Making the invisible engineer visible: DuPont and the recognition of nuclear expertise (original) (raw)

60 Years in Motion: Short History of Nuclear Engineering Division

Journal of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science, 2016

This paper presents a brief history of the ASME nuclear engineering division (NED) over the past 60 years. The technical interest of the Division naturally mirrored the main stages in nuclear-technology development and growth of the industry. This is reflected in how the NED evolved the technical content of its major international conferences, the role of ASME standards, and the value of international cooperation. The International Conference on Nuclear Engineering (ICONE) series of conferences is covered as it occupies a special place in the ASME and NED history. The paper covers the birth and growth of the Division, its leadership, publications, and its flagship student program. It concludes with activities the NED is working on for the distant future.

The Goldilocks profession: defining the nuclear engineer (conference presentation)

2013 International Congress for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (ICHSTM 2013), Manchester, UK. Symposium S015: Novel Expertise and Emerging Specialists, 2012

Between the 1940s and 90s, successive generations of nuclear specialists found themselves defined by conflicts. Their new expertise drew on both high physics and engineering heuristics. Their evolving jobs were defined alternately by the corporate industrial cultures of chemistry and of electrical engineering. And, despite the exuberance of the atomic age, their professional status and collective authority vacillated. Veiled by security, their new knowledge was guarded in national laboratories. Unlike their predecessors, the disciplinary borders, occupational roles and public status of nuclear engineers were defined largely by the State. As power generation developed as the principal application, nuclear engineers populated more stable job categories as designers and operators of reactors. But as ill-defined and often faceless experts, these practitioners’ characteristics became subsumed by those of corporate sponsors. In latter decades, these expert practitioners were delineated more often by accidents than by achievements. This paper examines factors shaping technical identity and argues that, as members of a perpetually ‘in-between’ or ‘Goldilocks’ profession, nuclear engineers had remarkably limited influence in defining their own identity. Based on archival and oral history research in the UK, USA and Canada and comparisons with earlier national studies, the history of their emergence can be characterised as transnational and yet largely transcending politics at the national scale.

Implanting a Discipline: The Academic Trajectory of Nuclear Engineering in the USA and UK

Minerva, 2009

The nuclear engineer emerged as a new form of recognised technical professional between 1940 and the early 1960s as nuclear fission, the chain reaction and their applications were explored. The institutionalization of nuclear engineering channelled into new national laboratories and corporate design offices during the decade after the war, and hurried into academic venues thereafter proved unusually dependent on government definition and support. This paper contrasts the distinct histories of the new discipline in the USA and UK (and, more briefly, Canada). In the segregated and influential environments of institutional laboratories and factories, historical actors such as physicist Walter Zinn in the USA and industrial chemist Christopher Hinton in the UK proved influential in shaping the roles and perceptions of nuclear specialists. More broadly, I argue that the State-managed implantation of the new subject within further and higher education curricula was shaped strongly by distinct political and economic contexts in which secrecy, postwar prestige and differing industrial cultures were decisive factors.

Creating a Canadian profession: the nuclear engineer, c. 1940-1968

Canadian Journal of History/Annales Canadiennes , 2009

Canada, as one of the three Allied nations collaborating on atomic energy development during the Second World War, had an early start in applying its new knowledge and defining a new profession. Owing to postwar secrecy and distinct national aims for the field, nuclear engineering was shaped uniquely by the Canadian context. Alone among the postwar powers, Canadian exploration of atomic energy eschewed military applications; the occupation emerged within a governmental monopoly; the intellectual content of the discipline was influenced by its early practitioners, administrators, scarce resources, and university niches; and a self-recognized profession coalesced later than did its American and British counterparts. This paper argues that the history of the emergence of Canadian nuclear engineers exemplifies unusually strong shaping of technical expertise by political and cultural context.

Segregated specialists and nuclear culture

Nuclear Ethnographies, 2026

Communities of nuclear workers have evolved in distinctive contexts. During the Manhattan Project the UK, USA and Canada collectively developed the first reactors, isotope separation plants and atomic bombs and, in the process, nurtured distinct cadres of specialist workers. Their later workplaces were often inherited from wartime facilities, or built anew at isolated locations. For a decade, nuclear specialists were segregated and cossetted to gestate practical expertise. At Oak Ridge Tennessee, for example, the informal ‘Clinch College of Nuclear Knowledge’ aimed to industrialise the use of radioactive materials. ‘We were like children in a toy factory’, said its Director: ‘everyone could play the game of designing new nuclear power piles’. His counterpart at Chalk River, Ontario headed a project ‘completely Canadian in every respect’, while the head of the British project chose the remote Dounreay site in northern Scotland because of design uncertainties in the experimental breeder reactor. With the decline of secrecy during the mid-1950s, the hidden specialists lauded as ‘atomic scientists’ gradually became visible as new breeds of engineers, technologists and technicians responsible for nuclear reactors and power plants. Mutated by their different political contexts, occupational categories, labour affiliations, professional representations and popular depictions, their activities were disputed by distinct audiences. This chapter examines the changing identities of nuclear specialists and the significance of their secure sites. Shaped successively by Cold War secrecy, commercial competition and terrorist threats, nuclear energy remained out of site for wider publics and most nuclear specialists alike. The distinctive episodes reveal the changing working experiences of technical workers in late-twentieth and early twenty-first century environments.

Security and the shaping of identity for nuclear specialists

History and Technology, 2011

Atomic energy developed from 1940 as a subject shrouded in secrecy. Identified successively as a crucial element in military strategy, national status and export aspirations, the research and development of atomic piles (nuclear chain-reactors) were nurtured at isolated installations. Like monastic orders, new national laboratories managed their specialist workers in occupational environments that were simultaneously cosseted and constrained, defining regional variants of a new state-managed discipline: reactor technology. This paper discusses the significance of security in defining the new subject in the USA, UK and Canada – wartime allies with similar political traditions but distinct trajectories in this field during the Cold War. The intellectual borders and content of the subject developed differently in each country, shaped under the umbrella of secrecy by disparate clusters of expertise, industrial traditions, and national goals. The nascent cadre was contained until the mid 1950s by classified publications and state-sponsored specialist courses. The early context of high security filtered its members and capped enduringly both their professional aspirations and public engagement.

The First Nuclear Industry: Radioisotopes, State and Society

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2017

This report has been conceived as a complement to the short national reports of the HONEST project. These reports deal with the history of nuclear infrastructures in different European countries, focusing on the social tensions that emerged around the setting up and the operation of nuclear reactors for the production of electricity. Nuclear technology was part of a larger network of military origin, which also included a civil branch devoted to the production and distribution of radioisotopes for research, medical and industrial uses. Radioisotopes, as well as military uses of nuclear energy, crucially shaped the social responses to nuclear technology. In fact, the only non-military application of nuclear reactors between their creation (Fermi's Chicago pile, 1942) and the first commercial nuclear power reactor (Shippingport, 1957) was the production of radioisotopes. As the only real civil product of reactors, radioisotopes moulded early images of the nuclear, and helped to counteract militaryrelated images, becoming essential resources for legitimising the nuclear sector.

Learning by Doing: The First Spanish Nuclear Plant

Business History Review

In the nuclear sector, turnkey projects can be considered an investment in obtaining information through “learning by doing” to capture rents from the next generation of reactors. As the first U.S. turnkey export project, the first Spanish nuclear power plant served that purpose and paved the way for the subsequent growth of the nuclear sector, for both Spanish and U.S. firms. Making use of archival material, we analyze the networks created by the government, experts, and business leaders, which sought to obtain, accumulate, and learn from the scarce and conflicting information about atomic technology that was available at the time. We also discern how firms on both sides of the Atlantic acquired and perfected the specific capabilities required to build a commercial nuclear reactor.

Containing the nuclear past The politics of history and heritage at the Hanford Plutonium Works

Journal of Organizational Change Management, 2002

This paper examines the production of a particular nuclear-organizational history to illuminate the rhetorical and political practices by which stakeholders engage that history as an opportunity to perform preferred ideological narratives. Analysis utilizes data collected from the authors' reflective participation in this process, and focuses on the tension between nuclearhistorical and-heritage discourses. We use the lens of critical public nuclear history studies to show how nuclear-organizational history contributes to broader controversy over the commemoration of nuclear weapons production in post-Cold War US culture.