When the United Kingdom formally commenced its atomic pursuits at the beginning of 1946, before the expert triumvirate of Cockcroft, Hinton, and Penney established their empires, plenty of naive ideas were tossed around. Here is one expressed in a meeting of a secretive Cabinet committee (called Gen 112) on January 28: The atomic power stations of the future could quite safely be placed in large. . .
The following paragraph by Michele Gerber, the official historian at Hanford, the huge plutonium production site in Washington State, is excess to my requirements, but I like it for its concise exposition of something important. The advent of reactors and bombs during World War II led to not only a vastly greater quantity of artificial radiation, the types and varieties of radiation also scaled. . .
Sportspeople who achieve are allowed to show emotion. Politicians are expected to emote. But engineers and scientists, even when they do remarkable things, shed no tears. “Butch” Lichtenberger, an Argonne physicist who was instrumental within teams building a number of first-of-a-kind reactors, always struck me from my reading as stolid; for example, he liked to hunt. In 1954 he wrote. . .
A revelatory paper by UCal historian Sean Malloy shocked me. Check out the final sentence of this conclusion to his masterful analysis: This survey of pre-Hiroshima knowledge of radiation effects in the United States makes it clear that most of the immediate and long-term biological effects of radiation on victims of the bomb were predictable at the time of the A-bomb decision, even if still. . .
Leo Szilard played an enormously important role in the development of the first atomic bombs. His eccentricities are oft mentioned. His core strengths as a physicist were not the complex maths of a theory, nor in conducting imaginative experiments. Rather he was a big-picture thinker, a prodigious one. After WWII ended, he retained some atomic charisma but quickly moved on to biology. One of his. . .
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. . .