168 | ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1946 
2. THE PEACETIME IMPLICATIONS OF THE RELEASE OF ATOMIC 
ENERGY 
Enough regarding the destructive uses of atomic energy. Of much 
more interest is its use as man’s willing servant. In the long run it 
can hardly be questioned that the peaceful applications of atomic 
energy will be those that will most profoundly affect our lives. What 
these important applications will be is, however, as difficult to predict 
as it would have been a century ago, just after Faraday laid the 
scientific basis for electrical engineering, to tell the future meaning of 
electricity. At this moment the obviously great field open to atomic 
energy is that of production of useful heat and power. We also see 
important though limited medical and industrial applications of ra- 
dioactive materials, artifically produced by atomic chain reactions. 
Perhaps more significant than either are the new vistas that will be 
opened up by scientific experiments that make use of the byproducts of 
atomic fission. 
Such had indeed been the case with such discoveries as X-ray. Fifty 
years ago it was evident that X-rays were useful for “seeing” through 
objects, such as the human body, which are opaque to ordinary light. 
It could not be predicted that X-rays would become a powerful weapon 
in the fight against cancer, or that researches made by X-rays would 
reveal the electron and with it give us the radio and a host of electronic 
devices. 
Such unforeseen developments are the result of every great discovery 
of science. It will nevertheless be worth noting some of the definite 
practical applications of atomic energy that we can now see clearly 
before us: 
At present, controlled atomic power in the form of heat is in con- 
tinuous production in large quantities at several plants, especially 
those at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and at Hanford, Wash. The heat from 
these plants is a byproduct, and is carried away in the one case by 
air and in the other by a stream of water. The useful product is neu- 
trons which are used in the plant as a means of transmuting certain 
chemical elements to others of specially useful characteristics. Of 
these transmutation processes the most important one is that of 
uranium into plutonium. Previous to the fission chain reaction the 
most abundant source of neutrons was the cyclotron which operates 
on electric power. Per kilowatt of energy used, the fission chain reac- 
tion. gives some 10,000 times as many neutrons as a cyclotron, and 
it is not difficult to make a fission chain reaction plant that delivers 
100 times as much power as is used by a cyclotron. This means that 
right now we are using large amounts of atomic power many times 
more efficiently for the particular process of producing neutrons than 
the best electrical machine that we have been able to devise. 
Looking to the future, we may expect the use of neutrons as a means 
