A piece of death, a piece of power.
A week after Halloween, I attended a Samhain rit with a local grove. The theme of the rit was on dreams and death, and at the end everyone was given a reminder of the theme. In this case the reminder was a small uranium-glass marble, described by the hosts as "a piece of death".
I can see why they would chose that association. Radiation, nuclear power, and uranium are fearful boogeymen among the public today. The average person on the street is likely to associate radiation with death, images of nuclear weapons wiping out humanity and nuclear disasters like Chernobyl. When I show the uranium-glass marble to my friends, the usual first response is fear and alarm. There's barely enough radioactive material there to make a Geiger counter click, but the name alone brings up a seep-seated superstitious fear.
I don't think it's a fair assessment, however. I prefer to think of my little ball of uranium glass as a little piece of power, and a lesson in the fundamental forces of our universe.
Your daily existence is ruled by the electromagnetic force. Gravity holds you to the ground, but you can overcome that weak force with your muscles and walk across the room. Your movement, and your very thoughts, are the end result of a vast chain of chemical reactions, tiny electric charges causing molecules to form, change shape, or break apart as your body converts energy stored in chemical bonds into heat and movement. The floor you walk on depends on chemical bonds, electrons and protons attracting to give strength to materials. Electric fields push electrons along copper wires, delivering the power to create electromagnetic waves which you perceive as light illuminating the room.
These interactions, all controlled by the same force, are similar in strength. Size and arrangement of atoms change just how strong the total force is, but there is an upper limit to how strong something made of atoms can be, or how much energy can be contained in a fuel powered by breaking chemical bonds. Evolved in a universe controlled by electromagnetic forces, we are intuitively used to the forces and energy levels involved. Even before understanding the physics involved, we were used to the rules by which electromagnetism plays.
Nuclear forces don't play by the same rules. Just as the electromagnetic force is vastly stronger than the gravitational force - allowing a the muscles of your legs to overcome an entire planet's worth of gravity - the nuclear forces are vastly stronger than the electromagnetic forces. This is why a softball-sized lump of uranium can power a nuclear submarine for years, or why a single nuclear bomb can do more damage than thousands of conventional bombs. This thumbnail-sized glass marble contains only trace amounts of uranium, but even that tiny amount of uranium could yield more energy than a barrel of crude oil if burned in a reactor. It's why used nuclear fuel can still contain enough energy to remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years, or why a microscopic particle of radioactive debris can kill you.
It's understandable that people fear radiation. Invisible, and not fitting with the physics evolution has prepared us for, it's like some kind of supernatural force. It's not surprising that some environmental groups treat nuclear power as intrinsically evil, like getting energy via selling souls to the devil or something.
While I understand the fear, I don't for a moment agree with it, or that we should let that fear rule our choices. Nuclear energy has great power to do harm, but it also has great power to save lives and do good. There's the direct life-saving use of radiation to treat cancer, of course. More often overlooked is the benefit of nuclear power, and how it compares against coal. Despite all the development that has been put into alternative power sources, coal and nuclear are still the only choices for large-scale baseload power generation. Coal power has an indisputably high cost in terms of lives, health, and environmental damage. Nuclear power has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives, between the direct benefit of eliminating dangerous coal-mining jobs, to those suffering from lung ailments from coal exhaust gas, and even in the long term all the deaths and displacements caused by global warming. As a humanist, and someone who believes in using technology to better the world, I believe that harnessing the nuclear strong force for peace and progress is something we should be doing.
I look at this green marble in my hand and see not death, but power. It seemed a shame just to let it sit around. I have no way to directly harness the energy in the uranium, but I can at least put the material to some artistic use. Uranium glass glows green when illuminated by ultraviolet light. I had a handful of ultrabright LEDs, left over from a bulk mixed-color buy off Ebay. Surely I could do something interesting with them. Messing around with copper wire, I would up with a radial arrangement similar to an old radial airplane engine. Originally I had planned to simply wire all the LEDs on for maximum illumination, but the radial arrangement inspired me to try and see if I could get them to light in sequence. Easiest way would have been to use a microcontroller, but a centralized control didn't fit the aesthetic I was aiming at. I put together a ring oscillator, built up of discrete components, and integrated it into the radial design. The result is a little glass-and-copper bauble, with a constantly changing green glow coming from the glass ball in the center. I'm happy with the results, although I think I can improve on it yet.
Now if only I could figure out how to make it self-powered...
I can see why they would chose that association. Radiation, nuclear power, and uranium are fearful boogeymen among the public today. The average person on the street is likely to associate radiation with death, images of nuclear weapons wiping out humanity and nuclear disasters like Chernobyl. When I show the uranium-glass marble to my friends, the usual first response is fear and alarm. There's barely enough radioactive material there to make a Geiger counter click, but the name alone brings up a seep-seated superstitious fear.
I don't think it's a fair assessment, however. I prefer to think of my little ball of uranium glass as a little piece of power, and a lesson in the fundamental forces of our universe.
Your daily existence is ruled by the electromagnetic force. Gravity holds you to the ground, but you can overcome that weak force with your muscles and walk across the room. Your movement, and your very thoughts, are the end result of a vast chain of chemical reactions, tiny electric charges causing molecules to form, change shape, or break apart as your body converts energy stored in chemical bonds into heat and movement. The floor you walk on depends on chemical bonds, electrons and protons attracting to give strength to materials. Electric fields push electrons along copper wires, delivering the power to create electromagnetic waves which you perceive as light illuminating the room.
These interactions, all controlled by the same force, are similar in strength. Size and arrangement of atoms change just how strong the total force is, but there is an upper limit to how strong something made of atoms can be, or how much energy can be contained in a fuel powered by breaking chemical bonds. Evolved in a universe controlled by electromagnetic forces, we are intuitively used to the forces and energy levels involved. Even before understanding the physics involved, we were used to the rules by which electromagnetism plays.
Nuclear forces don't play by the same rules. Just as the electromagnetic force is vastly stronger than the gravitational force - allowing a the muscles of your legs to overcome an entire planet's worth of gravity - the nuclear forces are vastly stronger than the electromagnetic forces. This is why a softball-sized lump of uranium can power a nuclear submarine for years, or why a single nuclear bomb can do more damage than thousands of conventional bombs. This thumbnail-sized glass marble contains only trace amounts of uranium, but even that tiny amount of uranium could yield more energy than a barrel of crude oil if burned in a reactor. It's why used nuclear fuel can still contain enough energy to remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years, or why a microscopic particle of radioactive debris can kill you.
It's understandable that people fear radiation. Invisible, and not fitting with the physics evolution has prepared us for, it's like some kind of supernatural force. It's not surprising that some environmental groups treat nuclear power as intrinsically evil, like getting energy via selling souls to the devil or something.
While I understand the fear, I don't for a moment agree with it, or that we should let that fear rule our choices. Nuclear energy has great power to do harm, but it also has great power to save lives and do good. There's the direct life-saving use of radiation to treat cancer, of course. More often overlooked is the benefit of nuclear power, and how it compares against coal. Despite all the development that has been put into alternative power sources, coal and nuclear are still the only choices for large-scale baseload power generation. Coal power has an indisputably high cost in terms of lives, health, and environmental damage. Nuclear power has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives, between the direct benefit of eliminating dangerous coal-mining jobs, to those suffering from lung ailments from coal exhaust gas, and even in the long term all the deaths and displacements caused by global warming. As a humanist, and someone who believes in using technology to better the world, I believe that harnessing the nuclear strong force for peace and progress is something we should be doing.
I look at this green marble in my hand and see not death, but power. It seemed a shame just to let it sit around. I have no way to directly harness the energy in the uranium, but I can at least put the material to some artistic use. Uranium glass glows green when illuminated by ultraviolet light. I had a handful of ultrabright LEDs, left over from a bulk mixed-color buy off Ebay. Surely I could do something interesting with them. Messing around with copper wire, I would up with a radial arrangement similar to an old radial airplane engine. Originally I had planned to simply wire all the LEDs on for maximum illumination, but the radial arrangement inspired me to try and see if I could get them to light in sequence. Easiest way would have been to use a microcontroller, but a centralized control didn't fit the aesthetic I was aiming at. I put together a ring oscillator, built up of discrete components, and integrated it into the radial design. The result is a little glass-and-copper bauble, with a constantly changing green glow coming from the glass ball in the center. I'm happy with the results, although I think I can improve on it yet.
Now if only I could figure out how to make it self-powered...