PLENTIFUL ENERGY

We will trace a little of the history of nuclear development, in particular for
electricity production. These were the ―civilian nuclear‖ programs that were
undertaken around the world following the proof of the chain reaction and the
eventual drama of the explosions of the two atomic bombs that ended WWII. We
want the reader to experience a little of what the civilian nuclear enterprise was like
in the early years and what research in nuclear at Argonne was like and how it
changed in almost every decade. What kind of people were at Argonne, and how
did they arrive there? The scientists had different backgrounds but all had pretty
much the same education and a similar outlook in technological matters too.
But how was business conducted? Remember, the whole field of nuclear energy
was new. Everyone felt the newness of it; there was a huge amount that was still
unknown. The first nuclear reactor in the world had gone critical barely twenty
years before Till joined the laboratory in the spring of 1963. A few nuclear
engineering schools, the source of much of the laboratory staff later, had begun at a
few major universities, but they were not yet a major source of laboratory staff. The
scientists at Argonne tended to be young, with no particular specialized nuclear
engineering training when they came to the laboratory, but they came out of schools
with good scientific and engineering credentials and they learned as they went
along.
In these introductory chapters I (Till) will describe the Argonne of those early
days, and trace a little of my own technical history as a more or less typical
example of the backgrounds of people coming into the laboratory at that time.
Argonne was acknowledged everywhere in the world to be the leader in reactor
development—or again, ―civilian reactor development,‖ as it was called then. I was
familiar with the respect Argonne generated worldwide. Before I came to Argonne
in 1963 I‘d seen it firsthand.
To be part of it, that was the thing. Not everyone has such an opportunity. The
projects, the people, the approximations we made in calculation, the short cuts in
analysis and experiments we used in those early days, are all gone now. Several
years ago Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the ―The Making of
The Atomic Bomb‖ and other distinguished historical books, who at the time had
written a small volume on contemporary nuclear power [4], kindly offered help in a
history ―of the second stage of nuclear reactor development.‖ ―You were,‖ he said,
―at the center of it. People decades from now would see it through your eyes.‖
But I knew a lot had gone on in those years that I knew nothing about at all.
Reactor development had advanced quickly. It was true that I had been very
privileged to be at Argonne through all those years. I saw it as a young man starting
out, wanting to accomplish something, something important for my time. And
through the years as the laboratory changed, and as I became more deeply a part of
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