The August 1953 issue of the Nucleonics trade journal contained this morsel: The Norwegian-Dutch Establishment for Nuclear Energy Research will be the host at a three-day conference on heavy-water reactors to be held August 11-13, 1953, at Kjeller, Norway. Visitors from 19 countries will attend the six sessions of the conference.Nucleonics. 1953. “Conference on reactors to be held in Norway.”. . .
From the time Admiral Hyman Rickover was granted the project of building America’s first civilian-only nuclear power plant, Shippingport, naysayers abounded. Rickover was a man who cultivated enemies. Shippingport would be regarded as the first PWR, pressurized-water reactor. Researching Rickover’s life and achievements yielded many intriguing bits and pieces, positive and negative. . .
Hyman Rickover is the implicit (and often explicit) father of nuclear energy, having proved the dominant light-water reactor design, firstly in submarines, and then at the Shippingport power plant. He reigned over the military nuclear submarine field for decades, but his impact on civilian reactors was fleeting. Why? Because he was abhorrent to the private sector. In late 1957, just as he was. . .
A couple of months after Windscale Pile 1, a plutonium producing military reactor in England, burst into flames, the powers to be needed to decide what to do with the identical Pile 2. Here we find an engineer at the Windscale factory pointing out a problem with restarting the shutdown pile: In July, 1955, improved health physics surveys at Windscale showed an increasing particulate deposition in. . .