The day before Christmas in 1956, Nazir Ahmad, head of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission met with England’s John Cockcroft (I’m not sure where, either in London or Harwell). Cockcroft was famously internationalist and forever battling isolationist Christopher Hinton, but even Cockcroft had to tread warily in this meeting, for how to treat Pakistan viz a viz India was a. . .

The oddities one stumbles upon … in January 1957 the trade journal Nucleonics trumpeted in a two-page article that “World opinion places U.S. in nuclear lead.” This was a period when a real sense of competition existed between U.S.A., U.S.S.R., and U.K. in the field of power reactors, even though it was also a period when next to no power reactors actually pumped out electricity. . .

Canada’s W. Bennett Lewis (Ben), a physicist who bestrode the first thirty years of CANDU development, typified the early reactor pioneers by being extremely capable. Listen to this extract from a eulogy by his colleagues: An incident that occurred during this period illustrates Lewis’s manner of working. For technical reasons the pressure and temperature of the steam in nuclear power. . .

Archival research coughs up the names of vital workers who are not famous or senior or significant. Administrators, assistants, secretaries… You grow familiar with those names and sometimes you wish you could feature them in a history. But no, functionaries miss out. Walter Zinn established the Argonne laboratory during the tail end of World War II. He left his creation in mid-1956. For. . .

Early British thinking about nuclear waste was dominated by the liquid that came out the other end of plutonium reprocessing plants, firstly at the military reservation at Windscale and then, in the mid-1950s, in remote north Scotland where a pilot breeder reactor was being built with a view to reprocessing non-military waste and recycle it, again leading to liquid end-waste. Engineer Christopher. . .

The debates over nuclear waste tend to recur. In May 1956, Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, took the visiting head of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, Edwin Plowden, on a tour of the Pennsylvania construction site of the Shippingport reactor (a year and a half from its startup). They fielded the press and a reporter had the temerity to ask about the waste. The. . .

From the National Archives in Chicago, I plucked a minor, minor memo from Walter Zinn to managers at his new Argonne laboratory. In a sense the memo says little but asides such as this one are useful because they signal the attitudes then prevalent. It comforts me that Zinn, such a relentless pursuer of nuclear energy, was also passionate about day-to-day safety. A recent accident in our. . .

You might have noticed how often Christopher Hinton, the engineer who could be called the “father of British nuclear energy,” recurs in this Nuclear Power History blog. Why? Because he is just so interesting as a human being. A domineering boss, he could also be disarmingly idealistic. In the Kew archives, I stumbled across a couple of pages of a script of a doco he must have made. . .

In 1957 an engineer with Phillips Petroleum, which was then managing the National Reactor Testing Station in remote Idaho, published an article in a trade journal, “Special Power Excursion Reactor Test III.” All of the countries who have embarked on major nuclear power programs have set up laboratories and testing devices, to explore design and safety features of reactors under. . .

The safety of nuclear power plants remains a fraught societal issue. The history of this aspect of nuclear reactors is, I’ve found, difficult to conceptualize. For example, here are two academics (political scientists, maybe) writing in 1986: In 1947 the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) established a Reactor Safeguard Committee (RSC) comprised of leading atomic scientists from outside AEC;. . .