I’ve been busy with another type of book recently but am now back with the reactor pioneers in the 50s. In May 1956, Lewis Strauss, controversial in history as a most aggressive chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, took his British civil service counterpart on a tour of the construction site of Shippingport, also controversial at the time because of its great expense. What interested and amused me was Strauss’s apology to a press aide about failing to get the plant-in-construction into the press enough:
[I]t is a hard plant to photograph effectively as about 4/5 of it is below ground level, in which respect it resembles an iceberg.
NOTES
American Society of Mechanical Engineers. 1980. Historic Achievement Recognized: Shippingport Atomic Power Station: A National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark. American Society of Mechanical Engineers, New York.
Balogh, Brian. 1991. Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975. Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, p. 113.