Of course my book presents Walter Zinn’s 1951 experimental breeder reactor as a key event, but one of its purposes was to confirm the very presence of such reactors, namely that they “breed” fissile material. That is, for every atom of uranium-235 (or other fissile material) consumed inside the reactor, another atom of plutonium (or other fissile material) is produced, almost as. . .

I don’t know what I would have done without Red Atom: Russia’s Nuclear Power from Stalin to Today (2000, W. H. Freeman, New York; I quote from p. 61). American historian Paul Josephson gained remarkable access to the nuclear centers of Russia during the 90s and Red Atom is one of only three book-length English language histories available to us Westerners. But Josephson’s. . .

One of nuclear power’s forgotten historical byways is General Electric’s pursuit, for over a decade after WWII, of what they called an “intermediate” reactor cooled by liquid sodium. Most nuclear machines slow down the “fast” neutrons expelled by nuclear fission, resulting in “thermal” or slow neutron reactors. More futuristic breeder reactors. . .

I’ve read way too much about the beginnings of what is euphemistically called “health physics” (rather than, say, “radiation protection science”) and what strikes me is the imbalance between the myriad reports, papers, and memoirs from USA and nothing at all from the Soviet Union. It is clear that the Soviet physicists, like their American counterparts, recognized. . .

Terence Price was an English nuclear physicist, born in 1921. In 1947, aged 26, he joined John Cockcroft’s startup laboratory in the English countryside. When he published his autobiography (titled Political Physicist) in 2004, I was at first agog with the data implications for me. “A month after joining Harwell,” he writes about a fifth of the way through the book, “I. . .

As with genre fiction, mainstream (i.e. non-academic) history need only possess clear prose. The point is the history, the story, the organization, the data. Virtuosic stylistics, if they arise, are a bonus. So when you find a historian whose writing is a pleasure to read, savor her, my friends, savor her. My go-to paragon of evocative history style is Richard Rhodes but another author I’ve. . .

Walter Zinn’s words amidst twelve pages of dense technical verbiage: “It may be acceptable in the early development of the industry to place as the first goal reactor power plants which are competitive in an economic sense with the coal-fired plants. Success in this inevitably will bring a demand for an increased utilization of the nuclear raw material. … It is equally clear that in. . .

It’s January 1956. American physicist Walter Zinn is about to leave the laboratory he founded a decade earlier, Argonne, situated on the outskirts of Chicago. Argonne now has 2,314 staff! He pens a formal-sounding memorandum to most of his direct reports, asking them to attend a series of eight 10 AM meetings to be held over three weeks. They’re all busy folks. He is, as always. . .

In 1957 Latin American nuclear scientists came to a bonding and education conference at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island near New York. Not much from that conference seems to have survived, at least outside American archives, but Nucleonics, the industry’s trade journal, reported on a speech by Alvin Weinberg, Oak Ridge’s supremo. Weinberg had a searching mind, fine. . .

Christopher Hinton was the engineering overlord of Britain’s huge world-leading push into power reactors from the early 1950s. He was a towering personality. Somehow he managed to combine blistering honesty (he battled bureaucrats all his life) with an anxious need to preserve a hallowed reputation. A number of years ago, I came across a classic invited speech he made in 1954, in which he. . .