Edward Willett

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Fission

We sometimes talk about living in the Nuclear Age, because it has only been in the last 50 years that we have managed to harness the power expressed by Einstein as E=mc2. But strictly speaking, uranium fission, which is what we think of when we think of nuclear power, isn't new. About 1.78 billion years ago (give or take a few million years) there was enough uranium trapped in the rock near Gabon, West Africa, for a chain reaction to begin on its own. For a million years, Gabon was home to the world's first nuclear reactor. Still, we egotistical humans don't really pay much attention to things that happened ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 11:01, November 13th, 1991 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns | Comment now »