Wherever he went, Hyman Rickover relished using his late-in-life fame to make mischief. Christopher Hinton, informing his boss Plowden, at the tail end of 1954… You will be interested to know that in conversation with Admiral Rickover and his assistant, who visited Risley on 15th December, they gave a vague
Enrico Fermi, designer and builder of the very first reactor, died a dozen years after that event. He entered a Chicago hospital on October 9, 1954, and died at home on November 28. He pursued truth throughout his life, even, it seems from this newspaper report, just before death… A
Our modern LWR reactors descend in direct lineage from Admiral Rickover’s submarine reactors. Few people realize that much of the original engineering and research work sprang from Walter Zinn’s Argonne laboratory. That is no accident. Rickover loathed the scientists and Westinghouse, the industrial powerhouse who took the design to world
The invigorating personal touches one finds in archives. Arthur Compton was pivotal to the Manhattan Project during WWII, leading Met Lab, which developed the first reactors and bomb materiels factories. After the war, he stepped back into academia at Washington University. At the end of 1954 he had just retired
W. H. McCorkle (I just discovered his first name was Willard) crops up a lot in the Argonne files in the early 50s, as a metallurgist who was a director of research. Walter Zinn tended to be blunt with him. I have had reported to me by a reliable source
October 1954. Did a smile flit across his face? Dear Doctor Zinn, Knowing the heavy schedule you have at the Laboratory, I realize the extra demand the speech before the Convention of F.B.I. Agents will make on your time and energy. Cotter, Frank P. 1954. Cotter to Zinn, Oct. 28,
Lewis Strauss looms large over the first decade of postwar reactor history. He was a commissioner under AEC’s first chairman, David Lilienthal, also under the second chairman, Gordon Dean, then got the top job from new president Eisenhower. He attracted strong antipathy. Here is Lilienthal diarising about Strauss at the
One of the more interesting pioneers was Sam Untermyer (Samuel Untermyer, III) who, together with Walter Zinn, invented the Boiling Water Reactor, helped General Electric develop and launch it, and then kind of faded away. I found 62 pages of interview transcripts mysteriously dated August 1965, with no context or
Walter Zinn used language directly, sometime ponderously, but often with flair. Here he is in 1954, writing to a scientist about to come work with Argonne for a month or so. Reading this, I ask myself: who informs Walter what is or isn’t “interesting”? I am delighted to know that
Our modern energy picture shows a strong tilt to a dominant reactor design, the light water reactor. Its history tends to be portrayed as a logical progression centered around Admiral Hyman Rickover, who, so goes the narrative, so resoundingly demonstrated the design’s efficacy with nuclear submarines, that when he built