One issue of relevance when considering the early development of reactors by the Soviet Union is the extent to which it was aided by atomic espionage. The tale of Klaus Fuchs is familiar and he certainly helped Soviet bomb development, but I could find no solid evidence that he assisted
When the co-head of the postwar UK atomic effort, Christopher Hinton, died in 1983, aged 82, one of his eulogies came from an unusual source. Margaret Gowing, the official historian of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (with various names throughout its history), penned a remarkable 23-page eulogy. She was
One can never get enough snapshots of Enrico Fermi, the 1942 “developer” of the first reactor and, some would say, the last great combined theoretical and experimental physicist. Listen to Stuart McLain, Oak Ridge physicist, from his charming autobiography Me!: Or Don’t Do It My Way (provided with great generosity
I’m not sure what kinds of airplanes flew from Washington, D.C. to Florida in 1957 but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have been quiet and comfortable. I enjoyed noticing how hard one of the reactor developers, Walter Zinn, worked and traveled after he left government employment to run his own
The British archival goldmine of Christopher Hinton’s diaries (not all of which can be viewed) offers a look at some of the quirks of that mercurial, impressive man. On January 1 each year he would grab the newspaper (not sure which one but probably The Times) and check the British
The day before Christmas in 1956, Nazir Ahmad, head of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission met with England’s John Cockcroft (I’m not sure where, either in London or Harwell). Cockcroft was famously internationalist and forever battling isolationist Christopher Hinton, but even Cockcroft had to tread warily in this meeting, for
The oddities one stumbles upon … in January 1957 the trade journal Nucleonics trumpeted in a two-page article that “World opinion places U.S. in nuclear lead.” This was a period when a real sense of competition existed between U.S.A., U.S.S.R., and U.K. in the field of power reactors, even though
Canada’s W. Bennett Lewis (Ben), a physicist who bestrode the first thirty years of CANDU development, typified the early reactor pioneers by being extremely capable. Listen to this extract from a eulogy by his colleagues: An incident that occurred during this period illustrates Lewis’s manner of working. For technical reasons
Archival research coughs up the names of vital workers who are not famous or senior or significant. Administrators, assistants, secretaries… You grow familiar with those names and sometimes you wish you could feature them in a history. But no, functionaries miss out. Walter Zinn established the Argonne laboratory during the
Early British thinking about nuclear waste was dominated by the liquid that came out the other end of plutonium reprocessing plants, firstly at the military reservation at Windscale and then, in the mid-1950s, in remote north Scotland where a pilot breeder reactor was being built with a view to reprocessing