In November 1957, staff at the Atomic Energy Commission, penned a report to the commissioners entitled “Status of Research and Development on Reactor Pressure Tubes.” If any decent-sized reactor was cooled by a gas, it needed to be held under pressure, either in a big ultra-strong pressure vessel or in tough tubes. America didn’t use tubes, only the Canadians and Soviets did. . .
David Wargowski, a retired scientist who also makes visual art out of early nuclear weapons history, has just pointed me to a fascinating short TV segment of Edward Murrow’s See It Now show (check out Wargowski’s screening on X). It’s a quasi reenactment, on December 2, 1952, of the very first reactor in Chicago ten years earlier. A microphone gets passed between various. . .
In 1994, German engineer Willy Marth penned a 191-page history of a small 20 MWe breeder reactor at the Karlsruhe laboratory south of Strasbourg near the French border. This is now one of history’s almost forgotten footnotes. In my research, I came upon a number of such “obituaries,” all tinged with a sadness you can sense from Marth’s early words: In memoriam: INTERATOMAs this report about KNK. . .
My book covers in some depth the (military) reactor fire at Windscale in rural England in October 1957. I won’t go into details here (you can read about it in Wikipedia or, better still, buy my book next year) but the hero of the day was undoubtedly Tom Tuohy, second-in-charge at the sprawling military establishment. After the accident, a small team, led by physicist William Penney, carried. . .
Another fascinating topic given scant attention in my book is the uranium mining industry and its history. I just couldn’t fit it in and there are plenty of books to peruse if you’re interested. As background, of course, I knew that the United States sought to corner every last morsel of this precious ore after World War II, as this wonderful summary attests: Those, then, were the. . .
Of the five nations blessed by the World War II and postwar push for nuclear weapons to have a head start toward nuclear power, Canada was the only one never interested in atomic and hydrogen bombs. I’ve concluded the Canadians always desired the peaceful atom. Over the years, some historians and analysts have painted Canada’s early efforts as having a dark side. I think this useful. . .
President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched nuclear power globally with his 1953 Atoms for Peace speech and subsequent initiatives but he was firmly one side of the “public power versus private power” debates that roiled American politics. As one author put it forty years ago: When dedicating the McNary Dam on the Columbia River, Eisenhower expressed his opinion of additional public power. . .
Westinghouse and General Electric loom large in my book, simply because they engaged in cutthroat competition to build power reactors as soon as World War II concluded. I don’t really dwell on the distant past of these two firms but note the following as background, from a wonderful history: Beginning with fifteen sizable companies in the early 1880s, they absorbed one another so rapidly. . .
My book comprehensively covers the early history of radioactive waste management across the five leading nuclear nations but some less dramatic moments are excluded from the narrative. The lead was taken, naturally enough, by the United States, but the issue was clear enough in the United Kingdom from the early days. About a year after that nation’s nuclear program was launched, in April. . .
There are so many Hyman Rickover stories! Here’s one surfaced by an American journalist less than twenty years ago, referring to an event seven decades ago: In 1953, he was under pressure from Adm. Rickover to make a presidential photo opportunity run flawlessly: President Dwight D. Eisenhower was to wave a wand (actually a neutron detector) in Denver, triggering a phone hookup to start a. . .