Nobel Prize-winning chemist Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium, ascended to the heights of Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1961 and presided for a decade. French chemist Bertrand Goldschmidt was one of the handful of scientists who kick-started France’s slow but accelerating post-World-War-II nuclear mastery. Over the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the two nations were often. . .
One of the pleasures, if that is at all an acceptable term, of following the massive multi-reactor nuclear accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi, was the role played by an enterprising blogger. Will Davis, formerly a US navy reactor operator, kicked off his Atomic Power Review blog in April 2010. The blog is still live though less frequently updated these days. Davis presents and analyses. . .
General Leslie R. Groves, the larger-than-life head of the Manhattan Project in World War II, doesn’t figure much in my book. He built the atom bomb and I’m not writing about the bomb. Inevitably, he crops up during my early story, but by and large I’m glad to leave him alone. (I did enjoy Robert Norris’s wonderful biography, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves. . .
Newspaper headlines and knee-jerk analysis of major historical events make for inaccurate history. Or to put it another way, spending too much time tracking the news is inefficient. Give a major event a year to settle down, or two years, or a decade, or a quarter century, and you have a better chance of ascertaining the “truth.” The 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania was. . .