One of the rousing aspects of researching the nuclear power pioneers is discovering how many of them were fascinating, fascinating as professionals and fascinating as people. Christopher Hinton, one of the duo that launched England’s brief supremacy of the global nuclear power sector, intrigues especially. He was a workplace tyrant who was nonetheless passionate about his staff, passionate. . .
The death from acute radioactivity of Canadian physicist Louis Slotin after an accident at Los Alamos on May 21, 1946 is well known and I don’t include it in my book because it has nothing to do with nuclear power as such (other than being a cautionary tale known by everyone in the nuclear power field). Slotin was a plutonium bomb expert bar none and had helped assembly the first nuke at. . .
Christopher Hinton, England’s nuclear engineering pioneer, made only a handful of visits to America. His most controversial was in October 1953, when he delivered what he called “a lecture” to a conference (organized by the influential National Industrial Conference Board) in New York titled “Atomic energy developments in Great Britain.” No doubt it struck the U.S. . .
History humbles. I’m constantly amazed by how little I know about the subject of my book, nuclear power. In taking notes about radioactive waste, I came across the following paragraph from a book on the topic by prolific historian Jacob Hamblin: One of the topics of discussion was the oceanographers’ idea to create a new laboratory under the auspices of the IAEA. This laboratory would study. . .
In the second year of nuclear development in the United Kingdom, in 1947, John Cockcroft ran a “Crazy Committee.” I make mention of this in my book, just a footnote to stress how far-ranging early reactor design thinking stretched. I’m sure someone can do a better job of combing the UK archives about those crazies but I only ended up with a few design minutes. For some reason. . .
Japan purchased one British power reactor, Tokai 1, a gas-cooled, very British design on the large side (160 MWe) for the times. It began operating in 1966. They never bought British again, heading exclusively to American reactors from then on. What I find interesting about this purchase and the subsequent rejection of that design stream, is not how much I know about it (I have quite enough. . .
Two of the greatest contributors to nuclear energy, in different eras, were the Italian genius, Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), and the American chemist, Glenn Seaborg (1912-1999). Fermi designed and built the first reactor, Seaborg discovered plutonium and, more pertinently, chaired the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for a decade from 1961. I enjoyed this 2001 reminisce from Seaborg (in a final memoir. . .
One of the fascinating aspects of writing a nuclear book is that one cannot explore everything. Take, for example, Pugwash, introduced here by historian Toshihiro Higuchi: Another impetus for transnational activism among scientists for a test ban came from an international conference in July 1957 held in Pugwash, a small village in Nova Scotia. Organized as a follow-up to the famed Russell. . .
I’m no expert on how multilateral or United Nations agreements/treaties are typically negotiated. Nor, in researching the genesis of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was I especially focused on the intricacies of the negotiation strategies/tactics. When you know little about a subject, you accept everything you read as “normal.” So it came as a slight surprise to note. . .
French nuclear chemist Bertrand Goldschmidt never got over his bitterness at France’s rejection by the major Western powers after World War II, the nation having to start almost completely afresh as it clawed its way to nuclear energy and, in 1960, nuclear weapons. The term proliferation didn’t really gain currency until the early 1960s, yet here he is, in 1977, scathingly referring. . .