It’s fun to catch a glimpse of times and individuals’ attitudes from archival research. Many of the world’s reactors descend from initial work done at the Argonne Laboratory over the late 1940s and 1950s (and onwards). An enormously talented group of scientists and engineers found their way there. During the
An enjoyable research moment is when historical actors, who you thought were apart, intersect. Albert Wattenberg was a physicist who helped out during the Manhattan Project but then mostly went into academia postwar. Harold Lichtenberger was a key lieutenant of Walter Zinn in designing and building key prototype reactors after
Enrico Fermi “invented” (although that’s the wrong term, discovered might be better, but that’s not quite right either) reactors by starting up a tiny “pile” in Chicago in 1942. He died in 1954 (aged only 53) and was experimenting with neutrons (the initiators of nuclear fission) from the early 1930s,
Researching Argonne National Laboratory, from which sprang most of the key reactor designs after WWII and into the early 1950s, the following 1992 interview with a Manhattan Project physicist, Albert Wattenberg, piqued my interest: Some people in the U.S. Army wanted to set the National Laboratory up at Baraboo, Wisconsin,
In writing up Japan’s early nuclear power history, I’ve needed to sum up the nation’s World War II efforts to manufacture a nuclear weapon (the main aspirants of course being U.S.A., Germany, and U.S.S.R.). It turns out Japan got almost nowhere towards a nuke, and what it did during the
News broadcasts should be ignored by historians, at least when they think of themselves as historians, because the news froths with such exuberance that it’s mostly wrong. So when I read a few days ago about a forest fire near the Chernobyl sarcophagus, I glanced at the report (it was
I’m telling the tale of nuclear energy, not nuclear war, but in writing up the early history of power reactors, the German and Japanese stories need to (in my opinion) briefly refer to their World War II nuclear experiences vis a vis the successful Manhattan Project. In other words, when
You’d think writing history would be easy. This fact, that event, another quote, an easy conclusion… Not so. I recently read Jill Lepore’s “These Truths: A History of the United States.” Regardless of what I think of the overall arc of her narrative, I found this quote to be true:
A fascinating power reactor I’ve delved deeply into is the Shippingport Atomic Power Station built by Admiral Hyman Rickover. (Why was an electricity-producing plant erected by a sailor? It’s a long story.) A second-tier utility, Duquesne Light Company, partly funded the construction and then operated it to add electricity to
One of the pleasures of researching the early years of nuclear power’s history has been observing the idealism of the pioneers. Not that they express it as such, often you have to read between the lines to realize this is a passion. To put it simply: this new technology was