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. . .
It amazes me how much progress India made in the first dozen postwar years toward nuclear capability, from a base that was essentially zero. The top atomic scientist, Homi Bhabha, was a key reason, and part of his success was his longstanding connections with scientists in the advanced nuclear nations. I always knew he was friendly with John Cockcroft, head of Britain’s Harwell, but I. . .
Over the late 1940s and well into the 1950s, the United Kingdom’s nuclear power program depended so much on two individuals, scientist John Cockcroft and engineer Christopher Hinton. Their interactions, antagonistic at times, shaped policy and actions. They were contrasting characters and I’ve written and blogged about both at length, but I remain fascinated by peripheral material. . .
I’ve been absent here for over a month. I’m sure you’ll forgive me when you hear that, after all these years, I spent that time reaching the point of a working book manuscript. I’ve had drafts of all fifteen chapters for a couple of years but those drafts retained pockets of narrative and stylistic weakness. What I had was not quite a “manuscript,” a document I. . .
The August 1953 issue of the Nucleonics trade journal contained this morsel: The Norwegian-Dutch Establishment for Nuclear Energy Research will be the host at a three-day conference on heavy-water reactors to be held August 11-13, 1953, at Kjeller, Norway. Visitors from 19 countries will attend the six sessions of the conference.Nucleonics. 1953. “Conference on reactors to be held in Norway.”. . .
From the time Admiral Hyman Rickover was granted the project of building America’s first civilian-only nuclear power plant, Shippingport, naysayers abounded. Rickover was a man who cultivated enemies. Shippingport would be regarded as the first PWR, pressurized-water reactor. Researching Rickover’s life and achievements yielded many intriguing bits and pieces, positive and negative. . .
Hyman Rickover is the implicit (and often explicit) father of nuclear energy, having proved the dominant light-water reactor design, firstly in submarines, and then at the Shippingport power plant. He reigned over the military nuclear submarine field for decades, but his impact on civilian reactors was fleeting. Why? Because he was abhorrent to the private sector. In late 1957, just as he was. . .
A couple of months after Windscale Pile 1, a plutonium producing military reactor in England, burst into flames, the powers to be needed to decide what to do with the identical Pile 2. Here we find an engineer at the Windscale factory pointing out a problem with restarting the shutdown pile: In July, 1955, improved health physics surveys at Windscale showed an increasing particulate deposition in. . .
The American Assembly was a thinktank set up by President Eisenhower in 1950. Part of Columbia University, it staged a few “nuclear” events in the mid 50s. In October 1957, John Cockcroft came from England and delivered an address to one such conference. He called it “Nuclear Power in Britain” and it was his usual mixture of candidness, slipperiness, and factuality. What. . .