The August 1953 issue of the Nucleonics trade journal contained this morsel: The Norwegian-Dutch Establishment for Nuclear Energy Research will be the host at a three-day conference on heavy-water reactors to be held August 11-13, 1953, at Kjeller, Norway. Visitors from 19 countries will attend the six sessions of the conference.Nucleonics. 1953. “Conference on reactors to be held in Norway.”. . .
From the time Admiral Hyman Rickover was granted the project of building America’s first civilian-only nuclear power plant, Shippingport, naysayers abounded. Rickover was a man who cultivated enemies. Shippingport would be regarded as the first PWR, pressurized-water reactor. Researching Rickover’s life and achievements yielded many intriguing bits and pieces, positive and negative. . .
Hyman Rickover is the implicit (and often explicit) father of nuclear energy, having proved the dominant light-water reactor design, firstly in submarines, and then at the Shippingport power plant. He reigned over the military nuclear submarine field for decades, but his impact on civilian reactors was fleeting. Why? Because he was abhorrent to the private sector. In late 1957, just as he was. . .
A couple of months after Windscale Pile 1, a plutonium producing military reactor in England, burst into flames, the powers to be needed to decide what to do with the identical Pile 2. Here we find an engineer at the Windscale factory pointing out a problem with restarting the shutdown pile: In July, 1955, improved health physics surveys at Windscale showed an increasing particulate deposition in. . .
The American Assembly was a thinktank set up by President Eisenhower in 1950. Part of Columbia University, it staged a few “nuclear” events in the mid 50s. In October 1957, John Cockcroft came from England and delivered an address to one such conference. He called it “Nuclear Power in Britain” and it was his usual mixture of candidness, slipperiness, and factuality. What. . .
In this blog of fragments and jetsam, quite often I quote Len Owen, the number two engineer of the early British nuclear reactor effort. He is another of those lost souls of history, not quite famous enough to have biographies penned about him. The British archives contain his “project diary” from January 4, 1946 to January 17, 1950 (I have no idea if he kept diaries after 1950). The. . .
In October 1947, David Lilienthal, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, set up an Industrial Advisory Group comprising mainly utility and manufacturing company execs. Lilienthal knew nothing much could happen with nuclear energy (i.e. commercial nuclear-generated electricity) during those early days when all the focus was on Cold War nuclear weapons work, all top secret stuff. He was hoping. . .
Christopher Hinton, head of the British military reactors, sent some kind of a 1952 Christmas letter to the huge Windscale complex. Gethin Davey, the capable physicist/engineer managing that complex, responded (handwritten!) a couple of days before Christmas: Dear Sir Christopher,Thank you for your letter dated 19th Dec., which is most appreciated by all of us at Windscale. The past year has been. . .
In 1963, Len Owen, once #2 under pioneer Christopher Hinton, but now seven years into his latest role of the production/engineering arm of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, addressed the Institution of Civil Engineers in Great George Street, Westminster, not far from Parliament Square. He called his speech “Nuclear engineering in the United Kingdom in the first ten years,”. . .
Say what you like about Western nuclear safety and dose management in the postwar era, there was nothing like the blatant disregard for public protection that the Soviet Union exhibited. Because the communist state was highly effective at secrecy, few realized the discrepancy between West and East in those early years (in fact it took the collapse of the Soviet Union to bring the sordid facts to. . .