. I discovered it and I wanted it kept wild and pure. Soon, however, there were certain threats looming darkly over parts of the region. Some folks wanted to dam up the wild rivers, cut down the pristine forests, dig huge, destructive mines in the heart of the mountains. What madness. This had to be stopped. But how?

            I discovered the power of photographs, coupled with forceful writing, that could impact public opinion and help protect wild places. Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club were doing just that and so could I. Embracing photography and writing with the same passion I had for splitting atoms, I began publishing photographs and articles in national magazines. With that I acquired a national reputation for my conservation work.

At the time I had no idea that all this would later lead to meetings and friendship with Arthur Godfrey, Pete Seeger, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Tom Brokaw, Michio Kaku, Joe McGinniss, Jim Fowler, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Leakey, two people who were Secretary of the Interior, and - writing a screenplay with Mason Williams, head writer for the Smothers Brothers. I became friends with America’s conservation guru, David Brower, who later invited me to join him for a meeting in the Kremlin with the Soviet Union’s Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, to save Siberia’s Lake Baikal as a World Heritage Site.

Who would have thought?

            I quit my physics career in 1969. My work had become a nightmare. One man in the Atomic Energy Commission stifled and killed this, the world’s most important program studying nuclear reactor safety. (This was so serious that the prestigious journal Scienceran a series of four major articles about it.) The Wilderness Society had offered me a job in their Denver office, with promise to continue my writing and photography along with my conservation work. It was an agonizing decision - I would be giving up a career in science that I had dreamed about since I was in grade school. Also, we would be leaving our beloved Tetons and Yellowstone and Salmon River and those secret wild places we had found over the years. In the end I decided I could do more to save wilderness. I left. Many of my colleagues left also and, like me, a few made radical career changes.

            As a parting shot, I suggested to my SPERT colleagues remaining behind that our project be renamed the Facility for Uranium Criticality Kinetics and Irradiation Tests. Project FUCKIT seemed appropriate.

            I worked for the Wilderness Society for eighteen months. We had a falling out over tactics in conservation efforts. I was too radical for them. I was fired. At that juncture the Sierra Club offered me a contract for my first book. So I embarked on freelancing as writer and photographer.

            It’s been a fun ride, with crazy adventures in Siberia, Alaska, Antarctica, Borneo, Africa, South America. From my bio in The Kenyon Review: Boyd Nortonis no stranger to risks. Since blowing up a nuclear reactor he has had close encounters with charging grizzly bears, poisonous snakes (he was bitten once), crazy bush pilots, snorting Cape buffaloes, rhino and elephant poachers, whitewater rapids, vertical mountain walls, Borneo headhunters, mountain gorillas, and Moscow taxi drivers.

My YouTube video(me blowing up the reactor) has 54,000 views.

Another link of interest: American Association for the Advancement of Scienceprofile. I am a member of AAAS. For promotion of the book, they have a very literate and book-buying membership of over 130,000.

 

The Dragon A neutron is a subatomic particle found in the nucleus of all known elements except  one—hydrogen, whose nucleus consists of a lonely proton. A neutron has a mass nearly that of a proton but has no electrical charge (the proton carries a positive charge). In the early years of nuclear physics, neutrons and protons could be thought of as sub-atomic billiard balls, solid and hefty. Now we know otherwise. Quantum physics tells us that a neutron is made up of two down-quarks and one up-quark. And quarks are thought to be made up of squiggles in n-dimensional space where n may vary from 4 to 10 or 11 or 26 depending upon your version of String Theory. I prefer the billiard ball analogy myself. Let it just be said that a neutron, with no electrical charge, can enter a nucleus of certain atoms, such as uranium 235 or plutonium 239, and create quantum havoc. The aftermath of that havoc is nuclear fission. In 1938, German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman bombarded a sample of uranium metal with neutrons. At the time, uranium, atomic number 92, was at the tail end of the periodic table of all known elements. By absorbing a neutron in its nucleus, it was thought that the uranium might be transformed into a new, unknown element of atomic number 93. However, their results were baffling. Instead of a newer, heavier element, they found several lighter elements that hadn’t been there before. Lise Meitner, an Austrian physicist, suggested to them that the uranium nucleus had split, releasing great energy, and leaving behind the lighter atoms as fragments. Shortly thereafter Meitner’s nephew, Otto Frisch, also a physicist and a colleague of Neils Bohr, came to visit her and he suggested the term “nuclear fission” to describe the phenomenon. I was two years old when this was happening. Thirty-one years later I listened to Otto Frisch, in person, give a lecture about a fission experiment he designed for the Manhattan Project. That experiment bore similarities to a project where I was working at the time.In 1944 Frisch was recruited to work in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. In early 1945 he proposed a rather risky experiment which entailed dropping a piece of fissionable uranium 235 through a sub-critical mass of the same material, making it supercritical for an instant. The burst of fissions would help in refining calculations for the final critical mass needed for the atomic bomb. At the meeting where the presentation was made for the experiment, the famed physicist Richard Feynman began chuckling. When asked why he thought it humorous he said, “That’s like tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.” Thereafter it was called The Dragon Experiment. Months after the successful tests, the Dragon killed two physicists.             Fourteen years later I came to work in a project that was a direct descendant of that Dragon Experiment.

How Cold Is Cold? Excerpt from my article about Lake Baikal in Audubon Magazine, 2009.By Boyd NortonIn the summer of 1990, on my second visit to Baikal, I spent time at the northern tip of the lake. While there I became intrigued by a name I found on a map—a village called Holodnia, located about 20 kilometers north of Baikal’s northern shores. Now holodnia, in Russian, means “cold.” I asked myself, “What on earth is it like to live in a place called Cold, Siberia?” I had to find out. After two days of finagling I managed to get a vehicle and driver to take me and a few colleagues to the village. There we found a charming collection of old, typically Siberian log homes, two small stores, and a biblioteka (library). It was a hot day, with temperature in the high 80s—not the typical picture (or temperature) that most of us associate with Siberia. The streets were lined with lovely old shade trees. Except for a few Russian made vehicles, mostly beat-up old Ladas, and an ancient tractor, this could have been a bucolic town right out of mid-America, circa the 1940s. The only thing missing from the picture was a makeshift stand with kids selling lemonade. Main Street, Holodnia We walked leisurely up one street and down another. On one of those side streets a man stood in his yard behind a picket fence tending a garden. He waved and we stopped to chat. He was incredulous when he discovered we were Americans. Amerikanski! Apparently no one here had ever seen a non-Russian, let alone an American. With great excitement he invited us in for tea. Here was my chance to find out about life in Cold, Siberia. We sat in his tiny kitchen. The tea was typically Russian—dark, strong, and bracing. He served some small cookies as well. We made small talk. My friend Susie Crate, a Russian scholar, translated for us. He asked many questions about us. Where did we live? How did we get here? He was still astonished that we were Americans—sitting right here in his kitchen! The conversation went on and I was getting impatient. Finally, I could contain myself no longer. When a lull came in the conversation, I asked, “What is it like to live in a place called Cold, Siberia?” Susie translated.His brow wrinkled and a puzzled look came over his face. Then he realized that I was asking how cold is Cold. He laughed and made an aw-shucks-it’s-nothing wave of his hand. “We sometimes have minus-40 degrees here. It’s not bad,” he said. (Minus-40 degrees Celsius is the same as minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit.) Then, pointing to the north with his finger he said, “Ah, but Pereval [a village 50 kilometers north of Holdnia], they get down to minus-55 degrees” (which translates to an incredible 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit!). He paused and smiled to let that sink in. You wouldn’t catch him living in a place as cold as Pereval. No sir. Holodnia was a much balmier climate. The place called Cold wasn’t so cold after all.

It is 20 years since I blew up the reactor, almost to the day, and here I am sitting next to Mickey Mantle at the bar in the Smothers Brothers’ dressing room in Las Vegas. How could I have ever predicted that this would happen to me?
I was never a New York Yankees fan. As a kid growing up in Rhode Island we were all diehard Red Sox fans and hated the Yankees. So in 1982, when I found myself sitting next to Mickey Mantle at the bar in Tommy and Dick Smothers’ dressing room, I didn’t know what to say to him. Turns out I needn’t have said anything. After shaking my hand, he stared off into space, glassy-eyed and downright sloshed. After seating himself, a major task, he swayed a bit from side to side, making me wonder if seat belts shouldn’t be mandatory on bar stools. Moments earlier he and Kyle Rote had weaved their way into the Smothers’ suite in the hotel. Kyle was not in much better shape than Mickey, stumbling a little getting to the bar and managing to get himself into the seat on the other side of Mickey. He managed to carry on a conversation with a couple of other guests, though the words were slurred enough to be incomprehensible—at least from my vantage point. Mickey was silent and continued to stare as though in a trance. Apparently, there was a celebrity golf tournament going on in Las Vegas that day and a few friends of Tommy and Dick were gathered in the suite. At the time Kyle Rote had been long retired from his career as running back for the New York Giants. He was then a sportscaster for NBC. I surmised that he either covered the golf event for the network or participated in it. Mickey also may have played in it. Either way, there had been some heavy partying before they arrived here.            I had flown into Las Vegas that afternoon from Denver. On the way into town from the Las Vegas airport I saw a billboard promoting the Smothers Brothers show at one of the big casinos. On a whim, when I got to my hotel, I called the casino and was able to get through to Tommy. He invited me to the show that evening. “Come up to the dressing room before the show and have a drink,” he suggested. I couldn’t turn that down.            That’s how I came to be sitting next to a very shitfaced Mickey Mantle. I felt dismayed and uncomfortable. I may not have been a New York Yankees fan, but there were certain ballplayers that I admired, and he was one of them. As a Red Sox fan, the great Ted Williams, of course, was at the top of my baseball hero list. But not far behind were Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, even though they were both damned Yankees. And here was Mickey, sitting next to me. I tried desperately to make conversation, but any response from him was an incoherent mumble. Questions ran through my mind in rapid succession – what did he think of today’s hitters, who was the toughest pitcher he ever faced, …? But I knew he probably would not or could not answer them. And so I simply babbled on about the great New York Yankees and the history of great ballplayers on the team and what an illustrious career Mickey had and all the time knowing that my words were drifting past him like butterflies in a strong wind.  Soon Kyle decided that he and Mickey should head back to their rooms in the hotel. However, Tom Smothers had to guide them both to the door and then help them into the elevator. Afterwards I couldn’t shake this image of the two spending the night in that elevator, riding from top to bottom and back, because neither could remember the floor they were on. Kinda like that Kingston Trio song, Charlie on the MTA– They may ride forever in that eleva-tor, they’re the men who never returned. A sad evening but the show later was a great performance by the Smothers Brothers.*   *   *            It was one of those strange twists of fate that brought me to that dressing room and Mickey Mantle. In April 1980 Mason Williams was a guest at our house in Evergreen. Mason had been invited as the featured musician to play at the Earth Day celebration in Denver that year. The arrangement for Mason’s performance was made by a good friend of ours, Jane Russo, who worked in the Denver office of the Environmental Protection Agency. She asked us if we could host Mason during his stay. Barbara and I had been enthusiastic fans of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the late 1960s, and Mason’s award-winning song Classical Gas was among our favorites. Mason had been the head writer for the wildly popular Smothers programs. So, we were excited to have him as a guest.            While staying with us, Mason learned about my nuclear physics background. He and Bob Gardiner, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, were working on a screenplay entitled Hot Ice, which he described as a nuclear meltdown comedy. Learning that I was now a well published writer, as well as a former nuclear physicist, he invited me to help write the screenplay. It sounded like so much fun, I couldn’t turn it down, even though I wasn’t sure the world was ready for a comedy about a nuclear meltdown. It was only a year after the Three Mile Island accident. I had just published a major article in Audubon magazine about TMI and how close it came to becoming a major disaster. On the other hand, maybe it was time for some humor.            It was in October of 1980 when Mason introduced me to Tom and Dick Smothers. Mason was finishing work on an NBC Smothers Brothers Special to be aired on the network in November. He invited me to come to the NBC Studio in Burbank for the last two days of scripting and rehearsals and the video taping of the show. Afterwards Mason and I would then go to Bob Gardiner’s place in Laguna Beach to work on Hot Ice.Despite the pressure everyone was under for the upcoming show, on my arrival at the studio I was welcomed warmly by all. When I was introduced, Tom and Dick took time to ask about my photography and writing. Tom, especially, seemed fascinated by my radical career change. Others greeted me as though I were part of the group.I got to sit in on the final polishing of the script and watched the walk-through and the rehearsal. The script session was fascinating. These were pros and were very serious about their comedy. Pat Paulson was involved, as always playing the dead-pan presidential candidate. Carl Gottleib, who had been in the movie MASH, was one of the writers, as was Bob Gardiner, Ed Begley, Jr., musician Glen Campbell, Martin Mull and, of course, Tom and Dick and Mason. Pat Paulsen was a very sweet guy, very down to earth and a year or so later we got together for a drink in Denver when he was giving a performance there. Carl was a bit brusque and very business-like, though I suppose he had to be—he was listed as the show’s producer. Someone had to crack the whip. I liked Ed Begley Jr. —he was very cordial as was Glen Campbell. I didn’t get to spend much time with Martin Mull, but the whole gang of them went out of their way to make me, the outsider, feel comfortable. There didn’t seem to be an inflated ego in the bunch.Though the script was nearly finalized there were a few suggested changes offered by some in the group. Judging from the occasional quip or joke, I can well imagine how lively it must have been at the very early stages of writing the script. These were creative people. Ideas floated through the air like a butterfly, which someone would snatch and put a spin to it and float it again. Some punch lines needed refining. More ideas floated. I was mesmerized by the process, because, in my physics career, one did not make things up. We dealt with cold, calculated facts. This was way more fun. Some ideas were a bit off the wall, but often that led to another thought related to the first. And then someone else would toss in another variant, taking it in a different direction. Tom Smothers had the final say and it soon became apparent that he was the brains behind creative decisions. Adding to this creative frame of mind, I had noticed, while walking down the hallway to the scripting session, the definite odor of cannabis (Uh, yes, I was very familiar with cannabis odor). I’m sure that wasn’t sanctioned by NBC, but it was probably overlooked as long as the smoke wasn’t too blatant. I certainly did not see anyone smoking a joint so it was kept sub rosa. The show was taped the next day before a live audience. Actually, there were two audiences; during the first part of the taping there were pauses and breaks, some scenes and lines were changed, and the show continued. This was all planned, which is why there was another audience brought in for the last half of the taping which also had pauses and breaks. It took almost all day to do a one-hour show. When I watched the show a couple of weeks later back home, it was all very smooth; none of the pauses and breaks were apparent at all. This was professional showbiz, as you would expect.
Mason and I drove with Bob Gardiner to his place after the taping of the show. Bob lived on the second floor, a small walk-up apartment a few blocks from the beach in Laguna Beach. He was twenty-nine then, though he looked as though he might still be in high school. Bob was the consummate free-spirit in an era of lots of free-spirits.  In 1975, when he was twenty-four years old, he and Will Vinton won an Academy Award for the Best Animated Short Feature, Closed Mondays. It was all done painstakingly with clay animation, making slight motion changes in the clay and capturing these frame by frame with a motion picture camera. It was all done in a garage-turned-studio. Even by today’s computer-generated animations, the work still stands as a tour de force. The film can be seen on YouTube and has had more than 55,000 views—mostly, I suspect, by aficionados of the art of animation.One of the first things I noticed when we entered Bob’s place was the Oscar he had won. It was not prominently perched on a trophy shelf or in a carefully lighted display box. Instead it was on the floor, being used to hold open a door that tended to close when the ocean breeze blew through the windows. An Oscar, the epitome of recognition in the motion picture profession, was a doorstop! This defined Bob Gardiner for me. He was one of the most talented and creative individuals I have ever met. Pick a musical instrument and Bob could play it. Once, while staying at our house, he seated himself at our old upright piano and played various songs, old and new, for almost an hour non-stop. Then he picked up a guitar and did the same. He’d never had a music lesson in his life. His artwork was superb. He and Mason published some children’s books about where Santa went after Christmas, all with Bob’s delightful illustrations. Even while he and Mason and I worked on the script for Hot Ice he often made quick sketches to illustrate his thoughts about how the characters should look. Mason was meticulous. Scenes were outlined on large file cards so they could be laid out on the floor or tacked on a wall and rearranged to match our ideas on the story flow. Characters also were put on file cards to match with various scenes.Mason and Bob had come up with the basic premise of the story, which I can only best describe as Dr. Strangelove meets Godzilla and China Syndrome as told by Mel Brooks with characters out of Blazing Saddles. The story: Cosmopolitan Edison company’s Happy Valley Nuclear Power Station and Theme Park undergoes a severe accident resulting in complete meltdown of the reactor core. In order to cut costs, Cosmo Ed has cheated on the plant’s specifications by making the containment vessel thinner than required. The core melts completely through the bottom of the containment building, melting its way down through layers of bedrock finally halting in a layer of rock comprised of high carbon content. The enormous heat and pressure of the molten core brings about a phase change in the carboniferous layer, forming layers of crystalized carbon—also known as diamonds. These diamonds are huge and flawless. When discovered by using a remote probe during the damage assessment, the CEO of Cosmo Ed sees a way of making billions of dollars to not only cover their cost of cleaning up the meltdown but making a huge profit by marketing these diamonds. There is only one slight problem: the diamonds are highly radioactive—Hot Ice. This doesn’t deter the CEO and board of directors. Enter a consultant hired by Cosmo Ed to assess the damage. He is a sophisticated and brilliant nuclear physicist named Newton Archimedes—a kind of Sean Connery James Bond type character. When he discovers how highly radioactive the diamonds are, he threatens to blow the whistle on their dangerous scheme. And thus, one or more major conflicts ensue. Newton Archimedes and his lovely Swedish partner, the brilliant biophysicist chemist metallurgist geologist, Lambda Angstrom, must escape their confinement by the company’s para-military security forces and alert the world about the dangers. All the while, Cosmo Ed sells these flawless diamonds to the wealthiest men worldwide whose wives and mistresses begin dying from mysterious causes after wearing the beautiful necklaces and bracelets and rings. The supply of the world’s most beautiful women is in jeopardy.Do Newton and Lambda escape from the evil forces of Cosmo Ed? Can they make it to the offices of the New York Times? Is the evil plot revealed? Are the perpetrators caught and punished? Are the beautiful women saved?We continued work on the script, planning our sessions when travels brought us close enough together. In 1983 I had an assignment from a travel magazine to shoot photos and do a story on the Pacific Crest Trail. In the time allotted to do the story, there was no way that I could backpack that 2500-mile-long trail from the Mexican border to Canada. So, traveling by car, I hiked certain segments of it to get a flavor of the various ecosystems it traversed. I planned one of those sections to be in Oregon, very near Mason’s vacation cabin in Oakridge, located on a lovely trout stream that, fortuitously, was not far from the Pacific Crest Trail. That gave an opportunity to work some more on the script. Bob had been living in Portland, so he could join us. We worked there for five days. When we took breaks from the writing, Mason pulled on his waders and fly fished in the river while I roamed the lovely forest taking pictures. Bob would smoke a joint and practice his music with one of Mason’s guitars.The writing sessions were not without a certain amount of stress. Bob’s creativity seemed endless, fueled by pot, and the more he smoked the more hyper he got. Ideas flowed from him like a gushing firehose. A lot of it was great, but some off-the-wall ideas strayed too far from the main story. The big problem was putting order into the chaos of his thoughts. He was brilliant. But his mind could not find a way to bring order to his great ideas and Mason and I struggled to get it down on paper in some semblance of a script. At one point, in frustration, Mason slammed his fist into and partly through a wall in his cabin.When we left these writing sessions we kept in touch by phone and snail mail (no internet then). Occasionally I would get a heavy package from Mason containing a three-ring binder thick with pages of the script along with revisions and some new ideas and thoughts. Those several days we spent at Mason’s cabin were the last time we three got together to write. And sometime later Mason declared the script finished. Or at least, finished enough.Most screenplays for the average 90- to 100-minute movie range from 100 to 150 pages in length. Our epic was well over 300 pages. Hot Icenever made it to the Silver Screen. Mason did try hard. He circulated it to some friends and contacts he had in Hollywood, including Rob Reiner and Lili Tomlin. All turned it down. As interest in it waned, we three screenwriters drifted apart. Mason continued with his music, organizing concerts from time to time with bluegrass groups. He never gave up entirely on Hot Ice. Sometimes I would get a large envelope in the mail filled with notes and ideas, along with a new CD of his music. Bob, I learned, bounced around taking various jobs involving his art. He did a number of television commercials and some videos. For a while, before computer animation came on the scene, his clay animation was popular in television commercials. On occasion Mason had comedy writing gigs and he got Bob involved to give him some income. I think Bob supported himself mostly by tending bar and playing piano in bars and clubs. I ended up in Siberia. In 1986 I had a contract to do a book with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Russian poet, entitled Divided Twins: Alaska and Siberia. That year I made the first of my many trips to Siberia. I was out of contact with Bob and Mason for a long time after thatMonths went by, then years, without much contact. And then I got an email from Mason in April 2005. Bob Gardiner had taken his own life, hanged himself in his studio in Grass Valley, California. He was 54 years old. It was devastating news. What is there about the brilliant, creative mind that sometimes, perhaps too often, leads down a path of self-destruction? Has anyone discovered the answer to that question? I’ve worked with, and among, creative people most of my life—in science and in writing and in visual arts. Some stand out in my mind. Bob Gardiner was high on the scale of brilliance. And so was Mason Williams.

Chapter One: Where the spaces are wide open . . .A-long the trail you’ll find me lopin’Where the spaces are wide open In the land of the old A-E-C, (Yahoo)Where the scenery’s attractiveAnd the air is radioactiveOh the wild west is where I want to be-e-e-e …From a song by Tom Lehrer
I love all deserts, but I have a particular fondness for that bleak and barren piece of wasteland that sprawls for hundreds of miles west and south of Idaho Falls, Idaho. It is blistering hot in August, bitter cold in January, barely tolerable the rest of the time. It’s called the Snake River Plain or the northern Great Basin Desert, depending upon which map you peruse. Nothing there grows higher than your knees, and mostly it’s scrubby sagebrush that claws at your legs when you walk through it. In spring, after the snow melts and the rains fall, this desert has a green blush that masks the outcroppings of black lava bedrock. When it rains the air is heavy with the camphorous odor of sage. In September the sage and grasses turn pale and, after those searing hot days of August, the desert smells like burnt grass and everything is crackling dry. In winter, just before dawn, the snow is tinged icy blue, like a scene out of Dr. Zhivago. The cold, dry air stings your nostrils when you inhale. Perhaps the real reason I like this desert so much is because it’s a land of extremes, and Iworked in it doing extreme things. It was important, cutting edge science. In recent times one reporter called us “The Right Stuff” of nuclear science because we were pushing the outside of the envelope of reactor safety. And on November 5, 1962 I punched through that envelope by blowing up a reactor. Deliberately.My God, but it had been fun. And exciting.
Headed west in 1960, fresh out of Michigan Tech with a degree in physics and an eye toward California, land of sunshine and aerospace industry, I took a wrong turn in the middle of Wyoming, or thought I did at the time. I wanted to see Yellowstone, make one of those typical in-and-out-of-the-park trips, mostly to confirm the wild stories I'd read about the place. My road map had been lost for days, buried somewhere in a backseat that was full of clothes and empty beer cans, but I knew where I was going and I knew that somewhere, just before Yellowstone, I would pass a mountain range called the Tetons. That name conjured up dim memories, from an old calendar photograph, perhaps, or a travel article, of towering peaks covered with a frosting of dazzling snow.West of Riverton and across hot, shimmering desert, the blue forms of distant mountains took shape. Past Dubois they were confirmed, rough, rugged mountains jutting out of a deep-green sea of forest —the Tetons, obviously. (Actually, as I was to learn later, what I was seeing was part of the southern Absaroka Range.) The highway continued on, climbing upward and apparently through the range. Funny. I didn't recall the map showing any highway cutting across the Tetons. Near the top of Togwotee Pass I stopped to breathe in that crisp air, take a picture of the great cliffs towering above, and listen to a Californian brag to another tourist about why he lived in the land of smog instead of here: "Ya can't eat scenery." ("Damned good thing," I muttered to myself.)I was totally unprepared for what happened next. Having seen and crossed the "Tetons," I continued my journey. In a few miles I rounded a bend on the west side of Togwotee Pass and very nearly drove off the road. Before me was the most stunning panorama I had ever seen. Laid out like a lush green carpet below me was the valley of Jackson Hole. And at the far edge of that carpet, poking upward like carnivorous teeth biting into a deep-blue Wyoming sky, were the most incredible mountains. No. They couldn't be real. They must be the leftover backdrop from a ridiculous Hollywood extravaganza. Even in my wildest dreams I could not have conceived of a range of peaks so awful, so bristling, so wild and rugged and magnificent. But there they were. As I drove closer the first impressions were amplified. They were awful, looming jaggedly over Jackson Hole. Frightening. Wild. And fascinating. The Tetons from Togwotee Pass The aerospace industry could do without my talents. I chose instead to settle somewhere near these magnificent Tetons—my Tetons. (I secretly laid claim to them that day on Togwotee Pass.) And thus began what was to become—and remain—a love affair with a great mountain range and wild country everywhere.Fortunately, before leaving the East Coast for my cross-country jaunt, I had submitted a resume in response to an ad in a technical magazine. A prime contractor for the United States Atomic Energy Commission was seeking physicists for reactor-safety studies at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho.Idaho! I had never been west of Wisconsin, so I hadn't the foggiest notion of what Idaho was like. I suppose in my mind there was some vague vision of a Sun Valley ski resort rising like Mt. Fuji, abruptly and snow-capped, out of a vast sea of potatoes. It didn't matter; if it was close to the Tetons and Yellowstone, Idaho it would be. Especially if I could be in the nuclear field as well.I had deep roots in nuclear science. When I was ten years old, I could write complex chemical equations and I knew the symbols and atomic weights for most of the known elements. By then I had graduated from the simple chemistry sets and had a fully stocked chemical laboratory in our basement. News of the atomic bomb drew me into physics like a magnet. By the time I was twelve I could explain in great detail the concept of critical masses and the fission process. My career path was becoming clear. I received my first AEC/FBI security clearance at age eighteen, right out of high school. This gave me access to information classified up to Top Secret. In order to earn money for college I had taken a job in Attleboro, Massachusetts as a lab technician in a metallurgical laboratory doing research on fuel elements for nuclear submarines. I guess I impressed them enough for they hired me back each summer during college. It was there that I handled Uranium-235 (the highly enriched fissionable isotope of an atomic bomb) for the first time and I got to play with exotic elements from a big chunk of the periodic table. Then, at nineteen, I was accepted with a scholarship to Michigan College of Mining and Technology. It was the poor man's MIT, located in the wonderful boondocks of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I majored in physics with a minor in beer consumption.So, when I hauled into Idaho Falls, only a two-hour drive from the Tetons, I was pretty excited. I put on my only suit and tie and went to see a man about a job. I was ecstatic when they offered me a position there.

A Prologue, kinda, from my newest book in progress. (Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz on this.) A neutron is a subatomic particle found in the nucleus of all but one element—hydrogen, whose nucleus consists of a single proton. A neutron has a mass nearly that of a proton but has no electrical charge (the proton carries a positive charge). In the early years of nuclear physics, neutrons and protons could be thought of as sub-atomic billiard balls, solid and hefty. Now we know otherwise. Quantum physics tells us that a neutron is made up of two down-quarks and one up-quark. Don’t ask me what quarks are made of. And please don’t ask what the difference is between a down-quark and an up-quark. I leave the answer to all that in the hands of such brilliant theorists as Michio Kaku. I prefer the billiard ball analogy myself. Let it just be said that a neutron, with no electrical charge, can enter a nucleus of certain atoms, such as uranium 235 or plutonium 239, and create quantum havoc. The aftermath of that havoc is nuclear fission.In 1938, German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman bombarded a sample of uranium metal with neutrons. Uranium, atomic number 92, was at the tail end of the periodic table of all known elements of the time. By absorbing a neutron in its nucleus, it was thought that the uranium might be transformed into a new, unknown element of atomic number 93. However, their results were baffling. Instead of a newer, heavier element, they found several lighter elements that hadn’t been there before. Lise Meitner, an Austrian physicist, suggested to them that the uranium atom had split, releasing great energy, and leaving behind the lighter atoms as fragments. Shortly thereafter Meitner’s nephew, Otto Frisch, also a physicist and a colleague of Neils Bohr, came to visit her and he suggested the term “nuclear fission” to describe the phenomenon. I was two years old when this was happening. Thirty-one years later I listened to Otto Frisch, in person, give a lecture about a fission experiment he designed for the Manhattan Project. That experiment bore similarities to a project where I worked at the time.In 1944 Frisch had been recruited to work in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. In early 1945 he proposed a rather risky experiment which entailed dropping a piece of fissionable Uranium 235 through a sub-critical mass of the same material, making it supercritical for an instant. The burst of fissions would help in refining calculations for the final critical mass needed for the atomic bomb. At the meeting where the presentation was made for the experiment, the famed physicist Richard Feynman began chuckling. When asked why he thought it humorous he said, “That’s like tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.” Thereafter it was called the Dragon Experiment. Only months after the first test, the Dragon Experiment killed two physicists at Los Alamos. The Dragon that killed physicist Louis Slotin


In 1960 I went to work in a project that was a direct descendant of that Dragon Experiment.

Is nuclear energy the key to saving the planet?Only Nuclear Energy Can Save the PlanetNuclear Power Can Save the WorldWithin the past couple of years, these and other headlines have appeared in publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times and even to the widely read environmental publication, High Country News.According to many of the articles newer designs and materials have made nuclear reactors much safer and therefore safe to use a major power sources. Unfortunately, these claims have not been proven.I spent nine years as a research physicist and middle management director studying nuclear reactor safety at the National Reactor Testing Station (now Idaho National Laboratory). It was called Special Power Excursion Reactor Tests (SPERT).

We had four reactors of differing designs operated by remote control from a half mile distance. I have the dubious honor of blowing up one of those reactors as a test in 1962. An offshoot of our program was called LOFT, or Loss of Fluid Test, designed to study what happens in a loss of coolant accident – similar to what happened in the Three Mile Island and Fukushima accidents. Both the SPERT and LOFT programs were eventually stifled and killed by one man, a zealous advocate of nuclear power plant development who was head of the division in the Atomic Energy Commission overseeing and funding reactor safety research. Today there is little, if any, meaningful research being conducted on reactor safety, particularly on the highly touted “new designs.” Many advocates point to computer modelling studies as proof of the safety. However, there are too many complex parameters in computer models and the only real study to prove the safety is to push the outside of the envelope on actual reactors.If computer modelling is so accurate, would we put astronauts on top of a powerful moon rocket relying solely on computer modelling - and not actually physically testing that rocket extensively? Not likely.My next book, in progress, will cover my years of nuclear reactor safety studies and the demise of true scientific research in that field. It’s entitled: Tickling the Dragon’s Tail. The title is from a quote by famed physicist Richard Feynman during the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos lab. A risky experiment had been proposed which would create a supercritical burst of fissions by dropping a piece of fissionable uranium 235 through a subcritical mass of the same substance. When the experiment was presented at a meeting, Feynman chuckled, saying “That’s like tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.” It became known as the Dragon Experiment. Later, two physicists were killed by modified versions of that experiment. Several years later I went to work in that Idaho project that was a descendant of the Dragon Experiment.

House republicans have introduced a bill that would allow oil and gas drilling in 40 National Parks. If it passes, this is what Grand Teton National Park will look like on your next visit:

Human ErrorHumankind has created a technology we cannot control.”  Martin Rees, world-renowned cosmologist and Britain’s Astronomer Royal.
Photo © Boyd Norton

Human ErrorHumankind has created a technology we cannot control.”  Martin Rees, world-renowned cosmologist and Britain’s Astronomer Royal.
Audubon magazine published my article on the Three Mile Island accident in May of 1980, a little over a year after the TMI meltdown happened. I traveled widely during that year, visiting nuclear plants, attending hearings in Washington, observing an actual test in Idaho of the loss of coolant experienced by TMI. While gathering material for the article, I visited a nuclear power plant under construction in North Carolina. I remember how I leaned over the temporary railing and stared down into a gargantuan pressure vessel at Duke Power’s McGuire Nuclear Generating Station, under construction near Charlotte, North Carolina. Blinding blue-white arcs of welding torches imparted an eerie, almost stroboscopic glow to the smooth interior of the great stainless steel container that was being put together, piece by piece. This was the crucial vessel that would restrain the nuclear fission while withstanding enormous internal pressures and searing bombardment by neutrons and gamma rays. And I wondered at the time: How do you build the perfect machine? For it takes nearly that to contain and control the fission process safely. How do you guard against the hung-over welder the foreman whose wife just left him the stoned and careless electrician the negligent draftsman the engineer appeasing management the inspector fearful of losing his job the inexperienced designer the alcoholic manager making decisions the incompetent reactor operator or the CEO whose primary concern is profits? In the end, every nuclear accident can be traced to human error since it is humans who design, build and operate nuclear reactors.
This is an excerpt from my newest book Tickling the Dragon's Tail, being completed. For those who might be interested here is the first chapter published last fall in the literary magazine, The Kenyon Review. It's about the day I blew up a nuclear reactor - deliberately. Link