Politician Stewart Udall (pictured) served as US Secretary of the Interior for eight years in the Sixties, and in the process became disillusioned with nuclear power. John von Neumann, an American (Hungarian-born) mathematician, physicist and computer science pioneer, had little to do with reactors but was a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1955 until his death in 1957. Here. . .
I’ve referred previously to the fascinating historical interplay between the two key British reactor pioneers, Nobel-Prize-winning physicist John Cockcroft and engineer Christopher Hinton. To put it plainly, they did not get along, though they both tried to make the relationship work, in different ways in different periods. The way they grated against each other is mostly airbrushed from. . .
49 people, some luminaries, some journeymen, one woman amongst them all, signed a celebratory Chianti bottle after witnessing Enrico Fermi and Walter Zinn’s Chicago Pile-1 “go critical” (that is, achieve fission), on December 2, 1942. The first one of anything is always special. I spend an entire chapter on CP-1 and this wintry Chicago morning, and am a fetishist on the event. . .
A while back, I quoted an interview snippet that encapsulated a strain of idealism in early nuclear power history. Far easier to spot in the historical record is the motivation of pioneering, of working in a brand new exciting field. I quoted Sellafield physicist Graham Brightman in that earlier post. Let me feature Brightman again: I moved over to work at the then very new shining Calder. . .
Last week I watched Ben-Gurion, Epilogue, a 70-minute documentary film exhuming a 1968 6-hour interview David Ben-Gurion gave to a British director and his film crew to inform into their script of a feature film on the legendary leader, a biopic recreating the man and parts of his life. The film reels came to be forgotten, almost lost. The accompanying soundtrack (which didn’t quite match the. . .
British atomic manufacturing supremo Christopher Hinton had a fearsome reputation that comes down to us more though asides and a handful of descriptions than from direct recollections. His diary is invaluable although generally cautious. But in this 1954 diary entry I catch him commenting on a non-executive director of the Atomic Energy Authority: There was a tough discussion about. . .
Facts are one thing, motives another. A historian can get lucky and tap into historical actors’ underlying aspirations and goals through revelatory memoirs, biographies, interviews or emails/letters, but in the nuclear field, opacity quickly came to be the prevalent stance. When the only historical documents are official reports, speeches, cautious meeting minutes, or newspaper articles, the spin. . .
In England, the national policy tension between mastering nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, and ballooning costs, was to preoccupy politicians and public servants from the 1960s, but I enjoyed finding an early sign of concern. The British triumvirate of Christopher Hinton, John Cockcroft, and William Penney was nigh impossible to subject to budgetary control, but on January 26, 1954, private. . .
The mythology of Rickover presents dark and light sides, an instance of the latter fascinating me in this pithy aside from biographers Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen: Rickover even put on a uniform for Time. Refreshingly, the Admiral hated kitting up (he hated much about the Navy he served). Of course his alternative dress was standard fifties suit and tie, but his dislike of pomp endears him to. . .
On December 2 falls the 75th anniversary of the very first nuclear reactor, CP-1 at the University of Chicago. A couple of days ago, the university posted a write-up of the momentous event by Michael Drapa. This event is close to my heart and I greatly enjoyed revisiting the drama, both in the post and in an embedded four-and-a-half-minute video narrated with great verve by Rachel Bronson. . .