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Nuclear Power History
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23.01.2022 An enjoyable research moment is when historical actors, who you thought were apart, intersect. Albert Wattenberg was a physicist who helped out during the Manhattan Project but then mostly went into academia postwar. Harold Lichtenberger was a key lieutenant of Walter Zinn in designing and building key prototype reactors after the war. I hadn't really been aware that they had a time together until the Chicago archives delivered an interview of Wattenberg (as part of an Argonne history project) in 1992. [ 152 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com//wattenberg-and-lichtenbe/
22.01.2022 Tuesday's New York Times contains a William J. Broad article, "New video shows largest hydrogen bomb ever exploded," explaining that Russia's Rosatom has released a previously secret video of exactly that. In October 1961 the Soviet Union set off Tsar Bombya in remote Novaya Zemlya, an explosion almost unthinkably stupendous at 50 megatons, over 3,000 Hiroshima bombs' worth, over three times as large as the largest U.S. [ 146 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com///flashback-of-armageddon/
21.01.2022 In 1957 Latin American nuclear scientists came to a bonding and education conference at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island near New York. Not much from that conference seems to have survived, at least outside American archives, but Nucleonics, the industry's trade journal, reported on a speech by Alvin Weinberg, Oak Ridge's supremo. Weinberg had a searching mind, fine narrative skills, and exuberant presentation tactics, so his speeches often resonate down the decades.... https://nuclearpowerhistory.com//the-inertia-theory-of-te/
21.01.2022 If you visit both Saint Petersburg (which was called Leningrad for nearly three quarters of a century, before the collapse of the Soviet Union) and Moscow, their differences and rivalry are readily apparent. The "father of the Soviet bomb" and also the launcher of its early power reactor efforts, Igor Kurchatov, began his career at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, which was the place to be for the first two Soviet decades. [ 189 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com//saint-petersburgs-absenc/
20.01.2022 Enrico Fermi "invented" (although that's the wrong term, discovered might be better, but that's not quite right either) reactors by starting up a tiny "pile" in Chicago in 1942. He died in 1954 (aged only 53) and was experimenting with neutrons (the initiators of nuclear fission) from the early 1930s, so in a sense his involvement in the history of reactors was a quarter-century long. [ 231 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com//penny-for-an-english-err/
19.01.2022 Gaining a level of understanding of a historical personage's motivations is tough for me. I'm tempted to acquire every available biography and pore over them, but that's an impractical strategy, so I make do with a few books or articles or whatever. A key founder of Israel and its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, is fascinating. Here's what one historian says about him, and you can see why it's a compelling image when you look at Ben-Gurion's portrait: [ 102 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com/2020/07/23/imagining-hair/
15.01.2022 In writing up Japan's early nuclear power history, I've needed to sum up the nation's World War II efforts to manufacture a nuclear weapon (the main aspirants of course being U.S.A., Germany, and U.S.S.R.). It turns out Japan got almost nowhere towards a nuke, and what it did during the war turned out to have almost no relevance to its slowly emergent post-war interest in nuclear energy. [ 279 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com//japan-in-wwii-an-obscure/
15.01.2022 Christopher Hinton was the engineering overlord of Britain's huge world-leading push into power reactors from the early 1950s. He was a towering personality. Somehow he managed to combine blistering honesty (he battled bureaucrats all his life) with an anxious need to preserve a hallowed reputation. A number of years ago, I came across a classic invited speech he made in 1954, in which he described the very first Windscale reactors, designed not to produce electricity but to produce plutonium for the nation's atomic bomb breakout.... https://nuclearpowerhistory.com/2021/03/reactor-be-simple/
14.01.2022 A fascinating power reactor I’ve delved deeply into is the Shippingport Atomic Power Station built by Admiral Hyman Rickover. (Why was an electricity-producing plant erected by a sailor? It’s a long story.) A second-tier utility, Duquesne Light Company, partly funded the construction and then operated it to add electricity to its grid. In 1959, with no other substantive reactor intended solely for electricity production in existence around the globe, Shippingport is a big deal, so both the Admiral and Duquesne maximise its impact and their own public relations. [ 148 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com//how-long-should-reactor-/
12.01.2022 Still trying to understand David Ben-Gurion's, Israel's first prime minister. I thought I knew enough but I don't, so I'm working through two biographies. One is, of course, Israeli historian/journalist Tom Segev's masterful book from a couple of years ago (see my review of it here, as a book rather than as a reference source). "He saw science as the pursuit of the truth," Segev writes, and quotes a general: [ 146 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com//a-leader-who-believed-in/
11.01.2022 News broadcasts should be ignored by historians, at least when they think of themselves as historians, because the news froths with such exuberance that it's mostly wrong. So when I read a few days ago about a forest fire near the Chernobyl sarcophagus, I glanced at the report (it was mostly benign, yes a fire had started but it was out or nearly out, and no, there was no cause for concern) and kept writing about 1955. [ 261 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com//history-means-ignoring-t/
10.01.2022 I've been quiet lately on this blog. Why? Because I've been wrestling with all the various inventive reactor design strands over the two-plus decades from the first reactor in 1942, and during that time it was never clear how much should live onward in my book and how much I should spit out here. But now I'm gaining clarity (and let me tell you, reactor design is one interesting field bewilderingly complex but fascinating) and can return to telling you all the bits and pieces that tickle my fancy.... https://nuclearpowerhistory.com/2021/03/gale-young/
08.01.2022 I'm telling the tale of nuclear energy, not nuclear war, but in writing up the early history of power reactors, the German and Japanese stories need to (in my opinion) briefly refer to their World War II nuclear experiences vis a vis the successful Manhattan Project. In other words, when it came time for the Japanese and Germans to consider nuclear electricity, what was their background, their atomic expertise? [ 410 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com//03/26/did-japan-test-a-n/
08.01.2022 You'd think writing history would be easy. This fact, that event, another quote, an easy conclusion Not so. I recently read Jill Lepore's "These Truths: A History of the United States." Regardless of what I think of the overall arc of her narrative, I found this quote to be true: No one can know a nation that far back, from its infancy, with or without baby teeth kept in a jar. [ 72 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com//jill-lepore-on-writing-h/
07.01.2022 Ancillary reading Number Gazillion ... I came across Super Bomb: Organizational Conflict and the Development of the Hydrogen Bomb by accident but knew immediately I needed to read it. The decision by President Truman in January 1950 to develop an American thermonuclear H-bomb has only a glancing impact in my book, but I'd previously read plenty about that intriguing landmark policy step.... https://nuclearpowerhistory.com/2021/01/h/
06.01.2022 This jumble of book offcuts has been silent lately. I’m in Darwin, working on the reactor design ferment in the 50s, and it’s not a field that has attracted much attention, so nearly everything I have goes in the book rather than this blog. But here’s a thought: one of the pleasures of history reading is discovering fine writers waxing on about my topic. [ 172 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com///the-fine-writers-i-read/
06.01.2022 The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists can always be relied upon to explore unfolding events. On August 21, Cheryl Rofer reported (in an article titled "Radiation detections in northern Europe: what we do and don’t know") on three minor, puzzling radiation releases detected over the last three years, the latest in mid June, all of them probably (but not definitively) located in Russia. [ 126 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com/2020/08/russian-secrecy/
06.01.2022 It's fun to catch a glimpse of times and individuals' attitudes from archival research. Many of the world's reactors descend from initial work done at the Argonne Laboratory over the late 1940s and 1950s (and onwards). An enormously talented group of scientists and engineers found their way there. During the summer of 1951, Winston Manning, head of the Chemistry Division, complained to pioneer Walter Zinn about Zinn's imposed travel expenses regime. [ 244 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com/2020/07/21/travel-expenses/
06.01.2022 It's January 1956. American physicist Walter Zinn is about to leave the laboratory he founded a decade earlier, Argonne, situated on the outskirts of Chicago. Argonne now has 2,314 staff! He pens a formal-sounding memorandum to most of his direct reports, asking them to attend a series of eight 10 AM meetings to be held over three weeks. They're all busy folks.... https://nuclearpowerhistory.com/2021/04/hidden-sadness/
05.01.2022 Researching Argonne National Laboratory, from which sprang most of the key reactor designs after WWII and into the early 1950s, the following 1992 interview with a Manhattan Project physicist, Albert Wattenberg, piqued my interest: Some people in the U.S. Army wanted to set the National Laboratory up at Baraboo, Wisconsin, because the property was available. Fermi said that he wouldn’t go there, if they wanted him. [ 290 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com//05/31/coincidences-amuse/
03.01.2022 For some reason, I've struggled to understand the genesis of nuclear power in Japan. The standard narrative is that the country was and is short of internal fuel sources, so it gravitated naturally towards the atom, and there is good logic in that picture. But the situation was more nuanced and fluid. One aspect was simply that the country was occupied by the United States for over half a decade and then, coincidentally, came into the modern world with a rush due to a nearby war. [ 258 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com/2020/09/occupation-of-japan/
01.01.2022 I limited my archival work to two forays of a fortnight each in the United Kingdom and three U.S. trips, ranging from two to three weeks. The National Archives in College Park, Maryland were the mainstay but I also went to Chicago's branch of the National Archives, and I visited the Library of Congress in Washington a couple of times. I blitzed my visits, trying to extract as much archival material, in the form of PDFs derived from photographs, as was humanly possible in the times available. [ 492 more words ] https://nuclearpowerhistory.com/2020/11/joys-and-mires/
