ArchiveFebruary 2018

Francis Simon, a German physicist and chemist who moved from Germany to England before World War II, became famous for co-inventing the gaseous diffusion method of uranium enrichment, vital for atomic bombs but also later for nuclear power reactors. After the war, he became an Oxford professor, received a knighthood in 1954, and died at age 63 in 1956. He had little direct atomic involvement at. . .

W. Kenneth Davis headed up the reactor development area of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission over the first four years of the 1950s, then joined Bechtel, a major engineering and construction firm. He proved to be an effective reactor salesman, in his own way. At the start of 1959, he addressed the First International Symposium on Nuclear Fuel Elements at Columbia University in New York. He talked. . .