President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched nuclear power globally with his 1953 Atoms for Peace speech and subsequent initiatives but he was firmly one side of the “public power versus private power” debates that roiled American politics. As one author put it forty years ago: When dedicating the McNary Dam on the Columbia River, Eisenhower expressed his opinion of additional public power. . .
Westinghouse and General Electric loom large in my book, simply because they engaged in cutthroat competition to build power reactors as soon as World War II concluded. I don’t really dwell on the distant past of these two firms but note the following as background, from a wonderful history: Beginning with fifteen sizable companies in the early 1880s, they absorbed one another so rapidly. . .
My book comprehensively covers the early history of radioactive waste management across the five leading nuclear nations but some less dramatic moments are excluded from the narrative. The lead was taken, naturally enough, by the United States, but the issue was clear enough in the United Kingdom from the early days. About a year after that nation’s nuclear program was launched, in April. . .
There are so many Hyman Rickover stories! Here’s one surfaced by an American journalist less than twenty years ago, referring to an event seven decades ago: In 1953, he was under pressure from Adm. Rickover to make a presidential photo opportunity run flawlessly: President Dwight D. Eisenhower was to wave a wand (actually a neutron detector) in Denver, triggering a phone hookup to start a. . .
Russian engineer Lev Kochetkov died last year, aged 93. He was around for many of the major Soviet reactors. In 2004, he penned an article for a Western journal and I was impressed by his climaxing words. Genuine emotion can be rare in commercial or industrial circles. This is genuine. The years will pass and the remote light of the small reactor in Obninsk will shine brighter for the people as a. . .
Physicist Myron Katzer was interviewed by journalist Stephanie Cooke. I enjoyed the flavor of what he said about the epochal Geneva conference in August 1955 and its impact on freeing up vital technical reactor information from the confines of the military: The thing that permeated everything in those days, of course, was classification. The real crucial step to make the separation between. . .
I enjoyed this aside about how Hyman Rickover, naval submarine tyrant, discovered the non-military world can be more complex: The building of Shippingport also introduced Rickover and American industry to each other. Submarine work, up until Shippingport, had been virtually handcraft. Rickover, like the manager of a small machine shop, was able to keep an eye on just about everything that was. . .
Churning through tediously written archival material leaves one open to joy when one reads vigorous, lovely prose, such as this one by a historian of space travel: Sputnik’s success unleashed an unprecedented orgy of self-laceration and hysteria in the American press, not only because it was so manifestly a technological triumph but because, quite literally overhead, it appeared to leave the. . .
The Windscale accident at the tail end of 1957, mostly forgotten now, occurred in a military reactor but had implications for Britain’s upcoming generation of gas cooled power reactors. I chuckled when I read this turn of phrase from John Cockcroft, writing to the chairman of one of a few inquiries into the whole affair. What Cockcroft is referring to here is how to find out if a metal can. . .
It’s tempting to think reactors, massive creatures as they are, are roughly the same size when comparing one design to another. I mean, a reactor is a machine enclosing the magic of fission, right? And fission doesn’t vary between one design and another, right? That isn’t correct, though, as this 1957 public speech by England’s John Cockcroft (the prestigious Boyle. . .