The #2 postwar British nuclear engineer was Len Owen. I don’t spend much time on him – other characters hold sway – but he was in his own way a colorful personality. Here he is, in 1963, describing his 1946 initiation into the nuclear world: At the start, of the
I’ve grown to admire and, yes, like, Christopher Hinton, the engineer who built Britain’s reactors from 1946 to 1957. No one who met him forgot him. I enjoyed reading the resume Hinton provided a senior civil servant. Here’s an extract summarising his wartime role: In 1941 I was transferred to
Anyone disputing the role of individuals in history needs to take a look at Canada’s early reactor history. I won’t go into the details here (of course I tackle it in the book) but let me quote some recollections of George Laurence, the most senior Canadian physicist at the time.
Walking from Florence to Rome (you can see the Via di Roma sign at the bottom of the photo) over five weeks, what should I bump into when passing through an obscure Umbrian village (I didn’t even record its name) but a direct reference to Enrico Fermi, hero of my
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
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
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
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
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
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