Uranium: A Strange and Fascinating Story

By Kennedy Maize

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Many Facts Still a Mystery

Ultimately, Zoellner is conflicted and a bit confused by his subject. That’s completely understandable. “There is much that remains enigmatic about uranium 70 years after Hiroshima,” he writes. “Even a basic question—‘how much of it does the U.S. government have under lock-and-key?’—does not have a firm answer. The U.S. Department of Energy decided in 1996 to make a complete inventory of all the highly enriched uranium America had manufactured through the years of the cold war. Such a task may have seemed easy at first glance.”

It proved to be nearly impossible, Zoellner reports. The traditional cult of secrecy that surrounded weapons production at the Atomic Energy Commission and the successor DOE meant that no one could know, or figure out, exactly how much weapons-grade uranium the government had made over the years. The government suppressed the final report for “nearly a decade,” Zoellner noted. The White House finally released the document after a long campaign by the Federation of American Scientists, an anti-nuclear-weapons group that grew out of the angst of many atomic scientists following World War II and the nuclear attacks on Japan.

The report, finally declassified after years of wrangling over the FAS’s Freedom of Information request, wrote Zoellner, “revealed that we had produced slightly more than 1,000 tons of highly enriched uranium in the course of half a century, and that approximately 3.2 tons of it had vanished at some point.” Lost in pipes? Rounded off in accounting? Diverted? Nobody knows. The question is probably not answerable.

Uranium is mysterious and fascinating stuff, and Tom Zoellner’s book is worth reading just to try to unravel the mystery. You’ll learn a lot about uranium—where it is in the ground, when it has been turned into something useful, and how it gets to you when you turn on the lights. The book, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped the World (New York: Viking, 2009), is recommended reading for energy wonks and for folks interested in modern history.

—Kennedy Maize is executive editor of MANAGING POWER.

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