Did you know that UW had a nuclear reactor? It’s not there anymore; in fact, the whole nuclear engineering program was shut down in 1992, a few years after the reactor itself was decommissioned. People fought to keep the brutalist building (renamed in the interim as More Hall Annex) that housed it, but after several rounds of litigation, UW was finally allowed to demolish it in 2016. They built the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering in its place.
Architecture fans pushed hard for incorporating elements of the original structure in the new building, but the university shot that down for seismic safety reasons. The preservationists held a “funeral for a piece of Seattle’s atomic past,” as the press put it.
Part of me wonders whether UW’s hard line on this was because they just really, really wanted this Cold War legacy to die: “out, damned spot!” The other part of me is also curious about how much of what goes on in this building today can also be weaponized.
UW might have dismantled its nuclear engineering program, but it still has an Institute of Nuclear Theory nestled on the fourth floor of the Physics and Astronomy Tower. The research that goes on there is arcane gobbledygook to my eyes, but one thing is glaringly obvious to even this simpleton: it’s partially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the “spiritual heir” of the Atomic Energy Commission. There is a direct arrow from the Atomic Bomb to Physics Beyond the Standard Model.
It’s interesting to think about how “theory” might distance a cognitive worker from the ultimate aims of their labor; sure, there may be astronomic and computational applications for this work, but the overarching purpose of nuclear science today is arguably tackling the “Grand Challenges” set by the American Nuclear Society in 2017. These include closing the nuclear fuel cycle (it takes a lot more energy to produce energy), better understanding low dose radiation (we don’t actually know how much can kill us), and other complicated problems of measurement and prediction.
The number one challenge set by the ANS, however? Improving public perception of nuclear energy.
I’m too ignorant to know what percentage of what goes on in this building can be weaponized, but I do know that nuclear energy and nuclear warfare are twinned at the umbilical. The total elimination of nuclear weapons must take on that two-headed hydra if it’s ever going to be more than an occasion in late September.