In the second season of The Bear an illustrious chef transforms the Italian beef sandwich shop he inherited into a fine-dining destination in Chicago, taking his team on a journey wholly unfamiliar to them in the hopes of creating something meaningful. Eighty-one years ago an illustrious Italian physicist – having won a Nobel Prize at 37 – took his team on a journey unfamiliar to anyone while he transformed a Chicago squash court into the room for the world’s first nuclear reactor.
Twenty-five miles away from The Bear’s River North neighborhood sits Argonne National Laboratory, one of the Department of Energy’s national labs that is working on – among much else – advanced nuclear reactors, including digital modeling, waste analysis, and using video game software to train nuclear operators. Argonne was founded in 1946 but has its roots in the Metallurgical Laboratory, Met Lab, a scientific research project founded in early 1942 at the University of Chicago under contract with the federal government’s OSRD. During World War II OSRD was akin to the James Bond Q Branch. It worked on missiles, fuzes, vehicles, radar, medicine, and the top secret S-1 project, later called the Development of Substitute Materials – better known as the Manhattan Project. OSRD formed the Met Lab to study plutonium and to learn how plutonium and uranium could be used to make an atomic bomb. To this end the team needed to create a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction – the key process in nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.
It fell to Enrico Fermi, the physicist who never returned to Fascist Italy after receiving his Nobel, to design and carry out a complicated series of calculations to determine how uranium and graphite could be configured to reach criticality (self-sustainment), and how to do so safely. Without enrichment the team had to use natural uranium. Fermi calculated that a simple reactor could achieve criticality – and he argued that the team should build it not at some distant purpose-built facility but in the same spot where other Met Lab experiments were conducted, in a squash court underneath the university’s Stagg Field football stands. After a series of mockups the team assembled the reactor: a pile of graphite blocks, cadmium control rods, and 100,000 pounds of uranium. A full-sized nuclear reactor only uses about 80,000 pounds to produce 1 GW of electricity for years on end, but this pile – Chicago Pile-1 – filled with unenriched uranium would produce the equivalent of just half a watt. Purely based on his math, Fermi convinced his colleagues and the OSRD that the pile was safe to build and test without expensive or time-consuming facility construction. In a sign of everyone’s trust in Fermi’s math, Chicago Pile-1 had no radiation shielding and no cooling system.
For modern context, when a scrap company tried a few years to open a metal shredding and recycling facility on Chicago’s Southeast Side, 2000 feet from the nearest house, with state-of-the-art equipment, two Chicago mayors tried to stop it in the courts, even after it received permits from four different city and state agencies. Opponents argued that perhaps the recycling would somehow create harmful pollution. For the nuclear experiment the Met Lab team and OSRD used a simple solution to preserve secrecy and prevent opposition: they told no one. Neither the university’s president nor the mayor were informed, no permits were sought, and no emergency crews on-call. A first-in-history nuclear chain reaction experiment was to be conducted in a city of four million people, and the only safety backup was someone holding a bucket of cadmium nitrate.
Six days after Americans first heard Humphrey Bogart wonder why, of all the gin joints in all the world, Ingrid Bergman had to walk into his, Fermi and 50 of his colleagues walked through zero degree weather to gather in the squash court on the morning of December 2nd, 1942, 359 days after the US entered the war. The experiment itself was mundane: control rods were slowly removed one by one. Fermi was in no rush – when an automatic safety feature interrupted the experiment after 90 minutes, he had everyone break to lunch. Two and a half hours later the team resumed rod removal. Sensors to detect criticality did not yet exist, only a neutron counter, so Fermi used a slide rule to calculate in real-time when criticality occurred. At 3:25 Fermi called it: criticality achieved. Shortly thereafter the team restored the rods, proving how easily a nuclear reaction could be stopped. They broke out the wine that one of the Hungarian scientists sneaked in. Appropriately, they drank Chianti.
As momentous as the experiment’s success was, Chicago Pile-1 was short-lived. Two months later it was dismantled and construction started on Chicago Pile-2, which had the key upgrade of radiation shielding. Pile-1 was buried in a section of forest on the other side of Chicago – the Argonne Forest. A few years later Argonne National Laboratory was built over part of the forest.
Much of the first season of The Bear hinged not on how the restaurant’s team members do things, but on whether they should do them at all: should they take online orders, serve risotto, sell doughnuts in addition to cake, and use drug money to keep the restaurant open (yes, yes, yes, and no, respectively). The Met Lab members went on to disagree not about how to produce atomic weapons, but on whether to use them and whether certain types or quantities should be produced at all. Yet Chicago Pile-1 unlocked nuclear energy. One of the 50 scientists in that squash court was Walter Zinn, who led the Argonne team that designed and built Chicago Pile-4. On December 20th, 1951, just over nine years after Fermi’s experiment, Pile-4 was switched on at what is now Idaho National Laboratory and powered four light bulbs, the world’s first power plant to produce electricity from atomic energy. Fittingly, three days after Pile-4 powered the bulbs, Humphrey Bogart’s The African Queen premiered. The crux of the plot: a duo with no bomb-making experience use smart calculations and secretly make a machine to help win the war.
