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.” Nucleonics 11 (Aug.): 61.
Global interest in heavy-water reactors was high. Argonne’s Walter Zinn sent his trusted technical man, John West. Oak Ridge’s Alvin Weinberg came, as did his key engineer, John McLain. The British design guru, John Dunworth, made the trip across the Channel. France’s Lew Kowarski, Sweden’s Sigvard Eklund, Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer, Norway’s Odd Dahl … key national reactor pioneers, all of them. Nineteen nations sent representatives.
I thirsted to browse the conference’s proceedings. What did these pioneers see as the future of the heavy water design? What variations in design were chatted about? What challenges confronted the design? Yet I never stumbled across any more about August 11, 1953, not in books, not in journals, not in archives.
