Those were the interesting days. Another Nucleonics article, in July 1950, says this about the other South American powerhouse: Argentina’s president Juan D. Peron, in a decree published last month, created a national atomic energy commission. The decree places the commission in charge of nuclear research in Argentina, with powers
The October 1951 issue of Nucleonics contained a near-invisible snippet: Brazil has taken steps toward installing a pilot atomic power plant. Announcement of this development was made last month by Alberto da Motta, president of Brazil’s National Research Council and member of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission since 1946.
In Richard J. Samuels’s invaluable 1987 book, The Business of the Japanese State: Energy Markets in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York), he provides a table of the overseas firms that established linkages with Japanese heavy manufacturing companies, beginning in 1955 and 1956. What could be
In writing up the 1952 Canadian NRX nuclear accident, I naturally specify that the out-of-control reactor spikes to a huge power level. I assumed the Canadians somehow measured this spike during the accident. But in another of James Mahaffey’s intriguing footnotes (see my previous post), he clarifies: …analysis of the
James Mahaffey, in Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters from the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima, one of his evocative trio of books published from 2009 to 2017, covers the 1952 Canadian NRX nuclear reactor accident. In a footnote, he raises a question (p. 151): …the superintendent said
One of the features of early British atomic history was an almighty battle between the scientists and the engineers. Mostly they worked well together but John Cockcroft and Christopher Hinton, the mighty titans who presided over a remarkable nuclear expansion, were so different in temperament that their organizations reflected them
In late 1951 Ben Lewis, the core physicist leading Canada’s reactor efforts, proposed the nation build its first power producing prototype. It would take another decade for what would be called NPD (Nuclear Power Demonstration) to start working, but in the meantime, Lewis went calling on his mother country, the
At the end of 1950, Christopher Hinton, the head of UK’s atomic factories, wrote to a Miss Lowrison, who I presume is personal secretary of Lord Portal, Hinton’s overlord in the Ministry of Supply. The very first of the nation’s military plutonium production reactors had just sputtered into life after
A minor but surprisingly crucial U.S.-U.K. scientific interaction in the early history of English reactors was a June 1948 trip to the mother country by Walter Zinn, who ran Argonne. I was amused to discover from this letter, four months earlier, from an English diplomat in Washington to John Cockcroft,
Few scientists in the late 1940s were as powerful as England’s John Cockcroft and few were as mild in manner. Thus the following brief letter to a London public servant, quaint as the language is, shows how tough he could be in protecting Harwell, his creation: You might like to