In this blog of fragments and jetsam, quite often I quote Len Owen, the number two engineer of the early British nuclear reactor effort. He is another of those lost souls of history, not quite famous enough to have biographies penned about him. The British archives contain his “project diary” from January 4, 1946 to January 17, 1950 (I have no idea if he kept diaries after 1950). The. . .
In October 1947, David Lilienthal, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, set up an Industrial Advisory Group comprising mainly utility and manufacturing company execs. Lilienthal knew nothing much could happen with nuclear energy (i.e. commercial nuclear-generated electricity) during those early days when all the focus was on Cold War nuclear weapons work, all top secret stuff. He was hoping. . .
Christopher Hinton, head of the British military reactors, sent some kind of a 1952 Christmas letter to the huge Windscale complex. Gethin Davey, the capable physicist/engineer managing that complex, responded (handwritten!) a couple of days before Christmas: Dear Sir Christopher,Thank you for your letter dated 19th Dec., which is most appreciated by all of us at Windscale. The past year has been. . .
In 1963, Len Owen, once #2 under pioneer Christopher Hinton, but now seven years into his latest role of the production/engineering arm of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, addressed the Institution of Civil Engineers in Great George Street, Westminster, not far from Parliament Square. He called his speech “Nuclear engineering in the United Kingdom in the first ten years,”. . .
Say what you like about Western nuclear safety and dose management in the postwar era, there was nothing like the blatant disregard for public protection that the Soviet Union exhibited. Because the communist state was highly effective at secrecy, few realized the discrepancy between West and East in those early years (in fact it took the collapse of the Soviet Union to bring the sordid facts to. . .
On July 19, 1956, the New York Times included an article that began: “The Atomic Energy Commission announced tonight that current atomic tests in the Pacific had proved it was now possible to minimize the ‘widespread fallout hazard’ from nuclear explosions. Lewis L. Strauss, commission chairman, made the announcement. He also said ‘real progress’ had been made in developing a variety of. . .
Physicist/engineer James Mahaffey has written a number of books. His main three are Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power (2009); Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters from the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima (2014); and Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays, and Isotopic Murder—A Journey into the Wild World of Nuclear Science. . .
In Canadian chemist Les Cook’s slightly homespun nuclear memoir, he offers many interesting perspectives. Canadians today may be surprised to learn how the scientific and conceptual engineering contributions to the initiation of the Chalk River project, or to the first two reactors at Chalk River, ZEEP and NRX, all came from outsiders. Indeed the first really new basic conceptual innovation. . .
W. Bennett Lewis was the British-born third head of the Chalk River nuclear laboratory in Canada. Toward the end of his career, he was shunted sideways, but his influence on matters not only of physics (his specialty) but even engineering was legendary. The choice of fuel-sheath thickness is another prime example of Lewis’s influence on the project. He was determined to minimize the non-fuel. . .
Ted (Theodore) Rockwell was one of the many talented nuclear engineers (in the early days they hadn’t received that label yet) who worked for Hyman Rickover during Rickover’s pioneering days. He was not only significant on the technical front, he was also prolific as an author, penning a number of books, mostly about Rickover and Rickover’s legacy. I had hoped to phone-interview. . .