The forgotten reactor pioneer is Walter Zinn, who had an early crucial hand in most of the world’s dominant designs. In his early fifties, he left the national laboratory he had built and set up as private designer/researcher, along with the cream of the lab’s scientists. Despite a coruscating private contempt for politicians, and lack of smooth charm, he knew everyone in the industry. . .
A Scottish journo Fyfe Robertson (pictured below), wrote a four-part series major articles about British nuclear matters in the first half of 1957. They came out in Picture Post, a “photojournalistic magazine” that lasted for twenty years before folding in 1957. I can’t get hold of Robertson’s articles but historian Dick van Lente devotes a page of The Nuclear Age in. . .
At the beginning of 1957, Christopher Hinton was deep within a national experiment to centrally kick-start a British reactor manufacturing industry. Four electrical firms had been encouraged and bullied into teaming up with boilermakers to form consortia that could bid for contracts to build British (and potentially overseas) reactors. The monopoly electricity supplier, the Central Electricity. . .
Christopher Hinton was one of the three scientist/engineer pioneers who oversaw the build-up from nothing of a massive British nuclear infrastructure over the first dozen post-war years, then he ran the near-monopoly state electricity generator for another seven years, so he can be called the prime architect of that nation’s substantive nuclear energy sector. He was intellectually as sharp. . .
Italy’s early (1950s) history is fascinating but weirdly complex. Reflecting a turbulent post-war political landscape, different state and private sector players sought to build different types of reactors, ranging from large to small. In particular, Fiat, the Italian car company we nowadays forget as being a postwar European success story, tried to build a power reactor, mainly due to the. . .
Canada’s second research reactor, NRU, sized at 135 MWt, was large for its day, but by the time it kicked off its working life, in November 1957, there were so many research reactors springing up all over the world, all of them by now peripheral to my central story about power (i.e. non-research) reactors, that I give them scant attention. That said, I relished this evocative picture of NRU. . .