One can never get enough snapshots of Enrico Fermi, the 1942 “developer” of the first reactor and, some would say, the last great combined theoretical and experimental physicist. Listen to Stuart McLain, Oak Ridge physicist, from his charming autobiography Me!: Or Don’t Do It My Way (provided with great generosity by his son, Douglas McLain): Dr. Fermi attended one meeting that. . .
I’m not sure what kinds of airplanes flew from Washington, D.C. to Florida in 1957 but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have been quiet and comfortable. I enjoyed noticing how hard one of the reactor developers, Walter Zinn, worked and traveled after he left government employment to run his own company in Dunedin, Florida. Here he is, writing to his friend James Ramey who worked at. . .
The British archival goldmine of Christopher Hinton’s diaries (not all of which can be viewed) offers a look at some of the quirks of that mercurial, impressive man. On January 1 each year he would grab the newspaper (not sure which one but probably The Times) and check the British honours list. He liked to line himself up against peers but especially against his ally and rival John. . .
The day before Christmas in 1956, Nazir Ahmad, head of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission met with England’s John Cockcroft (I’m not sure where, either in London or Harwell). Cockcroft was famously internationalist and forever battling isolationist Christopher Hinton, but even Cockcroft had to tread warily in this meeting, for how to treat Pakistan viz a viz India was a. . .
The oddities one stumbles upon … in January 1957 the trade journal Nucleonics trumpeted in a two-page article that “World opinion places U.S. in nuclear lead.” This was a period when a real sense of competition existed between U.S.A., U.S.S.R., and U.K. in the field of power reactors, even though it was also a period when next to no power reactors actually pumped out electricity. . .
Canada’s W. Bennett Lewis (Ben), a physicist who bestrode the first thirty years of CANDU development, typified the early reactor pioneers by being extremely capable. Listen to this extract from a eulogy by his colleagues: An incident that occurred during this period illustrates Lewis’s manner of working. For technical reasons the pressure and temperature of the steam in nuclear power. . .
Archival research coughs up the names of vital workers who are not famous or senior or significant. Administrators, assistants, secretaries… You grow familiar with those names and sometimes you wish you could feature them in a history. But no, functionaries miss out. Walter Zinn established the Argonne laboratory during the tail end of World War II. He left his creation in mid-1956. For. . .
Early British thinking about nuclear waste was dominated by the liquid that came out the other end of plutonium reprocessing plants, firstly at the military reservation at Windscale and then, in the mid-1950s, in remote north Scotland where a pilot breeder reactor was being built with a view to reprocessing non-military waste and recycle it, again leading to liquid end-waste. Engineer Christopher. . .