Russian engineer Lev Kochetkov died last year, aged 93. He was around for many of the major Soviet reactors. In 2004, he penned an article for a Western journal and I was impressed by his climaxing words. Genuine emotion can be rare in commercial or industrial circles. This is genuine. The years will pass and the remote light of the small reactor in Obninsk will shine brighter for the people as a. . .

Physicist Myron Katzer was interviewed by journalist Stephanie Cooke. I enjoyed the flavor of what he said about the epochal Geneva conference in August 1955 and its impact on freeing up vital technical reactor information from the confines of the military: The thing that permeated everything in those days, of course, was classification. The real crucial step to make the separation between. . .

I enjoyed this aside about how Hyman Rickover, naval submarine tyrant, discovered the non-military world can be more complex: The building of Shippingport also introduced Rickover and American industry to each other. Submarine work, up until Shippingport, had been virtually handcraft. Rickover, like the manager of a small machine shop, was able to keep an eye on just about everything that was. . .

Churning through tediously written archival material leaves one open to joy when one reads vigorous, lovely prose, such as this one by a historian of space travel: Sputnik’s success unleashed an unprecedented orgy of self-laceration and hysteria in the American press, not only because it was so manifestly a technological triumph but because, quite literally overhead, it appeared to leave the. . .

The Windscale accident at the tail end of 1957, mostly forgotten now, occurred in a military reactor but had implications for Britain’s upcoming generation of gas cooled power reactors. I chuckled when I read this turn of phrase from John Cockcroft, writing to the chairman of one of a few inquiries into the whole affair. What Cockcroft is referring to here is how to find out if a metal can. . .

It’s tempting to think reactors, massive creatures as they are, are roughly the same size when comparing one design to another. I mean, a reactor is a machine enclosing the magic of fission, right? And fission doesn’t vary between one design and another, right? That isn’t correct, though, as this 1957 public speech by England’s John Cockcroft (the prestigious Boyle. . .

By 1957, there were four brand new reactor manufacturing consortia in the United Kingdom (with one more to come by the next year). They were all using the unique British gas cooled reactor design, albeit with competitive variations between firms. Their home market was guaranteed by the near monopoly of the state electricity utility. But overseas. they competed. And their only competitor then was. . .

One of the most prominent “characters” in my book is Walter Zinn, reactor designer extraordinaire. He played a role in inventing most of the designs that would go forward. But he himself vacillated on the “best” design. He often spoke up in favor of American light water reactors, probably because they were, by 1957, leading the world and he was nothing if not a patriot. . .

Some of the early power reactor pioneers have some form of biography to memorialize them, others do not. “Ben” (W. B.) Lewis, the Englishman who took over as the second head of Canada’s Chalk River in 1946 and then loomed large over Canadian reactors for decades, fascinates because of a fulsome bio. Apparently the daughter of another British-Canadian physicist, Ruth Fawcett was. . .

Fortune smiled upon me the day I discovered I could peruse the diaries of Christopher Hinton, one of the two core drivers of British nuclear energy in the 40s through the 50s. I think I spent a fortnight at the evocatively named address of One Birdcage Walk overlooking the very London vista of St. James Park. The Institution of Mechanical Engineering feels like an ancient order of professionals. . .