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Uranium Nation

The most remarkable thing about the element uranium isn’t its value or its ability to destroy entire cities, but rather the extraordinary lengths man has gone to get the stuff.

We’ve known about uranium for a couple hundred years, but we didn’t unleash its full power until the middle of the last century, when the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert. Since then, man has had an unquenchable lust for it, the history of which is meticulously chronicled in Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World, by Tom Zoellner.

That history includes war, violence, spies, the military, slave labor, destruction and despair, and covers nearly all the world’s continents. Uranium’s path to the present includes fortunes made (and lost), careers rising (and falling) and a cold war between two superpowers that lasted nearly half a century.

The book also explores the political cost of harnessing the atom — it was Saddam Hussein’s alleged quest to obtain highly enriched uranium from Niger, Zoellner says, that became part of the U.S. justification for invading Iraq. “Few things inspire the collective dread of the West as much as the suggestion that a poor country — particularly an Islamic one — is busy trying to acquire or enrich uranium,” he writes.

The costs weren’t merely political: America spent $10 trillion mining and enriching uranium in the 20th century, he writes, a figure that’s larger than the entire economic output of the country during all of the 19th century.

“In this rock we can see the best and the worst of mankind,” he writes, “the capacity for scientific progress and political genius; the capacity for nihilism, exploitation, and terror.”

Zoellner explores personal stories of the myriad starry-eyed prospectors who set out to make their fortune on the radioactive rock but often ended up penniless. And he charts the ebbs and flows of the global uranium market, which is now experiencing a renaissance, likely because of a widespread concern for the environment and a foundering global economy.

“Unlike harnessing the wind or the sun, uranium power is here right now and ready to go. And a single ton of raw uranium provides the same electricity as twenty thousand tons of black coal,” he writes.

He breezily explains the important reaction within uranium that makes it so cool — namely, that it is an element in a perpetual state of anxiety, casting off bits and pieces of itself (radiation) while volatile enough to unleash energy on a stellar scale if enough comes together to achieve critical mass.

We figured out how to do this in the 1940s and, naturally, put it to military use, dropping the first of two bombs on Japan and effectively ending a war. (The book notes that one of the bomb’s creators went outside to vomit in the bushes after hearing of its success.)

Zoellner explains that uranium-235, which is the most fissile natural element on Earth and makes up less than 1 percent of uranium in nature (nearly all is the more stable uranium-238), is really the star of the show, because that’s what powers nuclear plants and makes the atom bomb so destructive — and useful.

When we figured out how to use uranium-235 for more peaceful ends, it ushered in the era of atomic energy, and to this day it helps power many of the world’s light bulbs — in France, more than 70 percent of them.

As the physicist Freeman Dyson said, “Nuclear explosions have a glitter more seductive than gold to those who play with them. To command nature to release in a pint pot the energy that fuels the stars ... these are exercises of the human will that produce an illusion of illimitable power.”

Because so much uranium has been enriched over the years and so many warheads are now in the hands of so many world leaders, any nation that deploys one will itself be subjected to a retaliatory volley. The cold irony is that most of uranium’s power lies not in its destruction but in our knowledge of just how destructive it is.

Uranium facts

• Uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring element.

• If inhaled, one thousandth of a gram of plutonium (a close cousin and by-product of uranium refinement) causes death in a matter of hours.

• The U.S. has produced more than 1,000 tons of highly enriched uranium; 3.2 tons of it has vanished.

Source: “Uranium,” by Tom Zoellner