The debates over nuclear waste tend to recur. In May 1956, Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, took the visiting head of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, Edwin Plowden, on a tour of the Pennsylvania construction site of the Shippingport reactor (a year and a half from its startup). They fielded the press and a reporter had the temerity to ask about the waste. The. . .
From the National Archives in Chicago, I plucked a minor, minor memo from Walter Zinn to managers at his new Argonne laboratory. In a sense the memo says little but asides such as this one are useful because they signal the attitudes then prevalent. It comforts me that Zinn, such a relentless pursuer of nuclear energy, was also passionate about day-to-day safety. A recent accident in our. . .
You might have noticed how often Christopher Hinton, the engineer who could be called the “father of British nuclear energy,” recurs in this Nuclear Power History blog. Why? Because he is just so interesting as a human being. A domineering boss, he could also be disarmingly idealistic. In the Kew archives, I stumbled across a couple of pages of a script of a doco he must have made. . .
In 1957 an engineer with Phillips Petroleum, which was then managing the National Reactor Testing Station in remote Idaho, published an article in a trade journal, “Special Power Excursion Reactor Test III.” All of the countries who have embarked on major nuclear power programs have set up laboratories and testing devices, to explore design and safety features of reactors under. . .
The safety of nuclear power plants remains a fraught societal issue. The history of this aspect of nuclear reactors is, I’ve found, difficult to conceptualize. For example, here are two academics (political scientists, maybe) writing in 1986: In 1947 the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) established a Reactor Safeguard Committee (RSC) comprised of leading atomic scientists from outside AEC;. . .
As a non-nuclear-specialist, trying to recreate or even imagine the history of reactors always slams against the technical aspects of this ferociously technical technology. As a layperson, I would have imagined that by 1957, one and a half decades into the technology’s history, everything would have been known about the most essential ingredient in a reactor, the fissile fuel. Not so, it. . .
People imagine that the second half of the twentieth century is easily explored, that everything is on the Internet, maybe even in an LLM. Not so. In America’s National Archives, I came across an almost trivial letter from Walter Zinn, head of Argonne laboratory, to an Atomic Energy Commission official: The following paragraphs provide the information in your January 24 letter and the. . .
I’m being less than precise with the heading of this post for the post features the 1948 U.S. Reactor Safety Commission editing its own words, and I’m skating over the fact that the RSC had no power, was just an advisory commission (but, in my defense, it had enormous cachet at a time of little expertise). Anyway, my last post featured Argonne’s head, Walter Zinn, petitioning. . .