Nobel Prize-winning chemist Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium, ascended to the heights of Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1961 and presided for a decade. French chemist Bertrand Goldschmidt was one of the handful of scientists who kick-started France’s slow but accelerating post-World-War-II nuclear mastery. Over the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the two nations were often. . .
One of the pleasures, if that is at all an acceptable term, of following the massive multi-reactor nuclear accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi, was the role played by an enterprising blogger. Will Davis, formerly a US navy reactor operator, kicked off his Atomic Power Review blog in April 2010. The blog is still live though less frequently updated these days. Davis presents and analyses. . .
General Leslie R. Groves, the larger-than-life head of the Manhattan Project in World War II, doesn’t figure much in my book. He built the atom bomb and I’m not writing about the bomb. Inevitably, he crops up during my early story, but by and large I’m glad to leave him alone. (I did enjoy Robert Norris’s wonderful biography, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves. . .
Newspaper headlines and knee-jerk analysis of major historical events make for inaccurate history. Or to put it another way, spending too much time tracking the news is inefficient. Give a major event a year to settle down, or two years, or a decade, or a quarter century, and you have a better chance of ascertaining the “truth.” The 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania was. . .
In March 1954, Oliver Townsend from America’s nascent nuclear energy organization, the Atomic Industrial Forum, wrote to Walter Zinn, head of Argonne National Laboratory, asking him to attend a May meeting. Zinn responded: I do not like to make speeches. My reaction to speech-making is mostly based on the fact that there is hardly ever any new information available, and I am rather weary of. . .
In early 1955, Walter Zinn, head of Argonne National Laboratory, was a key player in the US push into nuclear energy. Engineers were moving into the domain of the physicists but even then, nearly a decade after the end of World War II, much was unclear about the behavior of particles and substances in the midst of fission. Experienced, capable physicists were like gold and Bernard Spinrad. . .
Winston Churchill’s role in the history of nuclear energy is both limited and significant. Britain’s subsidiary, but occasionally pivotal, role in the Manhattan Project’s successful atomic bomb quest occurred while he was leader. Never comfortable with technicalities, he delegated most of that work, but in the later years of WWII, he did pursue (quite unsuccessfully). . .
It’s not often I recommend something unreservedly but if you’re a non-WordPress-expert and want something beyond the generic themes (not that there’s anything wrong with them), the theme underlying this blogsite, Typology from Meks, is sweet. Choosing a WordPress theme is a minefield and amateurs like me struggle with both understanding a theme’s specific features and then. . .
British engineer Christopher Hinton commenced his diary entry for Tuesday, October 29, 1956 thus: “Israel has attacked Egypt . . . [hard to decipher] . . . that Suez Canal is kept open.” I am of course obsessively fascinated by Hinton, father of the British gas-cooled Magnox and AGR reactor programs, and its decades-long breeder program. (Clearly I over simplify, as indeed many others. . .
On June 24, 1940, John Cockcroft, who would be the British scientist with most responsibility for the early English reactors, met up with two French scientists, Hans von Halban and Leo Kowarski, who had just fled Nazi-conquered France. Kowarski in particular would be key to the very early days of the Canadian reactor program, and the wartime work they would do, in England and later Canada, would. . .