Hyman Rickover was a force of nature, but insisted on "my way of the highway." His obstinacy is the reason we have no inherently safe sodium-cooled reactors such as EBR-II, no CANDU reactors that use natural instead of enriched uranium, no molten salt reactors, no high-temperature gas reactors, no pebble-bed or fluidized-bed reactors, no homogeneous reactors. He pressured Lewis Strauss to accept only the pressurized-water reactors he wanted for submarines, and reluctantly also allowed boiling-water reactors because a few were already in operation at commercial scale. Remember that the first reactor to make electricity was EBR-I, a liquid metal-cooled experiment.
Hyman Rickover was a force of nature, but insisted on "my way of the highway." His obstinacy is the reason we have no inherently safe sodium-cooled reactors such as EBR-II, no CANDU reactors that use natural instead of enriched uranium, no molten salt reactors, no high-temperature gas reactors, no pebble-bed or fluidized-bed reactors, no homogeneous reactors. He pressured Lewis Strauss to accept only the pressurized-water reactors he wanted for submarines, and reluctantly also allowed boiling-water reactors because a few were already in operation at commercial scale. Remember that the first reactor to make electricity was EBR-I, a liquid metal-cooled experiment.