Before rowing us and getting into work I propose a game. One fast, simple and above all curious. Open Google Maps, activates the satellite vision (with the street of the street the effect will not be the same), write “Alcalá Atomic Garden” and then let the website transfer you to a point located near Meco and the Northeast Highway, the A-2. There, Google’s red claw.
Approximately.
What do you see? Exact. A huge green circumference. Symmetric. Perfect As if they had drawn it with an XXL size compass. If you dedicate a couple of seconds you will appreciate that it is formed by concentric circles, a succession Tree rings Almost and leafy enough to stand out in bird view and that someone planted in their day around a clear center.
It is not a mistake. It is history.
More specifically the footprint of the “El Encín Gamma Radiation”, an installation that in its day, back in the last decades of Franco, stood out on the country’s scientific map. His chronicle is fascinating. Almost as the large 15 -hectare wooded square he left in Alcalá and that, in the words of the anthropologist Ambrosio Sánchez de Ribera, is “a singularity” at European level.
New times, new science
The 50s and 60s were times of change. For the world, which gradually entered the cold war. And of course to Spain, where Franco seemed to enter a new phase marked by developmentalism and certain cracking of its international isolation, with milestones such as the signing of the concordat with the Holy See in 1953, the pacts of Madrid or the entrance to the UN, in 1955.
The 50 were also time for something else: nuclear energy.
With still the recent memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the middle of the arms race with Moscow, the US wanted international opinion not to focus only on the threat of atomic war and also value its civil and scientific uses. Probably the best proof of that effort is the speech “atoms for peace”, pronounced in 1953 by Eisenhower against the UN.
“Instead of focusing exclusively on the dangers of atomic war, Eisenhower praised the Civil nuclear applications In agriculture, medicine and energy generation. He proposed to create an ‘international atomic energy organism’ that promoted the peaceful use of nuclear energy ‘for the benefit of humanity’, recalls Elisabeth Röhrlich, historian of the University of Vienna. The result soon materialized: just four years later, in 1957, the international organism of atomic energy (OIEA) was created.
Spain, who had started his own (and shy) history with nuclear energy in the late 40s, did not remain waterproof to those changes. In the 50 Patria Press (Node included) already spoke of the US plants or the United Kingdom and experiments with radioactive sources applied to medicine and agriculture. In 57 Madrid even hosted a European FAO summit on the subject.
Thus, with that backdrop, around 1959, Spain decided to take another step and, with the key mediation of César Gómez Campo, a experience with experience in the US, planned to create its own “Gamma Radiation Field”a focused specifically designed to perform “crop and seed irradiation experiments”. The chosen place: El Encín, a plot away from Alcalá where Gómez Campo himself had been conducting studies for the Institute of Agronomic Research.
The project advanced relatively fast, as Ambrosio Sánchez de Ribera recalls in a large (and very complete) essay on the Encín published in 2018 in Complutenses Annals. In 1961, what time was lifted would be an active scientific installation whose footprint still shows today from Google bird: a field of study of 440 square meters of diameter, an area of 15 hectares and 18,000 trees, although in 2018 there were only 5,000 left.
A huge outdoor laboratory
The Encín was a huge outdoor laboratory. One with a design as peculiar as its purpose. The field was circular and was formed by a series of concentric rings arranged around an axis. In the center there was a circle of 25 m radius with a removable hexagonal greenhouse. Inside it contained a lead sarcophagus that housed the source of radiation with which scientists operated, Cesio137 from used bars of American nuclear reactors.
Around that central almond of 50 m in diameter, protected with a concrete wall and a stepped soil slope of several meters high to avoid the radiation output, the nearly 18,000 trees that completed the circumference of 15 hectares were distributed. Its purpose was to serve as extra screen against radiation. By way of auction, the center had a garden of large trees and several constructions where the staff had its offices and laboratories.
Clarified what the Encín was the other great question: What did they do in it in the 60s? Basically experiment with radiation to find mutations that in last terms allow to achieve varieties of interesting vegetables, fruits or seeds for their characteristics. What is called induced mutagenesis.
Gómez Campo himself explained in 1964 what centers such as El Encín were dedicated: “Essentially it consists of a gamma ray emitting source that is installed in an open field, so that the irradiation of growth in growth or relatively voluminous animals is possible.”
Certain hours a day and for several months a year, at the Alcalá base the technicians opened the lead sarcophagus so that the gamma ray emitting source could act in the center of the field, the 50 m area of diameter protected with a wall and slope in which plants, seeds, insects or some animals were exposed.
“The dose received depended on the distance from Cesio137,” says Sánchez de Ribera. When the years of irradiation ended the lead sarcophagus fell again, the caesium was locked and the researchers could access to work.
The El Encín field worked 12 years, Between 1961 and 1973when his activity was complicated by the construction of a cement factory in the surroundings. The dust hindered research, so that in 73 it was decided to remove the radioactive source and transfer it to the Polytechnic University of Madrid. There he was only three years before embarking on a new trip, this time longer, to the low and medium activity warehouse of El Cabril.
The long decade that operated made El Encín an interesting ally for Spanish research. Sánchez de Ribera estimates that some 40 teams of researchers who dedicated themselves to explore issues as diverse as seed germination or food conservation were used. Moreover, the facilities even aroused the interest of foreign experts.
From 1965 in the Encín, the Fruit flies sterility To fight pests. To advance the study and once the source of Cesio was withdrawn cobalt60 in a laboratory to which the staff referred as “flies”. The fate of that source ended up being the same: the Waste Warehouse of El Cabril, in Sierra Albarrana.
We now have the footprint of what was one of the most curious scientific facilities in the Spain of the twentieth century. Although between the 50s and 60s Gamma Campos were built in more than 20 countries, Sánchez de Ribera reviewed in 2018 that the Encín was the only one that was preserved in Europe. Moreover, the OIEA reported only two assets: in Hitachiohmiya (Japan) and Jalan Dengkil, in Malaysia.
Alcalá also stands out for more than its uses. Its configuration is also peculiar. The wooded footprint that we still see today was not usual in the fields of their kind, which used to protect themselves only with retaining walls or were located in forests or areas where geology could serve as Protective barrier.
Now, 64 years after his granting, we can look at him in view of a bird.
Images | Google maps, Wikipedia 1, 2 and
In WorldOfSoftware | Spain was not one of the first to step on Antarctica, but now it has one of the most coveted laboratories on the continent
