I enjoyed this aside about how Hyman Rickover, naval submarine tyrant, discovered the non-military world can be more complex: The building of Shippingport also introduced Rickover and American industry to each other. Submarine work, up until Shippingport, had been virtually handcraft. Rickover, like the manager of a small machine shop,
Churning through tediously written archival material leaves one open to joy when one reads vigorous, lovely prose, such as this one by a historian of space travel: Sputnik’s success unleashed an unprecedented orgy of self-laceration and hysteria in the American press, not only because it was so manifestly a technological
The Windscale accident at the tail end of 1957, mostly forgotten now, occurred in a military reactor but had implications for Britain’s upcoming generation of gas cooled power reactors. I chuckled when I read this turn of phrase from John Cockcroft, writing to the chairman of one of a few
It’s tempting to think reactors, massive creatures as they are, are roughly the same size when comparing one design to another. I mean, a reactor is a machine enclosing the magic of fission, right? And fission doesn’t vary between one design and another, right? That isn’t correct, though, as this
By 1957, there were four brand new reactor manufacturing consortia in the United Kingdom (with one more to come by the next year). They were all using the unique British gas cooled reactor design, albeit with competitive variations between firms. Their home market was guaranteed by the near monopoly of
One of the most prominent “characters” in my book is Walter Zinn, reactor designer extraordinaire. He played a role in inventing most of the designs that would go forward. But he himself vacillated on the “best” design. He often spoke up in favor of American light water reactors, probably because
Some of the early power reactor pioneers have some form of biography to memorialize them, others do not. “Ben” (W. B.) Lewis, the Englishman who took over as the second head of Canada’s Chalk River in 1946 and then loomed large over Canadian reactors for decades, fascinates because of a
Fortune smiled upon me the day I discovered I could peruse the diaries of Christopher Hinton, one of the two core drivers of British nuclear energy in the 40s through the 50s. I think I spent a fortnight at the evocatively named address of One Birdcage Walk overlooking the very
It amazes me how much progress India made in the first dozen postwar years toward nuclear capability, from a base that was essentially zero. The top atomic scientist, Homi Bhabha, was a key reason, and part of his success was his longstanding connections with scientists in the advanced nuclear nations.
Over the late 1940s and well into the 1950s, the United Kingdom’s nuclear power program depended so much on two individuals, scientist John Cockcroft and engineer Christopher Hinton. Their interactions, antagonistic at times, shaped policy and actions. They were contrasting characters and I’ve written and blogged about both at length,