In Richard J. Samuels’s invaluable 1987 book, The Business of the Japanese State: Energy Markets in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York), he provides a table of the overseas firms that established linkages with Japanese heavy manufacturing companies, beginning in 1955 and 1956. What could be more useful for me, teasing out how Japan entered the. . .
In writing up the 1952 Canadian NRX nuclear accident, I naturally specify that the out-of-control reactor spikes to a huge power level. I assumed the Canadians somehow measured this spike during the accident. But in another of James Mahaffey’s intriguing footnotes (see my previous post), he clarifies: …analysis of the accident found that the reactor power had peaked at 80 megawatts, far. . .
James Mahaffey, in Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters from the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima, one of his evocative trio of books published from 2009 to 2017, covers the 1952 Canadian NRX nuclear reactor accident. In a footnote, he raises a question (p. 151): …the superintendent said “Dump the polymer!” I would have thought it correct to say “dump the deuterium oxide” or. . .
One of the features of early British atomic history was an almighty battle between the scientists and the engineers. Mostly they worked well together but John Cockcroft and Christopher Hinton, the mighty titans who presided over a remarkable nuclear expansion, were so different in temperament that their organizations reflected them and, frankly, often went to war. In 1951 Hinton, sick of what he. . .
In late 1951 Ben Lewis, the core physicist leading Canada’s reactor efforts, proposed the nation build its first power producing prototype. It would take another decade for what would be called NPD (Nuclear Power Demonstration) to start working, but in the meantime, Lewis went calling on his mother country, the United Kingdom, hoping to obtain assistance. None was ever forthcoming and one. . .
At the end of 1950, Christopher Hinton, the head of UK’s atomic factories, wrote to a Miss Lowrison, who I presume is personal secretary of Lord Portal, Hinton’s overlord in the Ministry of Supply. The very first of the nation’s military plutonium production reactors had just sputtered into life after experiencing half a year of difficulties, and everyone desperately hoped that. . .
A minor but surprisingly crucial U.S.-U.K. scientific interaction in the early history of English reactors was a June 1948 trip to the mother country by Walter Zinn, who ran Argonne. I was amused to discover from this letter, four months earlier, from an English diplomat in Washington to John Cockcroft, presaging Zinn’s journey, that it might not have even occurred if Zinn’s allergies. . .
Few scientists in the late 1940s were as powerful as England’s John Cockcroft and few were as mild in manner. Thus the following brief letter to a London public servant, quaint as the language is, shows how tough he could be in protecting Harwell, his creation: You might like to see the attached cutting about Sir Ralph Glyn, who is apparently still make rude remarks about Harwell. I think. . .
British physicist Terence Price had a way with words as well as numbers. In his autobiography, he recalls the start-up of what we would now call a minor research reactor, but was then significant. Bepo—British Experimental Pile 0—clicked into life on July 3, 1948. Price recalls his amazement that it was “painted in a colour that I had not previously encountered—heliotrope” (I too had. . .
Sometimes it almost seems too easy to find idiosyncratic outbursts from Christopher Hinton, chief builder of early British reactors: Thank you very much for sending me the photographs of the charge machine which you have built for Calder Hall A. It looks very nice and I only hope that it will work. If it does, it will be the first of its kind to be successful. Complicated machines were designed. . .