Thanks to CajunBear73 for his reviews and input.
=O=
Chapter 17: Our Friend The Atom
Astrid gawked at the spectacle before her. In the middle of a barren desert, a massive amusement park sprouted from the earth, its Ferris wheel, rollercoaster, drop tower, and other steel amusements sprawled out across the salt flats like a madman's garden.
Huge tombstones of glass and concrete – hotels, casinos, a mall, a theater – bracketed the amusement park, casting long shadows across the park and across the desert beyond.
Beyond the park and buildings was a vast emptiness – a landscape of mesas, windswept rocky outcroppings, and salt flats stretching as far as the eye could see.
They drove towards the massive gateway, an arch of anodized aluminium, which marked the entrance to the unholy product of local gambling ordinances, corporate-industrial sponsorships, and unbridled free-market capitalism.
ATOMLAND
原子天地
Hiccup stopped by the side of the highway and got out of the car, his Nikon angled skyward. He walked around, angling for a good shot - film was expensive, after all – even as Astrid tapped her foot.
Astrid dragged him back in the car the moment his camera clicked. "Come on, let's go!"
Onward they went. Looming tombstones gained definition, opulent entrances, and glittering neon signs. The western-themed Half-Life Casino, the black, monolithic Casino Schrodinger, and the raygun-gothic A-bomb Hotel cruised by, monuments to the foibles of human neurological reward pathways and cognitive biases.
"Wanna go in?" Hiccup shrugged.
Astrid shook her head. "Nah. That's not quite my thing."
They turned into a gargantuan parking lot, and Astrid grinned as a steel scrambler, gleaming in the midmorning sun, came into view.
Hiccup just gulped.
An old, somewhat faded billboard passed by unremarked.
Lop Nur Test Site
Public Outreach Center
=O=
"Oh come on, where's your fighting spirit, Hiccup?"
"I'll… take pictures of you on the ride from down here! Yeah, I, as the designated photographer, have a perfectly good excuse not to go on the… Furball." Hiccup insisted.
The insane-looking contraption whirled its occupants about at unnecessary speeds even as it twisted about its own axis, in an apparent attempt to replicate the sensation of being in a furball – the insane melees that characterized short-range fighter combat when too many fighters were squeezed into the same patch of sky.
Astrid narrowed her eyes. "I thought you wanted a combat posting to South Asia. How did you expect to survive fighter school if you can't take a merry mixer?"
Hiccup stood his ground. "I… had very good reasons to take fighter school. Those reasons do not apply here."
Astrid put her hands on her hips. "Such as…"
Hiccup clenched his teeth. "I wanted to impress my father. And show everyone that I could do it, that I was not just a pencil-pusher! There. I said it."
Astrid tilted her head, and put her hands on his shoulders. "Okay. Hiccup, you've got one combat mission under your belt, now. A few more, and that's all the proof you'll ever need."
"Thanks, Astrid." Hiccup smiled.
"And just how will you thank me?" Astrid's eyes were aglow.
Hiccup groaned, his attempt to change the subject having failed spectacularly. "By going on the furball."
His face remained impassive as he strapped himself into the unnecessarily nauseating amusement park ride.
"Think of it as a team-building exercise! This way, you can assure me, your frontseater, that you will follow me through hell, whatever form it may take and no matter how pointless the reasons!" Astrid laughed.
On cue, the contraption began to rise into the clear blue sky.
=O=
Hiccup's head spun as he got off the chrome-plated rollercoaster.
"Whew! That was awesome! Okay, so we can cross the Sabrejet off the map. Where to next? The Calutron? The Rocketship?"
Hiccup suppressed a groan as chased after Astrid. After the Furball, they had taken on the Centrifuge, the Yo-yo, and even the ludicrously tall drop ride the Ejection Seat.
They passed under a real WWII-era F-100 Super Sabre, displayed on a sleek, sweeping concrete pylon. Astrid stopped to admire the shiny silver fighter jet, and the kill tally painted on its side. "We've come a long way in a decade, huh?"
"How about we get some food?" Hiccup wasn't really hungry – heck, his stomach practically churned at the thought of another ride – but anything was better than another ride.
They wolfed down hot dogs, admiring the bustle of the park from the relative comfort of a sunbaked park bench.
Whoever had built this theme park in the middle of nowhere had not skimped on the decor. All around them were bright colours, sweeping curves, and viewscapes right off the cover of Amazing Stories – a style they were calling Raygun Gothic. Even the game booths had a prominent saucer top and antenna.
Astrid stood up, and binned the wrapper. Clad in a silvery sun poncho, a wide-brimmed aluminized hat, and a pair of working flash goggles (with the flash protection flipped off) she looked every bit a woman of the Atomic Age, as ready for a sunny day as she was for the searing flash of an atomic attack.
She looked beautiful. But then again, Astrid would have looked beautiful in anything.
Astrid noticed him staring out of the corner of her eye, and struck a pose. "How do I look?"
Hiccup blushed. "Uhh…"
Astrid chuckled, spun on her heels, and made a beeline for the game booths. Hiccup, his cheeks still burning, tossed the remains of his hot dog into the trash, and took off after her. He caught up to her under a sign marked "Space Gun Testing Range", where Astrid was already hefting a popgun.
"I want the plushie." Astrid gestured to a plush green one-eyed alien, hanging from the stall to attract children with limited abilities of cost-benefit analysis and equally poor hand-eye coordination.
Hiccup gulped. "I was never very good at this sort of..."
Astrid never took her eye off her sights. "Not you, stupid. I shoot. You pay."
The stall operator glared as Astrid began blasting BBs downrange with impressive skill, and Hiccup hurriedly handed over the obligatory dollar. The stall operator grunted again as he tallied the results, and handed over the cotton-stuffed extraterrestrial to Astrid.
Hiccup gawked. "Where'd you learn how to shoot?"
Astrid turned towards Hiccup, and handed over the plushie. "You paid for it, you keep it."
Hiccup, his embarrassment complete, turned red.
Astrid gave him a playful punch, and began to drag him through the park.
Hiccup, preoccupied with the plushie, didn't notice where they were going until they stopped in front of a grandiose, windowless building.
HALL OF ENERGY
Astrid kept a close eye on Hiccup, watching intently as his agape jaw slowly closed, and as the goofiest, most childlike grin spread across his face. She gave him a nudge. "I know you didn't come for the rides."
They walked past models explaining nuclear reactor types – burners, thermal-breeders, fast-breeders, reactors with solid fuel, molten fuel, even super-hot gaseous fuel – all the better to reach those high temperatures!
Astrid's mind boggled as she walked past a parade of reactors of all shapes and sizes, for seemingly endless applications.
Cheap old-fashioned reactors, powering the homes of today.
Efficient breeders, producing more plutonium than they consumed, for limitless electricity tomorrow.
Super-high-temperature reactors for oil refineries, industrial heat, jet engines, and rocket motors.
Small reactors with few moving parts, for isolated villages, military bases or space probes.
Reactors smaller than a watermelon, and bigger than a five-storey building.
Reactors for ships, submarines, planes, trains, rockets! Reactors for road trains, helicopters, tanks, drilling machines!
Hiccup shrugged as he glanced at the exhibit. "When it boils down to it, a nuclear reactor is basically a box of hot metal – which can be super-hot liquid metal soup or metal gas - that almost magically stays hot by itself, which you can turn on and off until all the fuel is unusable. You can use a reactor for basically anything that needs heat, or can use a form of energy that can be converted from heat. There are some niche applications for using the neutrons or fission products directly, but they're not very important."
Astrid still looked confused. Hiccup shrugged. "Okay, so… think of Toothless's turbojets. They suck in air and burn fuel with it. The hot air goes out the nozzle a lot faster, which powers us forward and spins a fan driving the shaft that powers the engine, right?"
"I wasn't born yesterday, Hiccup." Astrid growled.
"Okay, so what if you took away the jet fuel and replaced it with a hot metal box – a nuclear reactor? The air would still get hot, go out the nozzle, and turn the shaft. That's a nuclear jet engine. Heck, Toothless could probably fly around the world nonstop with that kind of power plant. You'd need to add a heck of a lot of shielding, or the neutron radiation would fry us by the time we got to altitude, but that's why they're designing a next-generation bomber to fit it and the shielding instead of retrofitting it to existing aircraft." Hiccup scratched his chin. "Or just hook the shaft up to a generator, a set of wheels, or propellers to power a city, a train, or one of the Navy's new destroyers."
They passed a large diorama explaining how nuclear fuel was produced – how uranium ores were strip-mined, processed, enriched in fissile isotopes, and forged into fuel rods or pebbles. Hiccup examined the scale cutaway of the massive enrichment plant – rows upon rows upon rows of gas centrifuges, each thrumming with power as they spun corrosive, boiling-hot uranium hexafluoride gas at supersonic speeds to separate the valuable light isotopes of uranium from the slightly heavier ones.
Astrid glanced at the placard. "Hiccup, it says here we're doubling capacity every two years. It's… some buildout." She caught a glimpse of the cost, and blanched. "That's… a lot of moolah."
Hiccup shrugged. "It's cheaper than it looks, actually. Remember, the cost covers fuel for the reactor buildout, industrial and vehicular reactors, and Defense's requirement for half of a million nukes by next year. Joule-for-joule, nuclear energy is dirt cheap. Heck, per unit of firepower, nuclear bombs are dirt cheap. Think about it. A ton of TNT – say a big GP bomb – costs maybe a few hundred dollars. Today, even accounting for the industrial capital costs, a one-megaton bomb comes in at well under a million dollars – so a ton of nuclear firepower costs less than a dollar. The nuke comes in a hundred times cheaper than the TNT, per unit of boom."
He gestured to the section on nuclear mining explosives. "Cheaper kaboom, cheaper to emplace, less air and water pollution. TNT is toxic, you know, and a million tonnes of TNT is terrifying so."
Astrid nodded. "So that's why the higher-ups were talking about phasing out conventional bombs entirely."
"For military applications, a one-kiloton or subkiloton tactical bomb – that's where most of the demand is these days - doesn't cost much less than a one-megaton bomb – maybe a hundred thousand dollars - but it's still pretty cost-competitive – especially when you consider that a Falcon guided missile also costs a few hundred thousand dollars."
Astrid winced, remembering the weapons she had expended over Siberia. You could build a hospital with that kind of money.
Hiccup chuckled. "Hey, the alternative to all this cool stuff is funding a hundred more armored divisions on the border with the Soviets, and pulling maybe four million more people off the economy and putting them in uniform. That would be way more expensive. Nukes are just that cost-effective, and the way things are going, they'll only get cheaper. But they'll never abandon conventional weapons. Just too much escalation risk."
They departed, nudged past a gaggle of schoolkids in matching uniforms, and entered into a brightly lit room.
Behind a floor-to-ceiling glass curtain, a series of control rods plunged from the ceiling into a deep, circular pool, a honeycomb of rods at its base. Astrid widened her eyes. "…is that…"
The teacher waved her class forward. "Okay, class! This is an operating atomic reactor. Come closer and see. Don't hit the glass, Ralph. Remember. The Atom is our friend, but we must treat atomic radiation with respect. See the long rods? Those are control rods, so they can shut down the reactor whenever they need to – just by dropping them. The glowing rods at the bottom are the fuel rods and moderator. The water in the pit keeps the reactor cool and protects us from the radiation. Now repeat after me, class…"
Astrid watched with amusement as Hiccup pressed himself against the glass, scrutinizing the reactor as a monk might a holy relic. She turned to a mustached teacher. "So, where are you guys from? Qinghai?"
The fresh-faced teacher shook his head. "Close, but no cigar. We're from Tianshui, Gansu. The train ride over is a hassle, but the kids love it. Plus, Atomland subsidizes our trip."
Astrid raised an eyebrow. "You come here often?"
The teacher nodded just as Hiccup suddenly turned back to Astrid. "So… uh… this is a TRIGA teaching reactor – a really tiny one, gives off enough power to maybe run five refrigerators…"
Astrid leaned back nonchalantly.
"…and the best thing about this reactor is that it can be pulsed – you can suddenly increase the power output of a TRIGA, and it will immediately self-correct back to a safe power output. President Zhou demonstrated a reactor much like it to everyone at the World's Fair a couple of years back, if you remember. Basically, the fact is that nuclear reactions can be affected by changes in volume and temperature, mostly because neutron interactions with other nuclei are temperature-dependent. In a TRIGA reactor, the fuel is designed so that the nuclear reactions slow down when the temperature increases. So when you increase the power output of the TRIGA – say, by removing the control rods, the temperature goes up, the nuclear reactions slow down, and the power output and temperature go back down. We can do it in this reactor."
Astrid smiled, and nodded.
"Let me show you."
Hiccup walked over to a small control console. He flicked a switch, and the lights went out, plunging the room into darkness. "Keep your eyes on the reactor – it's still right in front of us."
The room had fallen silent. Astrid stiffened as Hiccup guided her hand to a large button on the console. "Keep your eyes open. And 3… 2… 1…".
Hiccup mashed their joined hands on the button, and the reactor hissed as the control rods were flung from the core.
The reactor sprang to life with a flash of blue light, rapidly dimming to a soft blue glow that emanated from around the rods, bathing the room in blue, silver and black.
Almost like turning on a stove, Astrid thought. But then again, what was a nuclear reactor other than a fancy stove? And what was a stove other than a fancy campfire?
Other than the gargantuan difference in energy density, what was an Atom Bomb other than a fancy Molotov cocktail, releasing all of the energy in a fuel at once?
Astrid glanced at Hiccup's face as he stared, entranced, into the blue Cerenkov glow, as hypnotized by the powers at work as the first caveman must have been by the first campfire.
First fire and flint. Then wood and iron. Then coal and steel. Now, the Atom.
For an instant, Astrid saw what Hiccup did. The great chain of interlocking, interdependent technologies that had raised mankind to the heights of technological achievement, that had driven the great wheel of history forward, that had made man indisputable master of the Earth.
The azure glow died down, leaving a dark emptiness in its wake. Hiccup gave Astrid's hand a reassuring squeeze, and Astrid realized that they had been holding hands.
"Come on. Let's go see the next exhibit."
Astrid slowly nodded, and followed Hiccup out of the room.
She almost didn't want to go.
=O=
Real world:
Shipping, fluff, and excessive gushing about THE POWER OF THE ATOM! A little too mush gushing, I know, but THE ATOM IS OUR FRIEND! (This society is a bit atom-happy/atom-crazy).
To the best of my knowledge, many applications of nuclear power described above were explored at least on an experimental (test-stand) basis. The nuclear-powered road train, drilling machine, tank, aircraft and helicopter were paper projects only. The Soviet Union conducted tests of nuclear mining explosives. Readers are free to come to their own conclusions as to the wisdom of massive civilian nuclear proliferation (if you use nukes for oil and gas stimulation, you're going to have to put a few nukes in Saudi Arabia... among various other issues with the idea - groundshock will damage buildings nearby, and radioactivity is always a concern), and feedback is welcome as always.
The US nuclear arsenal topped out at 50,000 nuclear warheads in the 70s; the Soviet arsenal hit 70,000 weapons. The US and Russians currently have several thousand deployed warheads each (more than adequate for deterrence and warfighting), and the minor nuclear powers (China, the UK, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel) have perhaps several hundred each – less for North Korea and Israel.
With an immense investment of national effort, a decade or three to build the infrastructure, and enough uranium ore (which is not very rare), such obscene production of nuclear material was most certainly possible. Since Blackbird takes place in a distinctly atom-happy/atom-crazy society, this has come to pass. J
And yes, the US Air Force did once consider, very briefly, phasing out non-nuclear weapons entirely because yes, nukes were (and still are) ludicrously cost-effective. And yes, funding Strategic Air Command was definitely cheaper than funding a hundred more divisions to oppose the Soviets in Europe. The Soviet Union was ridiculously militarized, spending between a quarter and half of its GDP on the military (they were Communists, so their pricing systems were all screwed up) and fielding over 200 divisions at different times in the Cold War.
On the other hand, the Soviets had fifty thousand tanks, and maybe a hundred thousand armored vehicles in total. If you're thinking of blowing them up individually with nuclear rocket launchers, you're going to need comparable numbers of man-portable nuclear rockets.
