People imagine that the second half of the twentieth century is easily explored, that everything is on the Internet, maybe even in an LLM. Not so. In America’s National Archives, I came across an almost trivial letter from Walter Zinn, head of Argonne laboratory, to an Atomic Energy Commission official:
I’m being less than precise with the heading of this post for the post features the 1948 U.S. Reactor Safety Commission editing its own words, and I’m skating over the fact that the RSC had no power, was just an advisory commission (but, in my defense, it had enormous cachet
Nuclear reactor licensing is now a mammoth exercise in fulfilling regulations, providing safety information, and negotiating regulator feedback. Back in 1948 there was next to nothing. Walter Zinn was just establishing his new Argonne laboratory at a DuPage site outside Chicago. He had messily wrested control of most nuclear power
You’re a scientist. You’re not an actor or singer. Can you imagine a time when tourists come to gawk at you? Well, British physicist Terence Price recounts his initial days, in the late 1940s, at Harwell in the English countryside: Construction continued apace. Harwell was becoming a showplace for VIPs,
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
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
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.”
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’
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
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