Another weird and wonderful slice of life from Alexander Borovoi, describing his witnessing of the attempt of a Soviet robot to examine the deep, highly radioactive innards of the wreck of Reactor No. 4. (One of the frustrating aspects of this book is the lack of specific details such as, in this case, how big the robot was. The image below is apparently from a Chernobyl robot museum but I have. . .
I’ve only recently stumbled across a Russian book written in 1996 but not translated (at least in easily available form) until 2017. A Moscow engineer at the famous Kurchatov Institute, Alexander Borovoi began commuting to Chernobyl soon after the 1986 calamity, part of the huge team struggling to contain the aftermath. My heart leapt when I bought it on Kindle but it turns out much of it. . .
Historian Peter Kuznick, in a 2011 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article, dug up a fact new to me: Murray and Rep. Sidney Yates (Democrat of Illinois) suggested locating the first electricity-producing nuclear power plant in Hiroshima. In early 1955, Yates introduced legislation to build a 60,000-kilowatt generating plant there that would ‘make the atom an instrument for kilowatts rather than. . .
Arzamas-16 was the Soviet Union’s hidden, ultra top secret nuclear weapons laboratory, modelled on America’s Los Alamos. Nuclear physicist Veniamin Tsukerman worked there for nearly half a century, and he and his wife wrote a memoir in 1984 that was translated and published in the West in 1999. Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet bomb and its peacetime reactors, was extraordinary. . .
I’ve written quite a few times in this blog about the unique character of Admiral Hyman Rickover. Amazingly effective, he could not be said to be a nice person and nearly everyone not under his thumb by virtue of service in the U.S. Navy feared and loathed him. I have so much evidence for this situation that some of it won’t find its way into the book. Take, for example, this short. . .
The second head of Britain’s reactor production organization, Risley, was Len Owen, who had been the valued but often argumentative deputy to Christopher Hinton. Hinton exited the field in August 1957 and that month Owen chaired what was called the Production Executive Committee, a large meeting that regularly went over the nuts and bolts of ongoing work. My attention was caught by the. . .
The launch of the Calder Hall nuclear power station on October 17, 1956, is a big, big deal in the history I’m telling. It was modest in size (60 MWe, what venture capitalists are now spruiking as Small Modular Reactors), it was suboptimal because it was partly designed to produce military plutonium (which never, in the event, proved necessary), but it was a huge deal. The Queen, two years. . .
I’m two years behind on this but preeminent historian Richard Rhodes has lodged his papers with the University of Kansas. What a bounty (at least as far as I can judge without traveling to the university and going through the papers)! There are 145 boxes of material, including a hundred interview audio tapes. For anyone interested in atomic/nuclear issues, Richard Rhodes wrote THE core. . .
At the Institution of Mechanical Engineering, overlooking leafy St James’s Park in London, you can get a look at one of the most extraordinary records in nuclear power’s history, namely the diaries of Christopher Hinton, overlord of the first British reactors and the nation’s nuclear arms materials factories. Not all the years are available but what is open to the public is. . .
Anyone considering nuclear reactors from outside the scientific or engineering professions can pretend, after reading and reading and reading, that he or she “understands” how they work. She can absorb all the technicalities of neutron speed, fuel, moderator, and coolant, and imagine that’s all that’s that is needed. But of course that’s naive. Huge complexity lies. . .