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 requirements) from a fulsome interview by that bellwether magazine, The. . .
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 headed up Westinghouse’s reactor business for years, wrote a book. . .
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 the hope of the atomic age as it had been imagined immediately after Trinity. Tellingly, the magazine chose Trinity as its touchstone, not. . .
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 blog on radioactive waste from a young Finnish scientist, Iida Ruishalme (photo. . .
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 in 1954, and died at age 63 in 1956. He had little direct atomic involvement at. . .
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 addressed the First International Symposium on Nuclear Fuel Elements at Columbia University in New York. He talked. . .
Admiral Hyman Rickover, the dictatorial, talented engineer responsible for America’s nuclear navy, visited England just before the launch of a major reactor. The minutes of the British Atomic Energy Executive record the following minor item that reverberates with subtlety. First, reporting is Leonard Owen, the 2IC of the country’s reactor building organization. I believe he is angling. . .
In his final few years with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, Christopher Hinton, reactor building supremo, an engineer’s engineer, found himself away from his drafting table and either selling reactors or behind a lectern. In late 1955, he logged in his diary: Did a paper for AEA on Graphite supplies & then started trying to get my . . . lecture into shape – it isn’t in a. . .
In late October 1955, Christopher Hinton, Britain’s reactor building engineer, made one of his regular forays from his Risley country headquarters to the big smoke. His three days in London turned out to be routine. On his return journey, he confided to his diary, he ate on the run, “sandwiches by the airport where the wind would do things to a brass monkey.” If only he’d had an earth-shattering. . .
A while back, I wrote about the attention to detail exhibited by American nuclear pioneer Walter Zinn, noting how he complained about stray dogs on the grounds of laboratory. Well, Christopher Hinton, the builder of early British reactors, had a similar bent. Here’s a memo he sent in October 1955: The corridors from 5.10 p.m. onwards are once again crowded with people leaving work before. . .