April 1955 and the British hear of a radical new reactor design, the Boiling Water Reactor. David Goodlet, an energetic engineer working at Harwell, is heading over the ocean and tells his boss, nuclear czar John Cockcroft, that “boiling reactors are possible but not particularly attractive. . . . The boiling reactor thus appears attractive and simple only to people who have not thought. . .
In August 1953, one of the big hitter U.S. scientists, John West from Argonne, called in on a senior U.K. physicist, John Dunworth. They would meet a number of times over their careers and clearly had the greatest respect for each other. Yet Dunworth, in documenting to file their meeting, could not resist claiming that British reactor safety work was more advanced than the American work: It is. . .
Nobody debates or even talks about how reactors should be shielded, for the simple reason that through much thinking, research, and experimentation, the topic was mastered by the 1960s. Hyman Rickover, father of the world’s most popular reactor design, was a difficult man (to say the least) but dissimulation of quality information was one of his strengths. One of his faithful lieutenants. . .
Shimon Peres, ex-PM and ex-President of Israel, who died just two years ago, put out fascinating if coy memoirs in 1995. I spotted the following memorable quote: I use the term “engineering” advisedly: there is a difference between the scientist and the engineer, akin perhaps to the difference between a lover and a husband. Surely, since my book often contrasts engineers and scientists, I can use. . .
I don’t know much at all about E. N. Shaw, the author of an obscure 1983 book about an obscure reactor. I liked the insight from this paragraph, showing an example of why advanced reactor development is so arduous: Fuel development is a lengthy process, complicated by the fact that the fuel under test is, as already noted, an integral part of the core. From the definition of the particular. . .
Another of those fascinating interconnections between the reactor pioneers, of little import but fascinating anyway. Samuel Untermyer, a protégé of one of my main characters, reactor pioneer Walter Zinn, left Zinn’s laboratory in the early 50s to join General Electric. Here in 1958, he writes a polite letter to British reactor pioneer John Cockcroft, asking: Our European representative sent. . .
The reactor pioneers visited their overseas contemporaries/competitors often and reading their trip reports offers plenty of interest. At a more general level, one aspect I’ve observed is that if you’re a British physicist visiting U.S. laboratories, your eventual report will imply, if not state, that the British are further advanced. The converse is also true, as I noticed in this. . .
John Dunworth was one of the smart, opinionated physicists collected post-war by John Cockcroft for his Harwell laboratory. Over time Dunworth’s role became that of overall reactor guru. Here I catch him in 1953, eleven pages of him poring over all the technical literature and summing up recent British scientists’ tours of America. I enjoyed his put-down of a General Electric design. . .
In 1956 Kenneth Jay, sort of the inhouse historian of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, wrote a compact book about Calder Hall, the pride and joy of Christopher Hinton, the top engineer. Hinton often preached how safe British reactors were and this paragraph from Jay could have come straight from Hinton’s mouth. It was part propaganda (Hinton used to say the same things about the. . .
A Westinghouse engineer put out a book way back in 1955 on controlling reactors. My copy was a an ex-library book from the Cranfield College of Aeronautics and I was excited to open it up. Unfortunately it turned out to be too technical for my use. But an interesting introductory remark reveals why reactor engineers and scientists take the greatest care when starting up a reactor. Why? Because. . .