Earliest possible nuclear power use?

Gunnarnz

Just out of idle curiousity, what would be the earliest that a serious attempt could be made to release the energy of the atom? IOTL it required the discovery of the neutron in 1932, but it might be possible to speed that up and bring it back to before 1900 (which is why this thread is in this section of the forum).

A brief look at Wikipedia (I know, I know...) indicates that Newton may have been the first to suggest a mass-energy equivalence in 1717, and in the late 19th century there seem to have been several people investigating this area.
Radioactive materials themselves were discovered in 1896 by one of those coincidences which could perhaps have happened before. Becquerel was investigating phosphorescence with the help of photographic plates, but knowledge of a photochemical effect apparenly dates back as early as 1694!

So:
1) What science/engineering is needed to make a decent stab at producing a nuclear power plant?
2) How much could those techniques be plausibly brought forward?
And, as a bonus question in case those aren't enough to be getting on with: 3) Who are the most likely candidates to be involved in this research?
 

Falecius

I read somewhere a rather implausible story concerning nuclear weapons developed by Newton (IIRC) and deployed by Britain against France in some War of Something's Succession.
 

Gunnarnz

I'm not thinking in terms of weapons, just as a power source really. And it doesn't have to be successful, I was just wondering if it was possible for someone(s) to have given it a decent go, even if they decided "nope, doesn't work" or have themselves a horrible industrial accident that contaminates the landscape and kills a off a whole slew of their best scientists.

Without the theory behind it all, nuclear power plants are basically steam engines it seems. Could the fact that radioactive materials give off heat have been noticed relatively early, and some bright spark have decided to use that heat for something?
 

Falecius

Gunnarnz said:
I'm not thinking in terms of weapons, just as a power source really. And it doesn't have to be successful, I was just wondering if it was possible for someone(s) to have given it a decent go, even if they decided "nope, doesn't work" or have themselves a horrible industrial accident that contaminates the landscape and kills a off a whole slew of their best scientists.

Without the theory behind it all, nuclear power plants are basically steam engines it seems. Could the fact that radioactive materials give off heat have been noticed relatively early, and some bright spark have decided to use that heat for something?
Click to expand...

I think it is possible. However, to get an explosion is far easier than to get sustained heat, especially if you are operating without a theory behind.
I'm trying to figure out how much far back you can go with this. If photochemical effect are observed more systematically earlier, say in the Middle Ages, they could offer an headstart, but it is difficult to see anything important done before 1700 or so at the very best.
Also, what if some Aristotle's works are lost? This would mean a massively different way to development of physical sciences. Atomic theory could become the mainstream view in Islamic science (it was widespread before Aristotle's books were taken as the main reference) and be handed down to Europe after. This does not mean necessarily a more advanced science in general, but possibly one able to focus on such stuff earlier.
 

Gunnarnz

Obviously to pursue this I need to know more about nuclear science and engineeering, and the general history of science in those fields too. :)

The butterflies of the Aristotelian loss you describe would be truly ferocious and I don't think I'm equipped to handle them at this stage. So for the moment let's stick with a post-1700 POD, that at least gives me something recognisable to start from.
Newton's mass-energy equivalence might not get any more attention than it did IOTL - for that to become the basis of something more substantial seems to me to require that someone notice the changes in mass of radioactive material following decay, and then link that with Newton's idea. That link might require something similar to an investigation of the photochemical effect in order to get across the idea that the materials are emitting a strange kind of light.
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=134310&highlight=earliest+nuclear

AH Challenge: Earliest Possible Nuclear Weapon (
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Atomic bomb created in 1905 (
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for instance
 

Oba

I have an idea for a very early pebble bed reactor: Simple graphite and then silicon carbide coated pebbles with a core of Uranium carbide with CO2 as cooling gas, being easy to produce; each carbide is produced by the simple process of taking a coarse powder of the element and burning it in a charcoal fire to produce the ceramic. The CO2 heats a steam engine's boiler which does the work.

Even easier would be a Magnox-like design using unenriched uranium rods with a graphite neutron moderator and CO2 as a cooling gas that heats the boiler of a steam engine.

Have a look at the Chicago Pile-1, BTW.
 

Gunnarnz

I'm pretty hazy on the physics of it all, but I don't think a reactor (especially the pebble-bed type mentioned) needs it's fuel to be as highly enriched as that for a weapon. That being said, some enrichment is probably still necessary for the project to return anything resembling worthwhile results.
The enrichment process is difficult and expensive - I think it requires either masses of centrifuges, poisonous and corrosive gases, or some combination of those things. Is this even possible before the 20th century?
 

Thespitron 6000

You could do it, but it's difficult to see how it would be more beneficial than, say, wood as a fuel source. All you have to do is drop rocks of relatively pure uranium into a container of water, let it boil, and you have steam power. That's all nuclear power is, really, is a fancy steam engine. The problem is that unshielded uranium-235 is highly radioactive, being a gamma emitter. So anyone who spends much time handling it with their bare hands (since they probably don't have any concept of radioactivity) will probably develop cancer. Wood or coal will prove to be a safer fuel supply earlier than, say, 1920.
 

Stephen

Banned
Sterling engines can be designed to derive power from small temperature differences so you could make a low powered reactor with non enriched fuel. Using a removable neutron reflector like beryllium to turn on the fuel rods instead of using enriched fuel relying on neutron absorbers to turn them of. Freon powered turbines can also make use of small temperature differences.
 

Gunnarnz

I hadn't realised Magnox reactors used unenriched uranium as fuel! That's very clever of the designers, and removes the enrichment issue. Creating the fuel rods themselves is a non-trivial engineering issue, of course.
Chicago Pile 1 required considerable quantities of graphite, which wasn't produced artificially until the 1890s but did occur in natural deposits - one in particular was in the UK. I can't find any references to it's cooling system (maybe it didn't have one?), but it also used cadmium rods as a moderator. Cadmium was discovered in Germany in 1817.
Leaving aside for the moment the issue of the theories which directed the use of them, it seems that the materials needed for a primitive attempt at a reactor are available somewhat before OTL's WW2 nuclear programmes (Uranium was isolated in 1841, according to Wikipedia). The engineering and chemical techniques to produce them and control the pile also seem to exist in the same timeframe (which at the moment is looking like the early to mid 1800s), largely in Europe.

This leaves the biggest problem - the theoretical knowledge required to inform and direct such a project. A corollary to that is the desire to see the issue investigated. Without the benefits of hindsight or some great urgency, the motivation to spend so much time, energy and resources on the matter may be hard to come up with.
The critical theoretical issues seem to me to be mass-energy equivalence and the idea of materials emitting energy (as observed with respect to the photochemical effect). Anyone have any other ideas about what knowledge is absolutely essential for a project like this?
 

Oba

Gunnarnz said:
I hadn't realised Magnox reactors used unenriched uranium as fuel! That's very clever of the designers, and removes the enrichment issue. Creating the fuel rods themselves is a non-trivial engineering issue, of course.
Chicago Pile 1 required considerable quantities of graphite, which wasn't produced artificially until the 1890s but did occur in natural deposits - one in particular was in the UK. I can't find any references to it's cooling system (maybe it didn't have one?), but it also used cadmium rods as a moderator. Cadmium was discovered in Germany in 1817.
Leaving aside for the moment the issue of the theories which directed the use of them, it seems that the materials needed for a primitive attempt at a reactor are available somewhat before OTL's WW2 nuclear programmes (Uranium was isolated in 1841, according to Wikipedia). The engineering and chemical techniques to produce them and control the pile also seem to exist in the same timeframe (which at the moment is looking like the early to mid 1800s), largely in Europe.

This leaves the biggest problem - the theoretical knowledge required to inform and direct such a project. A corollary to that is the desire to see the issue investigated. Without the benefits of hindsight or some great urgency, the motivation to spend so much time, energy and resources on the matter may be hard to come up with.
The critical theoretical issues seem to me to be mass-energy equivalence and the idea of materials emitting energy (as observed with respect to the photochemical effect). Anyone have any other ideas about what knowledge is absolutely essential for a project like this?
Click to expand...
CP-1 lacked a cooling system as well as a radiation shield, but cooling systems would be just easy to make carbon dioxide and lead &/or concrete casings would solve the latter problem. Control rods of boron steel would also be relatively easy to make as well. And natural graphite is pretty common worldwide so it should not be too hard to produce.

Like you said, the main problem (much like with putting electricity to practical applications) was more from the lack of knowledge and understanding of such phenomena than actual difficulty of making them practical: For example if during the Bronze Age some Egyptian scholar developed a battery, using copper, vinegar/citrus juice and tin or nickel, (or even a nickel-iron battery if in the Iron Age) one could see several important uses during the Bronze Age such as electroplating or even simple telegraphs; the problem is that hindsight is 20/20 and that we know now what Hero's Aeolipile, Al-Jazarī's elephant clock (basically a very basic programmable computer) or Mesoamerica's clay stamps were capable of becoming (the vehicles for an industrialized Rome; the beginnings of the Information Age and mass literacy in Mesoamerica, respectively) but there is no reason they should have for various reasons that would have been perfectly logical at the time such as the great inefficiency of the Aeolipile in a Rome with abundant and proven slave labor, the apparently unneccesary complexity of the Elephant clock when compared to simpler water clocks and sundials or the desire for the Mesoamerican elite to keep their monopoly on access to theoretical information and literacy.
 

Gunnarnz

Exactly. It seems clear that for this to have a chance of occuring much earlier than OTL, the central issue is that the theoretical understandings will have to be advanced. The materials and engineering, although difficult, might be achievable; motivation to look into it is more problematic but there might be a way around that as well. The slaves issue you mention is a good example of how a "technology" that is currently economic and prevalent can negatively affect investigation of other alternatives.

What I'm trying to do at this stage is get an idea of what the critical theories are, so that I can see if/where they might be plausibly advanced.
 

Oba

Gunnarnz said:
What I'm trying to do at this stage is get an idea of what the critical theories are, so that I can see if/where they might be plausibly advanced.
Click to expand...
I think your best bet would be either in Song China, due to the fact that the Song had the Siemens process, the Bessemer process, large scale printing, mass literacy and were on the brink of an Industrial Revolution that was stopped just as it was about to make a huge breakthrough by the Mongols. Also, the Chinese were far more tolerant of different ideas, especially since the short-lived Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution, and had a long history of coexistence and mixing of different ideologies including Chinese Folk Religion, Confucianism, Daoism and, more recently in the Song Dynasty, the foreign religions of Buddhism and even Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Manichaeism. This tolerance would basically continue for the rest of the T'ang and during the latter Song Dynasties. And China was not held back by Aristotle's ideas in the way that the Muslims and the Westerners were.

Due to these reasons, I think Song China is your best bet.
 
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