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
The debates over nuclear waste tend to recur. In May 1956, Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, took the visiting head of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, Edwin Plowden, on a tour of the Pennsylvania construction site of the Shippingport reactor (a year and a half from
From the National Archives in Chicago, I plucked a minor, minor memo from Walter Zinn to managers at his new Argonne laboratory. In a sense the memo says little but asides such as this one are useful because they signal the attitudes then prevalent. It comforts me that Zinn, such
You might have noticed how often Christopher Hinton, the engineer who could be called the “father of British nuclear energy,” recurs in this Nuclear Power History blog. Why? Because he is just so interesting as a human being. A domineering boss, he could also be disarmingly idealistic. In the Kew
In 1957 an engineer with Phillips Petroleum, which was then managing the National Reactor Testing Station in remote Idaho, published an article in a trade journal, “Special Power Excursion Reactor Test III.” All of the countries who have embarked on major nuclear power programs have set up laboratories and testing
The safety of nuclear power plants remains a fraught societal issue. The history of this aspect of nuclear reactors is, I’ve found, difficult to conceptualize. For example, here are two academics (political scientists, maybe) writing in 1986: In 1947 the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) established a Reactor Safeguard Committee (RSC)
As a non-nuclear-specialist, trying to recreate or even imagine the history of reactors always slams against the technical aspects of this ferociously technical technology. As a layperson, I would have imagined that by 1957, one and a half decades into the technology’s history, everything would have been known about the