Uranium

Comment: Just a history of uranium, thought as interesting!

War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World

By Tom Zoellner

Uranium is highly unstable at the best of times, but put a bunch of the atoms close together, then shoot one with a neutron, and the whole lot becomes cataclysmically unhinged.

It is uranium's contact with humans, of course, that results in the mayhem.

Left to its own devices, uranium is happy to shed particles in orderly fashion, shape-shifting its way down the isotopic chain to radium, to radon and polonium, on and on until coming to rest as lead. But refine the atom from U-238 to U-235 and you've got an element with profound anger-management issues that can be exploited by folks bent on violence.

Tom Zoellner's "Uranium" is a serious and exciting, in a terrifying way, telling of the element's story, a behavioral geology of its progress through the human condition.

It is not often a pretty picture - though it can be, as uranium is highly chromatic: It has been used as body paint, and as a tint for stained glass and a line of dishes known as Fiesta Ware.

Mostly, once the refined product U-235 is on the table, what we witness are "some of the darker pulls of humanity: greed, vanity, xenophobia, arrogance, and a certain suicidal glee."

The book is timely, with all the talk about nuclear power's future role in the politically charged world of energy needs and how it might have a rightful place in tempering global warming. Before anyone blindly jumps on that bandwagon, Zoellner reminds us that many of the same safety questions we had 50 years ago about nuclear energy have yet to be answered:

"How do you dispose of the waste? How do you keep the plant from being a military target? How do you make sure the plutonium by-product isn't being secretly taken elsewhere and packed into the core of a bomb?"

Zoellner comes at uranium as an investigative reporter who takes the facts and shapes them into a journey, starting with the Congolese mine that yielded much of the uranium used in the Hiroshima bomb.

Congo was given a small reactor in thanks for its help with the Manhattan Project, which went critical in 1959, one year before an endless civil war broke out. Two fuel rods, at least, have been stolen so far.

Though it's a tale full of colorful anecdotes and freebooting characters, the tone here is one of dread: a schizophrenic genie uncorked from its bottle, with a malevolent side that could easily prevail. Lost, stolen or strayed, plenty of U-235 has already been mislaid - inevitably, considering human nature.

Zoellner's chapters on Australia's uranium industry highlight our fraught relationship with the element.

Its mining created a measure of wealth and a great deal of power, while questions arose regarding toxic waste, disregard of Aboriginal culture and nuclear proliferation.

And there, from an Australian opponent of uranium mining, a coda: "Was putting all this stuff into the world really making the planet any safer?"

Peter Lewis is a writer at the American Geographical Society. E-mail him at books@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/13/RVHR167QSA.DTL