A Day Trip Through Technology Choices

The Argonne National Laboratory sits next to a large forest preserve. This unique Illinois category of public land stems from the rarity of forests in my home state. Settlers valued those stands of trees and made a special effort to preserve them-in forest preserves-while quickly tilling or otherwise developing Illinois’ main natural landscape, the prairie. Less than 1% of Illinois remains as natural prairie, but the state made the choice to keep the forests [1]. On a warm Fall day, I drove to the forest preserve next to the Argonne campus. Intrigued by choices made during the early stages of the Manhattan Project,1 my goal was to visit the buried remains of the first nuclear reactor. I pulled into the parking lot and checked the map to see if I was in the right place. A quick search revealed that the buried reactor was part of a different forest preserve, a few miles away but across a county line, in Red Gate Woods. I drove to a much emptier parking lot and headed up the trails, looking for nuclear history.

It was hotter than I thought it would be, and bugs flew around my face. The scrubby beginning of this walk gives way to forest, a network of ditches and creeks with shady hiding places, and clearings with small shrubs and single trees. Woodpeckers, bluejays, and darting finches crossed the path. A nice day, and place, to be outside. As I headed up a slope, the numbered sign markers gave way to historical ones. Figure 1 shows the first sign, which promises “the Dawn of the Atomic Age.” The trail leads to Site A, as the sign in Figure 2 warns. Site A houses two decommissioned reactors, buried directly under where I stood. Figure 3 shows photographs and schematics of that first nuclear reactor, called the Chicago Pile, which became Chicago Pile-1 and then CP-1 (see Sidebar).

Figure 2.Historical marker reads “You are now entering Site A.” (Photo credit: Ketra Schmitt.)

Figure 3.Historical marker shows images and schematics of the Chicago Piles. (Photo credit: Bert Schmitt.)

At Site A, a cube of granite commemorates the reactor site (as shown in Figure 4). Figure 5 shows a green tube sticking up throughout the forest preserve for ease of monitoring. These monitoring sites allow Argonne to produce an annual safety report, which they post on their website [2]

Figure 4.Granite marker commemorates the reactor site. (Photo credit: Bert Schmitt.)

Figure 5.Green monitoring tube sticking up in the grass. (Photo credit: Bert Schmitt.)

I had wanted to see this buried reactor since I found out about it-fascinated by its location on recreational land. The story initially appealed to me for its little piece of history and for the implicit message about the ways that public safety risks can be managed and perhaps as importantly, perceived. I thought of this in the context not just of the history of science and weapons development but of the ongoing challenges involved in safely storing spent nuclear fuel.

Spent nuclear material and cleanup of nuclear sites remain expensive and controversial components of nuclear power. Cleanup has also been an important issue at this public recreational site. Site A was decommissioned in 1952, and the first round of cleanup ended in 1956. Nearby residents who were concerned about radiation from Site A lobbied the Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety to test well water in 1990. State workers with Geiger counters found a chunk of uranium while walking through Site A. Red Gate Woods was closed for decontamination until 1997 [3], [4].

On the trail back to the parking lot, I noticed a map of the Red Gate Woods and the surrounding area, as shown in Figure 6. Besides housing two spent nuclear reactors, Red Gate Woods is also where the Calumet-Saganashkee channel meets up with the Chicago Sanitary and ship canal. Leaving the forest preserve, I traveled on backroads, passing the canal and channel. I was surprised to spot barges on the water. The Cal-Sag channel, as it is locally known, was completed in 1922 after 11 years. Work on the Chicago Canal started in 1887. These massive infrastructure investments allowed boats to transport goods from the north of the state of Illinois to the Mississippi River on the Missouri border and to the sea. This day trip tells a story not just about risk but a broader one about technology and society. How we spend our public resources and how we manage risks and foster science and technology to create growth, opportunities, energy, and weapons are ultimately at the core of what we explore when we study the technology and society relationship.

Illinois settlers made an early and impactful choice on conservation—preserving one specific habitat over another and forgoing economic opportunity in favor of preservation and recreation. Those choices cost money but have large environmental and social benefits. The roads we drove on to get to Red Gate Woods cost an enormous amount of money to build and retain, yet these are rarely the focus of cost-benefit analysis. Public transport, on the other hand, is often evaluated using this metric. My first meeting of the day took place in Oak Park-a southern suburb to the northern one where I was staying, but one that was reachable by two suburban trains. The estimated time was an hour and 20 minutes—a bit longer than the 38 minutes my map application suggested it would take to drive to Oak Park. In the end, the map was wrong, and the drive took at least as long as the train ride would have. Choked in traffic, I arrived late for my meeting in Oak Park.

The choices for development, roads, trains, and transport are just as essential to the social impacts of technology as the technologies themselves.

However, it was not this longer transit time to Oak Park that made me decide to drive. I am a sucker for trains, and two commuter trains in a row sounded great to me. The trip from Oak Park to the forest preserve, on the other hand, would have taken nearly 4 hours on public transport and would have involved a series of buses, making missing a connection and being stranded for hours far too likely. After leaving Oak Park, I drove the next 40 minutes to and through the Palos Forest Preserve—a 15,000-acre network of public forests. The choices for development, roads, trains, and transport are just as essential to the social impacts of technology as the technologies themselves.

Most goods are now shipped over roads, with 72% of goods delivered on trucks in the United States in 2017 [5]. However, trains and canal boats remain part of the goods transportation network. Critically, these alternate methods have a much lower climate impact than transport by roads and especially by plane. The reasons that low-carbon modes of cargo transport such as trains and boats are not preferred are mostly speed and cost. Those lower costs are made possible because industries do not pay for the environmental consequences of their actions. Industries reap the advantage of these lower costs, while the public, the environment, and future generations pay for them. Such are the mechanisms by which the social implications of these technologies are realized.

Roads, the argument goes, have tremendous economic benefits—allowing us to go to work, shop, get to school, and generally live. The costs and benefits associated with recreation benefits such as the forest preserve are low, and the benefits are easily enough tallied. Both the Argonne National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) committed funds to isolate this land from the public, determine the extent of contamination, and perform remediation [4], [6]. The scale of the cleanup and monitoring at the Red Gates Woods site itself was shaped by choices and stakeholder action, marked by disagreement between DOE and Argonne staff and the local residents.

The national defense costs associated with nuclear weapons, and the sometimes conflated discussion of the storage of spent nuclear fuel is often enormous. Much has been written within this magazine on the infrastructure choices that shaped my day trip, from the physical transport choices [7], [8] to the privacy implications of the technological infrastructure that underpins the mapping functions I used on my phone [9] and the choice between nuclear energy or other sources [10], [11], the challenges in disposing of spent nuclear fuel [12], and the ways in which our values can, should, and actually do guide our technological choices [13], [14], [15].

Climate change will reverse our infrastructure gains, wiping out the good things we had and did not know about.

Confronting the climate crisis, all levels of government face enormous costs related to decarbonization and adaptation [16]. While various climate agreements have been struck, governments and corporations consistently miss their targets [17]. Commitments have often focused on science-based or net-zero targets. However, these targets often rely on offsets or net-zero certificates. Unfortunately, those certificates and claims often do not represent actual emission reductions [18]. Even if science-based or net-zero targets did represent emission reductions, they are a wildly insufficient measure to combat climate change [19]. Worse yet, corporations have begun abandoning these net-zero pledges [20].

In How Infrastructure Works, Deb Chachra details the way that infrastructure provides collective care, often in ways that are nearly invisible to us [21]. This is especially true when the price was paid long ago by someone else. Climate change will reverse our infrastructure gains, wiping out the good things we had and did not know about. Planning and investing now is the only real way that we can protect ourselves, and we have now locked in warming that is already showing catastrophic effects.

Back to Red Gate Woods. When Illinois made the decision to enact a forest preserve system, they did more than preserve natural forest; they took prairie lands and made more forest. Over the past few decades, conservationists and state agencies have sought to restore prairie areas. Red Gate Woods includes rare remnant prairie lands and can provide a valuable space to expand intact prairie. On the way out of the forest, I spotted two compact track loaders clearing brush, as shown in Figure 7. It turns out that this was part of a U.S. $ 10 million effort to restore native species, preserve biodiversity, and hopefully access the benefits of prairie lands in flood prevention [22].

Figure 7.Compact track loaders clearing brush. (Photo credit: Bert Schmitt.)

Land and the species that use that land provide us spaces for recreation, well water, secret military projects, and dumping toxic waste. That same land can act as a carbon sink to prevent the worst flooding impacts [23], [24]. Each of these uses and the ways we get to and from these spaces were collective technology choices. They cost money and time, and reflect the networks of our ancestors, their lives, and their choices.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Nick Zacchia for his excellent comments and insights. These improved the manuscript immensely.