Reckoning With the Legacy of the Nuclear Reactor, 75 Years Later
Journalists have always struggled to reconcile the destruction and the development ushered in by this famous experiment.
At the time, news of the breakthrough on December 2, 1942, was conveyed only in code: “The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.”
Our “Italian navigator” was Enrico Fermi, the physicist who had escaped fascist Italy for America. The “New World” was not a place but a time: the atomic age. On that day 75 years ago, Fermi’s team set off the first controlled and sustained nuclear chain reaction.
It all happened under the bleachers of University of Chicago’s Stagg Field. Fermi’s nuclear reactor was a pile of graphite, henceforth known as Chicago Pile-1. It produced all of a half-watt of power. But it proved that a neutron emitted by a splitting uranium atom could indeed split another uranium atom, which could split another and another,
