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.
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,
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
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,
Looking back, it’s tempting to apply today’s cynicism to yesterday’s words, but often the words mean what they say. Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1953 to 1958, was mostly a pernicious influence on the history of reactors, but this August 1955 quote (surplus to my
Unless you’re lucky, it’s almost impossible to get behind the facades erected by most companies. Westinghouse and General Electric dominated global reactor sales over the 1950s to 1970s, and while there is plenty of public material about them, the real skinny is nigh impossible to get. However, John Simpson, who
Historian Dick van Lente managed to track down a nifty paean to the pioneers of nuclear power, a tribute too many for my book. (I found I could get hold of some issues of Life Magazine but not all.) He writes (p. 64): Life on August 8, 1955, reflected on
Watching pro-nuclear and antinuclear polemics play out in the ideas marketplace is very interesting to me. My son alerted me to a Facebook share from a neat blog called The Logic of Science, whose author prefers anonymity, that mostly targets unscientific nonsense. The Logic of Science suggested taking seriously a
Francis Simon, a German physicist and chemist who moved from Germany to England before World War II, became famous for co-inventing the gaseous diffusion method of uranium enrichment, vital for atomic bombs but also later for nuclear power reactors. After the war, he became an Oxford professor, received a knighthood
W. Kenneth Davis headed up the reactor development area of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission over the first four years of the 1950s, then joined Bechtel, a major engineering and construction firm. He proved to be an effective reactor salesman, in his own way. At the start of 1959, he