Last week I had an opportunity to travel to the San Francisco Bay Area and to give a “TechTalk” at Google. I chose to expand on some remarks that I had made earlier in the year at the ThEC2011 conference in New York about why the thorium molten-salt reactor wasn’t developed. I had done quite […]
Not far west from the ruined community of Cefn Croes lies the Snowdonia Mountains of Wales, the site of one of the United Kingdom’s most beautiful National Parks. It was to Snowdonia in 1971 that a young Amory Lovins came at the behest of David Brower. Young Lovins, a three-time college dropout with an unearned […]
(guest post by Charles Barton) Both Eugene Wigner and Enrico Fermi were brilliant scientists. Both made enormous contributions to the theoretical and practical development of atomic energy. Their educational background was different, and for this reason their thinking about long-range reactor design diverged. Fermi was a classic physicist. Fermi thought of reactors first in terms […]
(Guest post by Charles Barton) Shortly before Alvin Weinberg’s 80th birthday, Bill Cabbage and Carolyn Krause, journalists associated with ORNL, interviewed him. During the interview Weinberg was asked to comment on Milton Shaw. Weinberg responded, “Milton Shaw had a singleness of purpose. In many ways I admired him, and in many ways he drove me […]
(guest post by Charles Barton) Eugene Wigner spent a brief period as Research Director of what was then called the Clinton Laboratories. Oak Ride was in 1943 a town that did not exist, so the Laboratory could not be named for it. Instead the assigned name that of Clinton, the old East Tennessee town that […]
(guest post by Charles Barton) The history of the nuclear reactor usually begins with the first successful operation of Enrico Fermi’s Stagg Field reactor on December 2, 1942. In fact, scientists working at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, England built the first successful reactor in 1940. British scientists mixed 112 liters of heavy water with […]
In 1957 Alvin Weinberg presented a paper whose ostensive lead author, Raymond Clare Briant had been dead for three years. This is a procedure is science to memorialize a scientist who had made a significant contribution to a research project but who had died before the contribution could be recorded in a scientific paper. In […]