Lewis Strauss headed America’s Atomic Energy Commission for three years from 1953 and it is fair to say few have influenced the history of nuclear power as much as he did. Although a complex character, generally the weight of history judges him as a negative force. On January 21, 1954, the First Lady, Mamie Eisenhower, launched the first nuclear submarine (though the reactor isn’t yet on board at. . .
In the August, 1956 issue of Nucleonics, the nuclear power industry’s US trade journal, I found this jotting: On December 7, 1954, Con Edison notified AEC that it was launching talks with various manufacturers in the nucleonics field. From several proposals made to it, the company selected a pressurized-water enriched-uranium thorium-converter reactor. I haven’t teased out this design strand but. . .
It’s February 1954 and English atomic mandarin John Cockcroft is trying to talk his UK Atomic Energy Executive colleagues into more European collaboration: “Plans are now being prepared by several European countries for the construction of new reactors. We are receiving a number of requests and ought now to develop a consistent policy.” Cockcroft’s instinctive and deep desire for nuclear. . .
In early 1952, Argonne’s head, Walter Zinn writes to his key administrative offsider, Joseph Boyce: “This is to place on record your responsibilities in connection with the training of Belgian scientists in unclassified reactor technology.” Boyce swings into action, setting up a full-time training program for five Belgian engineers, four physicists and a chemist (a later trade journal article. . .
Nobel Prize-winning chemist Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium, ascended to the heights of Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1961 and presided for a decade. French chemist Bertrand Goldschmidt was one of the handful of scientists who kick-started France’s slow but accelerating post-World-War-II nuclear mastery. Over the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the two nations were often. . .
One of the pleasures, if that is at all an acceptable term, of following the massive multi-reactor nuclear accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi, was the role played by an enterprising blogger. Will Davis, formerly a US navy reactor operator, kicked off his Atomic Power Review blog in April 2010. The blog is still live though less frequently updated these days. Davis presents and analyses. . .
General Leslie R. Groves, the larger-than-life head of the Manhattan Project in World War II, doesn’t figure much in my book. He built the atom bomb and I’m not writing about the bomb. Inevitably, he crops up during my early story, but by and large I’m glad to leave him alone. (I did enjoy Robert Norris’s wonderful biography, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves. . .
Newspaper headlines and knee-jerk analysis of major historical events make for inaccurate history. Or to put it another way, spending too much time tracking the news is inefficient. Give a major event a year to settle down, or two years, or a decade, or a quarter century, and you have a better chance of ascertaining the “truth.” The 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania was. . .
In March 1954, Oliver Townsend from America’s nascent nuclear energy organization, the Atomic Industrial Forum, wrote to Walter Zinn, head of Argonne National Laboratory, asking him to attend a May meeting. Zinn responded: I do not like to make speeches. My reaction to speech-making is mostly based on the fact that there is hardly ever any new information available, and I am rather weary of. . .
In early 1955, Walter Zinn, head of Argonne National Laboratory, was a key player in the US push into nuclear energy. Engineers were moving into the domain of the physicists but even then, nearly a decade after the end of World War II, much was unclear about the behavior of particles and substances in the midst of fission. Experienced, capable physicists were like gold and Bernard Spinrad. . .