Tom Steinfort, 60 Minutes reporter, dominated the October 21 show with a segment titled “Going Nuclear: The Champion.” He visits Fukushima and dons protectives to go in as far as the spent fuel pool, full of accident rubble, of the melted-down Number 3 reactor. He visits the Darlington power station
Filmmaker David Schumacher just released a doco on all the work being done on new reactor design, focused, I gather, on the young people involved. This is an enormously important topic for me and one that carries echoes all the way back to the 1940s. The purpose of this post
The New Yorker, one of my favorite magazines, has published several long articles on my subject over the last three quarters of a century. Mostly I’ve found them readable, as ever, but of not much practical use to me. Such is the case with Daniel Lang’s 1959 article “A most
In 1974, around the time the Atomic Energy Commission was disbanded, to be replaced by other bureaucracies, two of its longest standing managers, wrote a quirky summary of their organization. I didn’t find it terribly useful but it has a few pithy lines such as this marvellous one pointing out
When you think of water, do you picture it sizzling through metals. I didn’t. One of my most valuable reference finds, a retrospective by a key nuclear engineer, enlightened me: Strange as it may seem, pure water under high temperature and pressure is a most corrosive liquid, as corrosive as
The International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy held in Geneva in 1955 had a profound effect on technology history. America’s nuclear trade journal Nucleonics reported just after the event. An oddity on its editorial summary of a huge program is this: The U.S. AEC spends about $100/yr/man
The 2017 BBC documentary “Concorde: Designing the Dream” at last reaches Australia, screening on SBS. The only reason I’m drawn to it is that I caught a Concorde flight in the early 90s, but as soon as I begin watching, I realize aspects of it fit into my book. The
In April 1954 the New York Times reported: Prof. Ira M. Freeman, physicist of Rutgers University, thinks he has found the best solution of this “hot” waste problem. He would dump the wastes on Mars, or Venus or some other planet. . . . If there are objections Professor Freeman
One of my most useful references doesn’t sound all that relevant. Gail Marcus’s Nuclear Firsts might seem like a Guinness Book of Records but is chock full of entrancing facts. For example: The first nuclear reactor to operate on a spacecraft was launched on the SNAP-10 satellite developed as part
I came across an obscure 1955 article by two American engineers in a firm long vanished: In solid-fuel reactors, fuel is held in containers, usually called assemblies, and must be removed by a batch method. Ideally, solid-fuel handling equipment would load and unload the reactor without interrupting neutron production. Actually,