The Canadian Nuclear Society web pages include several articles on Canadian nuclear history. A recent addition is the entire proceedings of "50 Years of Nuclear Fission in Review (1989 CNS Conference Special Symposium)", which includes papers from Les Cook, Bertrand Goldschmidt, Syvia Fedoruk, Geoff Hanna, John Foster, and Alvin Weinberg, plus comments from Ara Mooradian and Robert Bothwell. This special symposium can be found at www.cns-snc.ca, then click on "Nuclear History" found on the side bar.
Here's an interesting comment from John Foster's paper:
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In the Joule Memorial Lecture of 1951 Sir John Cockcroft, after explaining that the gas-cooled graphite reactor technology was manageable, said: "we do not expect to produce a cheaper source of power than that derived from coal - it is likely, in fact, to be somewhat more expensive. What we are aiming at is to increase the total power available". He concluded by saying: "The essential thing is now to get on and build some power reactors".
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Hmmm. This is different from the "too cheap to meter" comment attributed to Levi Strauss.
It's also interesting to read Alvin Weinberg's surprise that light water reactors have
been so widely implemented:
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Of the world's 500-odd commercial reactors, about 85% are moderated and cooled by light water. As one who was involved in the original decision to power NAUTILUS with a light water reactor, I have never outgrown my astonishment that LWR became the dominant reactor. After all, light water was chosen originally for the submarine because such reactors are compact, and at least in principle, relatively simple. They were not chosen because light water recommended itself as the best choice for generating electricity cheaply. To achieve compactness, we had to use highly enriched uranium, and at the time enriched uranium was very rare and expensive. Moreover, to retain the simplicity of its core design, the original NAUTILUS prototype simply burned U-235, without generating any new fissile material. Given our impression at the time that enriched uranium was very scarce, we could not visualize a light water reactor ever producing electricity at a competitive cost.
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cheerio
Morgan