Christopher Hinton, England’s nuclear engineering pioneer, made only a handful of visits to America. His most controversial was in October 1953, when he delivered what he called “a lecture” to a conference (organized by the influential National Industrial Conference Board) in New York titled “Atomic energy developments in Great Britain.” No doubt it struck the U.S. . .
History humbles. I’m constantly amazed by how little I know about the subject of my book, nuclear power. In taking notes about radioactive waste, I came across the following paragraph from a book on the topic by prolific historian Jacob Hamblin: One of the topics of discussion was the oceanographers’ idea to create a new laboratory under the auspices of the IAEA. This laboratory would study. . .
In the second year of nuclear development in the United Kingdom, in 1947, John Cockcroft ran a “Crazy Committee.” I make mention of this in my book, just a footnote to stress how far-ranging early reactor design thinking stretched. I’m sure someone can do a better job of combing the UK archives about those crazies but I only ended up with a few design minutes. For some reason. . .
Japan purchased one British power reactor, Tokai 1, a gas-cooled, very British design on the large side (160 MWe) for the times. It began operating in 1966. They never bought British again, heading exclusively to American reactors from then on. What I find interesting about this purchase and the subsequent rejection of that design stream, is not how much I know about it (I have quite enough. . .