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Re: [cdn-nucl-l] More Canadian nuclear history on CNS web site
Thanks for doing this Morgan. Nice quotes
too.
Bill
At 09:47 AM 1/6/2003 -0500, Brown, Morgan wrote:
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:
<BEGIN QUOTE>
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".
<END QUOTE>
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:
<BEGIN QUOTE>
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.
<END QUOTE>
cheerio
Morgan
Bill Garland
http://engphys.mcmaster.ca/faculty_staff/faculty/garland/
[on leave at UOIT, Oshawa, Ontario 905-721-3176 November 2002-April
2003]