Even a history requires characters, people you write up in a way that hopefully brings them to life. To spend time with a character, I think the author must remain intrinsically interested in him or her. Plenty of French scientists and physicists were involved in the early history of that nation’s reactors but my interest was piqued early by a chemist, Bertrand Goldschmidt. Not only did he leave. . .
Sometimes the unlikeliest of sources provides clarity. Silverstein’s book is entertaining but rather off topic for me, except take a look at this: Manhattan Project scientists discovered that some neutrons move at about seventeen million miles per hour, one fortieth of the speed of light. If they are “moderated” to about five thousand miles per hour, they have a better chance of being. . .
During my weeks in the American and British archives, the only archives I ended up having time to explore, I concentrated on bringing home as much primary source material as I could. Sometimes the import of what I found was crystal clear, at other times not so much, so I rushed. Mostly I wielded a Canon point-&-shoot, holding the camera and pressing the button with one hand, while keeping the. . .
Reactors bristle with subatomic complexity. Especially in the early days, devilishly complex reactor physics calculations had to be undertaken because the underlying physical phenomena are so difficult to model. As a former actuary, I knew something about mathematics, but I struggled, and still struggle, with nuclear physics. Witness this page from a wonderful, but tough, basic text, E. E. . .
Are nuclear bombs linked to reactors? An ancient question. One aspect of this is covered in a very low-key speech given by Nobel laureate Sir John Cockcroft in 1948: Nor have I spoken about the dark side of the picture – the Atomic Bomb. Workers in atomic energy are indeed always aware of this potential danger of their work. They feel, however, that the problems cannot be solved by a retreat into. . .
One of the more analyzed and described nuclear accidents was that of Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number 1 (SL-1) at the very beginning of 1961. The reactor was an army one, so it’s not terribly relevant to me. SL-1 was a strange concept from the start, a self-contained building, 14 meters high and 11 meters in diameter, meant to house a handful of soldiers in remote snowbound areas. Power. . .
I’ve spent some time trying to understand Nikita Khrushchev’s role, during his 1953-1964 reign as the head of the Soviet Union, in the history of nuclear electricity. Armando Iannucci’s black-as-pitch satire, The Death of Stalin, messes with chronology to depict Khrushchev’s triumph over Lavrenti Beria after Josef Stalin’s 1953 death. As I’ve noted before. . .
In 1957, in the very early days of power reactors, Christopher Hinton, head of reactor building in England, visited Sweden. On his return, he wrote to Frank Farmer, the UK expert on reactor safety. Sweden was planning to build a small reactor, of the sort then being built in Canada, to provide community heating by warming up water piped into a town. “It follows,” wrote Hinton. . .
I was intrigued to find that as early as May 1956, the threat of an airplane crashing into a power reactor, with its load of radioactive fission products, was considered. In fact a British politician asked the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority about this risk. An engineer drafted a response that summed up: In general terms, we think that any such incident is unlikely except by the remotest. . .
A now-forgotten reactor design path was the bright idea of General Electric in the late 1940s to build what they called an “intermediate breeder,” cooled by liquid sodium. This is not the time or place to explore the intermediate breeder concept but suffice to say that it didn’t really work, so GE modified what they had to attempt a submarine reactor, at a time when there were. . .