Enrico Fermi was born on September 29, 1901 in Rome, Italy, and went down in history as one of the leading architects of the nuclear age. He developed the statistical mathematics necessary to clarify much of subatomic phenomena, explored nuclear transformations caused by neutrons, and directed the first controlled chain reaction necessary for nuclear fission.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 and in his honor the Enrico Fermi UU Fermilab Prize Department of Energy.., The National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, bears his name, the same as the fermion element is given number 100 of the periodic table.
Nuclear energy today is an alternative to fossil fuels that can help curb climate change, and it has a multitude of peaceful applications. However, manipulated in a certain way, nuclear energy can be used for weapons purposes, as is well known, through the development of the atomic bomb.
It should be clarified that it is impossible for a nuclear power plant to explode as an atomic bomb would, since the enrichment necessary for both functions are very different.
Fermi’s role in the Manhattan Project
When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, nuclear research was already established to some extent. Fermi had built a series of ‘piles’, as he called them: it consisted of a flattened sphere about 7.5 meters in diameter containing 380 tons of graphite blocks, 6 tons of metallic uranium and 40 tons of uranium oxide as fuel, distributed in a careful pattern.
In 1942 it was shown that such a ‘pile’ could be started, controlled and stopped during a nuclear reaction. The Chicago Pile-1, as it was called, was the first prototype of several large nuclear reactors built in Hanford, Washington, where plutonium, an artificial element heavier than uranium, was produced. Plutonium could also fission and thus amounted to another route to the atomic bomb.
In 1944, Fermi became a US citizen and moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer headed the Manhattan Project laboratory, whose mission was to make weapons from plutonium and the rare isotope uranium-235. Fermi was associate director of the laboratory and headed one of its divisions. When the first plutonium bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, Fermi made a rough estimate of its explosive energy.
The ethical considerations of the atomic bomb
After the war ended, Fermi accepted a permanent position at the University of Chicago, where he influenced another distinguished group of physicists. Fermi largely avoided politics, but agreed to serve on the General Advisory Committee (GAC), which advised the five commissioners of the Atomic Energy Commission. In response to the revelation in September 1949 that the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb, many Americans urged the government to try to build a thermonuclear bomb, which may be orders of magnitude more powerful.
The GAC was publicly unanimous in opposing this step, mainly on technical grounds, and Fermi and Isidor Rabi went further by introducing an ethical question: “Such a bomb becomes a weapon that in practice is almost one of genocide . It is necessarily an ‘evil thing’ considered from any point of view, “they wrote. Instead, US President Harry S. Truman ignored their warnings, and the loyal Fermi returned for a time to Los Alamos to help develop fusion weapons, hoping they would prove impossible. to build (as it was).
Fermi’s paradox
During his later years he posed a question now known as the Fermi paradox: ‘Where is everyone?’ Fermi wondered why there seemed to be no detectable extraterrestrial civilization, despite the vast size and age of the universe.
