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. . .
Yesterday, buried in book editing while on the road, I acknowledged what I’ve been avoiding: I need to absorb and document Australia’s current nuclear debate. You might view this statement as trivial and unprofessional, and, truth be told, I’m ashamed to admit it. Here’s the essence. The leader of the conservative opposition party here has challenged the governing Labor Party’s climate change. . .
The Soviet Union’s Sputnik rocket, launched in late 1957, impacted mightily on both the Cold War arms race and the efforts to bring in nuclear power. It suddenly and unexpectedly announced to the world that the East, regarded as technologically backward, might well be leading the space race. I love skilful, exuberant prose, and no doubt you do also, so I bring to you a delightful couple of. . .
On August 7, 1957, Christopher Hinton, the leader of the engineering half of the British nuclear power push, wrote to a civil servant: Frankly, I can not see that collaboration with the Australians on H.T.G.C. makes sense. I gather from Stewart that the Australians are saying that because of the limited development of their engineering industry, they do not intend to manufacture atomic energy. . .
After World War II, defeated nation Germany held high hopes for plentiful use of the new means of generating electricity, namely nuclear reactors. There were myriad reasons for this, with political and psychological reasons ranking highly. Not until 1955 was West Germany granted independence of occupation and not until 1960 was national atomic legislation, so the German aspirations unfurled only. . .
In September 1957, Leonard Owen, the new head of the Risley organization that built reactors, enrichment plants, etc., was chairing a meeting of his executive, when he spoke of an upcoming tour of Britain’s nuclear facilities by America’s powerful Joint Committee for Atomic Energy (JCAE), a small group of elected politicians with oversight of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington. . .