Foreword, the Cosmic Origins

Before delving into nuclear energy, let us take a quick detour to its origins.

Massive supergiant stars are ten to twenty-five times heavier than our Sun. True leviathans of the sky. At the end of their life, when they have exhausted all of their fuel for nuclear fusion and finally collapse under their own weight, they cause a powerful and luminous explosion called a supernova. The last event of this nature in our galaxy, observed in 1604, remained visible during the day for over three weeks.

While the outer shell of the star is violently expelled, its interior rapidly implodes in a small sphere about twenty kilometres in diameter with a mass one to two times that of the Sun. An object so dense that the gravity at its surface is more than two hundred giga times that at the surface of the Earth—one and eleven zeroes. Anything denser would result in a gravitational singularity, a black hole. At this level of pressure, electrons and protons combine to form neutrons. It’s all neutrons, one big ball of neutrons. Hence the cryptic name for these highly exotic objects : neutron stars.

Now imagine two of these neutron stars silently orbiting around each other. The gravitational fields at play are so intense that their dance sends waves in the very fabric of space-time. We know, because we measured such ripples from hundreds of millions of light-years away. The energy lost to generate these gravitational waves causes them to gradually spiral inwards. They get closer and closer until, in a fantastic display of energy, they merge to form either a more massive neutron star or a black hole.

These collisions also eject a tremendous amount of matter, at extremely high temperature, density, and neutron flux. These are the right conditions for rapid neutron capture to take place, a peculiar process that is responsible for the formation of around half of the elements heavier than iron. Silver, gold, platinum, uranium… all of these elements were forged in the cataclysmic mergers of neutron stars. All of it. Whatever quantity we have of it was washed away through the cosmos and reached us after aeons of travel through interstellar space. Among these elements, uranium is particularly interesting. It is a gift from the gods. It offers a key, for those able to solve its puzzles, to unlock part of the formidable energy it received at birth.

Somewhere in the depths of the universe, on a rocky planet bathing in the white light of a yellow dwarf, a group of primates have cracked the code.

We have accessed nuclear energy.

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