Boron and Bytes
The summer after high school, I didn’t head straight for a factory floor or a fast-food counter like many of my friends. I found myself in a chemistry lab. Not the kind of lab where you mix food dye and vinegar, but one where we worked with boron-10 isotopes for the nuclear industry. It was heady stuff for an 18-year-old who had just taken every chemistry course his high school could offer.
My freshman year, I tested out of general science and went straight into sophomore biology. At the time I didn’t find biology all that interesting — and it didn’t help that they stuck me at a table with some… let’s say, less academically minded classmates. At one point we were working with an E. coli sample when one of them managed to spill it all over the table. Our teacher nearly had a heart attack and made us bleach everything in sight.
But the next year was chemistry, and that was something else. Learning about atoms, seeing radiation tracks in a cloud chamber, igniting hydrogen gas in a “pop bottle” — all of it was cool to me. Since I was still a year ahead, I had time to take advanced chemistry and physics my junior year. By senior year I even got permission to do an independent study in chemistry (which, as I recall, was mostly just TA work).
So after graduation, before starting at the local university, I landed a summer job in the QA/QC lab at Eagle-Picher1 Boron2 in Quapaw, Oklahoma — not far from my hometown of Joplin, Missouri. I didn’t hesitate to take it.
My job was quality control. I’d be handed a small vial of fine, white boron powder (passed through a little airlock between the production line and the lab) and told to weigh it out. Sounds simple — until you realize we needed to be accurate down to the microgram. That meant using a special balance enclosed in a glass box, sitting on its own slab of concrete isolated from the rest of the building. A passing truck on the highway or even someone shutting a door too hard could nudge the numbers. I learned to move carefully, breathe shallowly, and treat every measurement like it mattered. Because it did.
Once I had the sample’s weight, the next step was titration. I’d dissolve the powder in acid, set up burettes and flasks, and slowly add solution until the reaction flipped. Later in university I had to do this all by hand, but in this lab we had a titration machine that did the hard work, spitting out results on graph paper — all I had to do was find the right part of the curve. The calculations traced back to my original measurement, so accuracy at the beginning was everything. The work was repetitive but mesmerizing — I was part of a meticulous process that fed directly into the nuclear supply chain, under contract with the Department of Energy (DOE). At 18, that responsibility felt enormous.
There was other work, too. Between boron samples, we tested the boiler water used to make steam for processing, recommending additives to offset corrosion. The cooling towers needed daily sampling in case algae or other impurities required treatment. And since many of our tests called for boiled deionized (DI) water, we always had big flasks simmering away on hot plates with magnetic stir bars whirring inside, building up our supply.
I thought at the time that chemistry was my future. My plan was chemical engineering, maybe a career in labs like this one. But life has a way of shifting course. While I was there, the plant began shutting down as the nuclear industry collapsed in the wake of Three Mile Island. I stayed on for a while longer, but eventually — about a month before college started — I was let go when production halted.
Not long after, I found computers — and once I realized I could get the same sense of precision and problem-solving from code and systems that I had from a microbalance and titration, I was hooked.
Looking back, that summer job was less a detour than a foundation. It taught me that the smallest details matter, that process and patience are everything, and that invisible things — whether isotopes or cloud infrastructure — can shape the world in outsized ways. My path turned out to be measured in bytes instead of micrograms, but the mindset has never left me.
-
Eagle-Picher
Eagle-Picher has a fascinating history. Dating back to 1843, they started in lead and zinc mining, with a side business in batteries that greatly expanded during World War II. Afterwards, they moved into government contracts, doing everything from semiconductors and exotic-material batteries to boron isotopes. The first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, used Eagle-Picher batteries. So did Hubble. Remember Apollo 13, when the astronauts had to use the Lunar Module as a lifeboat — and its batteries kept them alive? Those were from Eagle-Picher, too.
They’re around today (now known as EaglePicher Technologies), still making batteries for space missions. ↩︎
-
What’s Special About Boron-10?
Boron has two stable isotopes: boron-10 (about 20% naturally) and boron-11 (about 80%). The “10” means it has 5 protons and 5 neutrons. That balance makes boron-10 unusual: it’s an excellent neutron absorber.
In a nuclear reactor, controlling neutrons is everything. Too many free neutrons, and the chain reaction runs out of control. Too few, and the reaction fizzles. Boron-10 steps in as a kind of brake. When a neutron hits a boron-10 nucleus, the atom captures it and then splits into a lithium atom and a helium nucleus (an alpha particle). That process removes neutrons from circulation, keeping the chain reaction steady.
Because of this, boron-10 is used in:
- Control rods — solid rods that can be inserted into the reactor core to absorb neutrons and slow the reaction.
- Reactor coolant additives — boron dissolved in the coolant water gives operators finer control over neutron activity.
- Radiation shielding — because it soaks up stray neutrons, it helps protect workers and equipment.
- And — maybe — even fusion warheads. A fusion warhead uses a fission device as its trigger, and managing the neutron flux is critical to making that work. It’s possible that boron-10, with its knack for absorbing neutrons, has some role there — though that’s firmly in the realm of speculation.
In short, boron-10 is a quiet but critical player in nuclear safety. That little white powder I weighed on a balance in 1983 was destined to keep reactors running safely, one microgram at a time. ↩︎