Notes from Airport Conversation with Nuclear Bombmaker
Posted at 1:06 pm on Friday, May 4, 2007, in Uncategorized, and tagged misc.
Sitting at an airport bar I struck up a conversation with the person sitting next to me. After exchanging pleasantries, our conversation turned to his work — nuclear bombs. The fellow held a PhD graduate from UPenn and worked at a national laboratory in South Carolina. He was in the San Francisco bay area on a business trip to the Lawrence Livermore lab — the “designers” he referred to them as. He considered his lab the “producers.”
He (I never got his name, I didn’t really know how to ask) said he was in “metallurgy,” which prompted me to ask what type of metallurgy he is involved in. “Nuclear weapons,” he responded. And oh how I wished I had a voice or video recorder rolling, although I probably didn’t have clearance (as he would discuss later).
I proceeded to ask the metallurgist a series of probing questions and he was all the more prepared to answer them. The questions ranged from a desire of mine to resolve my questions based on engineering (he was in materials science engineering, and it was once he knew what we did for a living, that me and my wife are both engineers, when the conversation turned from the weather and traffic to nuclear bombs) to the political aspects of nuclear testing, nuclear waste and North Korea. What I got as a result of my “innocent” questioning (I never told him that I blogged, and that I would most likely blog whatever he told me) was a revealing look into an engineer’s perspective on the issues surrounding nuclear weapons.
Our new friend informed my wife and I on the differences between an atomic and nuclear bomb. In what has to be considered a crash review of a graduate-level course in nuclear physics, the atomic bomb consists of a forced reaction that squeezes an amount of plutonium or uranium into a smaller space, causing an explosive blasting effect, followed by the more deadly radiation effect. Simply put, he told us, today’s nuclear weapons use the atomic bomb as the ignition of an even larger bomb. Yesterday’s bomb is today’s ignition (as the saying goes). The atomic blast at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the metallurgist said, was roughly equivalent to 1000 tons of TNT. Today’s nuclear bomb would be 100 times more explosive. Eep.
We talked briefly about North Korea and the differences between nuclear energy and nuclear weapon-making, and whether if the U.S. were able to know the difference from afar. He said that the only reason North Korea would need centrifuges (to isolate the neutrons to create the desired, altered, explosive element) would be for the production of nuclear weapons, not nuclear energy. “We would give them what they need for nuclear energy,” the stranger insisted, “but they don’t want that.”
There has been no nuclear testing by the U.S. in over twenty years but does that really mean anything, I asked. “Not really.”
Our new airport friend was not a fan of the Clinton administration. He felt that the people put in charge were political and not aware of issues pertaining to his work. (That is probably a safe assessment.) One thing he mentioned was that the Clinton appointee wanted to do away with the three levels of security clearance because it was discriminatory. He made a good point as to how ridiculous that was, if it was indeed true. He was clearly a conservative — he stressed his Catholic school upbringing at the beginning of our acquaintanceship — and I’m certain most people in his profession are.
He mentioned he was in business solely because the nuclear weapons material has a half-life of ten or so years. Therefore, they need to decommission weapons and build new ones all the time. His work mostly centered around the decommissioning of old weapons.
We talked about nuclear waste, which has a half-life of 10,000 years or so. He thinks that the Yucca mountain project is a good idea — to concentrate all of the waste around the U.S., currently stored underwater (to trap the radiation) in several locations, in one cave in the desert. We didn’t discuss whether or not Nevada should be required to allow all of this nuclear material into their state, or the long-term environmental effects, but he did state that Nevada was originally fine with the plan when they were informed as to how much money thew would get.
All in all, I considered this random one-hour-long conversation to be fascinating, and it surely made the time fly by as we awaited our delayed takeoff. I had a couple of Red Bull i vodkas. Our friend never sipped his glass of wine. I wanted to ask for his business card, but I thought that would have been strange. It was very comforting knowing that we didn’t know each other’s names, especially since we would never see one another again, so what would be the difference.
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Below are the hand-written notes I jotted down in the airport immediately after the conversation. I was able to read much of it…
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May 8th, 2007 at 8:16 am
I’ve often been caught up in conversations with strangers in public places after not having introduced myself first. You’re right in that it IS awkward to ask the other person’s name midway through the conversation, but what I usually do is wait for a pause and then introduce myself, excusing my bad manners. Or, more often than not, just before we take leave of one another, say that I’ve enjoyed the conversation and then introduce myself, again apologizing for my manners. (Of course, if I haven’t enjoyed it, then I don’t do that.) You never know that you just might meet again!