I don’t know much at all about E. N. Shaw, the author of an obscure 1983 book about an obscure reactor. I liked the insight from this paragraph, showing an example of why advanced reactor development is so arduous: Fuel development is a lengthy process, complicated by the fact that
Another of those fascinating interconnections between the reactor pioneers, of little import but fascinating anyway. Samuel Untermyer, a protégé of one of my main characters, reactor pioneer Walter Zinn, left Zinn’s laboratory in the early 50s to join General Electric. Here in 1958, he writes a polite letter to British
The reactor pioneers visited their overseas contemporaries/competitors often and reading their trip reports offers plenty of interest. At a more general level, one aspect I’ve observed is that if you’re a British physicist visiting U.S. laboratories, your eventual report will imply, if not state, that the British are further advanced.
John Dunworth was one of the smart, opinionated physicists collected post-war by John Cockcroft for his Harwell laboratory. Over time Dunworth’s role became that of overall reactor guru. Here I catch him in 1953, eleven pages of him poring over all the technical literature and summing up recent British scientists’
In 1956 Kenneth Jay, sort of the inhouse historian of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, wrote a compact book about Calder Hall, the pride and joy of Christopher Hinton, the top engineer. Hinton often preached how safe British reactors were and this paragraph from Jay could have come straight
A Westinghouse engineer put out a book way back in 1955 on controlling reactors. My copy was a an ex-library book from the Cranfield College of Aeronautics and I was excited to open it up. Unfortunately it turned out to be too technical for my use. But an interesting introductory
To answer the question, I had to look up the definition of “auxiliary power requirements” in in a 1958 trade journal article titled “A Thermodynamic Comparison,” written by an engineer from a consulting firm. A glance at the diagram shows that this is just the percentage of a reactor power
English engineer Harold Tongue was post-war Chief Engineer at Harwell, the bastion of visionary scientists. His job can’t have been easy, especially as the more natural home of budding nuclear engineers, Risley, was often squabbling with Harwell. Here we find Tongue being stubbornly conservative on February 2, 1953, when writing
In November 1954, Ralph Lapp, a former Manhattan Project nuclear physicist, now a journalist, penned an article titled “Civil defense faces new perils.” The article was informative for me but peripheral to my book, but I think it’s worth noting here its effect. The American public, let alone the rest
By 1955, Admiral Hyman Rickover had achieved the kind of fame only a Cold War can generate. The public knew him as the genius creator of Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine and an unqualified triumph. He was building a reactor to generate electricity. Elected politicians fawned at this feet.