This show has been flagged as Clean by the host.
--------------------
01 Introduction
This is a follow up to my 8 part series on nuclear power.
In this episode I will answer questions posed by listeners in the comments to the series.
I would like to start by thanking these people for taking the time to submit interesting questions.
--------------------
Costs of Small Versus Large Reactors
02
brian-in-ohio asked two questions
The first was for a cost comparison between large and small reactors.
The second was for nuclear plant safety compared to conventional power plants.
03 Answer
I think that any answer to the second question is going to be perceived by some people as politically controversial, so it's probably not a good topic for HPR to address.
04
The first question though about cost of small versus large reactors is an interesting one, although not one that is easy to give an answer to.
I will restrict the answer to just grid scale electric power production and ignore use cases such as industrial process heat or power for remote mines and communities.
05
This question comes down to economies of scale versus economies of replication.
Economies of scale centre around increased efficiencies of use of materials and labour when making something bigger.
For example, the amount of steel used by a pipe increases linearly with its diameter, but the amount of fluid that it transports increases with the square.
06
Economies of replication come from increasing efficiencies which result from serial production. As you repeat the same design over and over again, you learn how to do things better and make fewer mistakes.
07
The exact same principles apply to shipbuilding.
Indeed, a lot of the inspiration for Small Modular Reactors comes from the shipbuilding industry.
If you build a series of identical ships, then each subsequent ship will cost less and be built faster.
There are of course diminishing returns to this process, so the improvements are less with each additional unit and after a sufficient number of units the cost and time reductions level off.
08
However, this doesn't discount the benefits of economies of scale.
What it does mean is that there are two ways of approaching the problem, and which way works in any given scenario depends on such conditions as
how big the local electricity market is
how fast the demand for electricity is growing,
the ownership and financing structure of the electricity market, and
the geography of the area, which may pose limits on the number of sites.
09
According to the finance people who have crunched the numbers, there are two sizes of reactor which make the most sense in the above context.
These are 300 MW and 1000 MW.
However, take those as very rough numbers rather than immutable laws of nature and other sizes may work as well.
10
The key point is that there are cases to be made for both small and large reactors, with the large reactor being several times the size of the small one.
11
An additional factor is that building only one reactor does not reap the benefits of efficiency of replication.
You need to build a series of them on the same site.
So if you are building a power plant, you don't build a power plant that has just one reactor unless you are in a small market which can only use that much power.
Instead, you should build between 4 and 6 reactors in sequence next to one another.
12
If you are supply a large population with a growing demand for electricity, then 4 or 6 large 1000 MW reactors gains both economies of scale and economies of replication.
If you are supplying a smaller population with slow growth in demand for electricity, then 4 or 6 300 MW reactors at least gets you economies of replication.
13
There is what could be viewed as an interesting example in terms of the above taking place just east of Toronto.
There they are building four 300 MW SMRs on a site next to an existing nuclear power plant.
14
Here are the cost estimates from the Government of Ontario.
All costs are in Canadian dollars.
Unit 1 is $6.1 billion, plus $1.6 billion in costs which are shared by all four unit.s
Unit 2 is $4.9 billion.
Unit 3 is $4.2 billion.
Unit 4 is $4.1 billion.
15
As you can see, building a series of reactors sequentially on the same site results in declining overall costs.
They are very confident in these costs as they used data from a series of major nuclear power plant refurbishment projects in Ontario which have been coming in on time and on budget.
16
Construction began last year and the plant is expected to have a 65 year operating life.
17
However, the province of Ontario also has plans for expansion of electrical generation by about 15,000 MW by 2050 in order to meet net zero targets.
18
Given the heavy concentration of population in the Toronto region,
and the very high cost and difficulty of building long distance transmission lines,
and the limited number of sites which could host new power generation facilities of any sort,
I suspect it is quite likely that subsequent reactors will be large 1,000 MW ones rather than SMRs.
19
The Wesleyville site (which is further east of Toronto) is tentatively scheduled for a 10,000 MW nuclear power plant.
That would seem to make ten 1,000 MW reactors more likely than 34 300 MW reactors.
20
I don't have a comparable set of numbers for building large reactors to give an exact apples to apples comparison of costs.
Different countries use different accounting and financing systems, and finance makes a huge difference to overall costs for nuclear power as operating costs are a relatively small share of the total.
21
Now to look at another side of this equation, the provinces of Saskatchewan and New Brunswick wish to replace their coal fired power plants with nuclear power plants.
The populations of these provinces are too small to absorb a large new power plant into their grids, and studies assuming large reactors have foundered on this issue.
22
New Brunswick already have a nuclear power plant, but it was build in the days when reactors were much smaller.
Both provinces however are very interested in small reactors, even individual ones, in order to replace the coal fired plants that are of similar size.
23
I think this covers the cost versus size issue.
The more I look into it, the more it becomes apparent that there is no simple one size fits all answer but rather there are a series of trade-offs which must be taken in light of local circumstances.
--------------------
MOX Fuel in the USA
24
The next question comes from mnw who asked about the use of MOX fuel in the USA.
25
mnw asked
I am enjoying and look forward to the rest of the series. Do you think the US will ever wake up and start recycling its spent fuel? It seems like such a huge waste just to try and keep a small amount of fuel away from"the bad guys" or whatever they are imagining.
Answer
26
My answer to this is as follows.
I think I've addressed this in the original series, although not directly with respect to the US so I can provide some more detail on that aspect of it.
27
First though I will review what plutonium-uranium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel is.
As mentioned in previous episodes, military grade plutonium is not the same as the plutonium which comes out of commercial power reactors.
Just as military grade uranium requires nearly pure U-235 isotope, military grade plutonium requires nearly pure Pu-239 isotope.
28
What comes out of a commercial power reactor as spent fuel is not usable for weapons purposes as the proportion of Pu-239 is much too low.
However, plutonium recovered from spent fuel can be used as fuel for nuclear reactors in place of uranium 235 when mixed with uranium 238 either left over from enrichment or extracted from spent fuel.
This is what is known as MOX fuel.
29
To look at the US history of this however, here's the sequence of events.
The US banned fuel reprocessing in 1976.
However, this ban was repealed in 1981.
30
In 2005, the US began building a mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel plant at Savannah River in the state of South Carolina.
However, this plant was not intended as a normal commercial operation and it was not intended to recycle commercial nuclear power plant fuel.
It was instead intended to convert surplus military grade plutonium into commercial fuel in order to get rid of it as part of an arms control program.
31
The program was suspended in 2018.
There were apparently many complex political issues involved in these on-again off-again decisions and I won't pretend to have the time or interest to explore all the details nor do I think most listeners would be interested in hearing abou them.
32
As of March 2026, the US are looking at reviving part of the Savannah River plant to produce limited amounts of fuel for testing of advanced reactors.
The issue driving this is the shortage of uranium enriched to just below 20%.
This fuel is used in certain types of small SMR.
33
The main commercial supplier of this material was a plant in Russia, but "certain events in Europe in recent years" shall we say, have resulted in that supply no longer being available to commercial operations in the US.
MOX fuel based on surplus weapons grade plutonium is intended as a short term quick fix for that problem.
34
Another driving force is legal requirements following from domestic commitments for the US government to dispose of certain stockpiles of weapons grade plutonium from certain sites in the US where it is "temporarily" stored, and the solution to that is seen as burning it up in power reactors.
35
So the history is the US banned fuel reprocessing.
Then a few years later they un-banned it.
Then the US government started building a MOX plant which was intended to get rid of surplus weapons grade material by burning it up in power reactors.
Then they decided they didn't want to do that.
Then they decided they may want to make MOX fuel after all to replace supplies of special grades of fuel for experimental or prototype reactors.
36
What is missing from the above history is any actual interest from the US commercial nuclear industry in MOX fuel.
The reason for this is, as mentioned in the previous episodes, uranium is so cheap and abundant that fuel made from fresh uranium is cheaper than MOX fuel.
37
Some countries such as France wish to recycle spent fuel to reduce their dependence upon imports.
Recall that France's drive to build nuclear power plants was in response to the 1970s era energy crisis when oil imports from the Middle East were suddenly cut off.
However, the US are not concerned about this issue and so do not make it national security policy as France did.
38
As a result, US commercial demand is for cheaper fuel made from fresh uranium rather than for MOX fuel.
Until such time as fresh uranium greatly increases in price there is little economic incentive for the use of MOX fuel in the US.
39
However, there is another aspect to this.
If you recall in previous episodes I described molten salt reactors which used dissolved uranium fuel.
These reactors inherently reprocess fuel as part of their normal operation.
They just do it as part of maintaining the molten salt chemistry at the correct values rather than doing it as a separate process.
40
If these types of reactors become widely used then they would be achieving the same thing as creating MOX fuel, but without an explicit separate step.
41
As a final footnote to the above, the US has almost exclusively use enriched uranium light water reactors.
As mentioned in previous episodes, there are ways of recycling spent fuel from light water reactors which do not involve chemically reprocessing it to make MOX fuel.
42
Experiments have been done involving South Korea, China, and Canada which take spent fuel from light water reactors and repackage it to fit it into natural uranium heavy water reactors.
What is used up or "spent" fuel for a light water reactor is high grade fuel to a natural uranium reactor.
However, the US has, for whatever reason, never built commercial natural uranium reactors such as are used in a number of other countries around the world.
43
If they were to do so, then nuclear fuel could be used twice, once in a light water reactor, and again in a natural uranium reactor, all without having to turn it into MOX fuel in a separate reprocessing step.
However, this particular alternative would likely face the same issue in the sense that fresh fuel would still be cheaper than reusing spent fuel.
--------------------
A Variety of Questions from Clinton
44
Next we have a variety of questions from Clinton.
Clinton asked
I would like some commentary in the current situation,
why has hinkley gone off the rails,
the new american approach,
the odd things done after fukushima,
the new radiation rules in the states.
45 Question 1
why has hinkley gone off the rails,
46 Answer
The question refers to cost overruns at the Hinkley Point nuclear power project in the UK.
The UK government looked into this issue in a more general sense in 2025.
They published a report on it titled
Nuclear Regulatory Review 2025
Enabling nuclear delivery through regulatory reform
John Fingleton
There is a link to the report in the show notes.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/692080f75c394e481336ab89/nuclear-regulatory-review-2025.pdf
47
As the report is 162 pages long, I won't try to cover it all in this answer. I will however give a few simple examples.
The report focuses on civilian nuclear power and the defence nuclear industry as well.
However it also draws examples from outside the nuclear industry to show that the problem is not limited to nuclear.
It shows that the same problems exist in the offshore wind industry, and in the HS2 High Speed Rail project.
48
In the view of the authors of the report, the essence of the problem seems to be a lack of any degree of proportionality in terms of mitigating negative effects from any project.
Big nuclear projects make the headlines because they are inherently big projects, but as I have just mentioned, they affect things like wind power development and rail transport as well.
49
I will pick one example from Hinkley Point specifically.
This is "Case Study: Hinkley Point C Fish Protection"
A summary of this is that they spent £700 million of additional money on the cooling water intakes to protect an estimated 0.083 salmon per year, along with 0.028 sea trout, 6 river lamprey, 18 Allis shad, and somewhere between 100 and 528 twaite shad.
The report points out that there are ways to protect far more fish for far less money by spending it in other areas, and gives some examples.
Again, this problem is not limited to nuclear power, and they give similar examples connected with offshore wind development and HS2 High Speed Rail.
50
I would like to emphasize that I am not expressing an opinion on whether or not any of these decisions were good or bad ones or whether the money was well spent.
I am just summarizing the report's explanation of why large projects of all sorts initiated and approved by the UK parliament were not turning out as initially expected.
I will leave it up to people in the UK to decide whether or not they are satisfied with the current situation.
51 Question 2
the new american approach,
52 Answer
The US have apparently announced changes to their regulatory system.
I don't know enough about the subject to really judge the practical effects of regulation within the US.
However, I have read and listened to many interviews of people from both the industry and the regulatory side of things who are from outside the US but are familiar with it.
They generally contrast two different approaches to regulation.
On the one hand there is the US approach, which they see as being more of a box ticking exercise than an in depth safety review.
This makes it very hard to get a design other than a traditional PWR or BWR approved in the US.
53
It has the advantage from the regulator side of things though in that it reduces the amount of work required as it primarily requires just following a set of defined procedures.
These people then contrast that approach with the one used in the UK and in Canada, both of which they see as being very similar to one another.
In those two countries, regulators work with industry to review designs from basic principles rather than just seeing if it meets a pre-defined list of criteria.
This is a results oriented system rather than a process oriented system as used in the US.
54
As a result of this, designers of new nuclear reactors are going to the UK and Canada first to go through preliminary review there, and only going to the US later.
What designers are looking for is feedback on their design as they go along in order to align the design with what safety regulators see as being required from their standpoint.
They want to go into a review process before the design is finalized so they can get guidance on how they should approach things rather than trying to add safety as additional features on top of a finished design.
55
It would take someone with deep familiarity with nuclear regulation systems to understand the practical effects of recent changes in US regulatory systems, but it is quite possible that people within the regulatory structure in the US have been taking the above on board and trying to adapt to current circumstances.
However, I can only speculate on that.
This is about the best answer that I can give.
56 Question 3
the odd things done after fukushima,
57 Answer
This covers a lot of topics, some of which are probably political and so are not suited to HPR.
I will try to list a few events however.
As a brief summary if the Fukushima events go however, a historic scale earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011 caused huge loss of life and widespread damage.
About 20,000 people were killed by the earthquake and tsunami.
Three nuclear reactors based on 1960s era GE BWR designs were seriously damaged by hydrogen explosions caused by loss of power to backup generators when they were flooded by the tsunami.
However, there were no radiation related deaths or cases of radiation sickness.
58
Following events in Japan was a general review of designs around the world, with various improvements made in some areas, particularly backup generators and hydrogen management.
It seems to be conventional wisdom that the Fukushima event caused a number of countries to decide to phase out nuclear power.
59
However, when I tried to make a list of such countries for this episode I found things were not as is often heard.
The countries which decided to get rid of nuclear power had largely started down that road at least a decade before then and generally for reasons unrelated to any specific events outside of their own country.
In other cases they reversed that decision or are in the process of doing so.
Japan itself has restarted many of their nuclear power plants and plant to replace decommissioned nuclear power plants with new ones, although many of the older and smaller ones were considered not economically worth upgrading at this point in their life to restart them.
60
The one possible exception to this may be Taiwan which decided to phase out nuclear power in 2016.
However, I don't know enough about Taiwanese politics to state with any confidence that their decision in 2016 was based on anything related to events in Japan, or whether in fact they were a byproduct of other political changes within Taiwan and the shut down of nuclear plants happened to be carried along with those.
Currently Taiwan get their electricity primarily from natural gas and coal.
61
Meanwhile across mainland Asia from Turkey to China, large numbers of nuclear power plants were built or are under construction.
Taken together on a global scale, did anything really change after Fukushima, or did the countries which had already decided to close down their nuclear power plants simply continue to do so, and those countries who decided they wanted more of them continue to build them?
That's a good question for which I don't think anyone has the perspective to answer at this point.
62
Another side of this which is hard to disentangle from it though is the increased use of natural gas for electric power generation which was happening at around the same time.
Increased use of fracking in a number of countries, plus increased supplies from Russia and LNG from the Middle East and other places resulted in falls in natural gas prices in many places.
Since combined cycle natural gas turbines form the main competitor to nuclear power, anything which improves the economics of natural gas will act to reduce demand for nuclear power.
This makes it hard to decide to what degree the reduction in the number of reactors being built was due to the political effects of the earthquake and tsunami and to what degree it was due to cheaper natural gas through fracking and other means.
I'll leave that question at that.
63 Question 4
the new radiation rules in the states.
64 Answer
I'm not deeply familiar with US radiation rules, but I will attempt to answer the question.
Apparently there are wide variety of different things being addressed, only some of which have any relevance to the nuclear power industry.
One of these is an epidemiological study on the current exposure limits for workers in the nuclear industry.
This study will take place over about 5 years.
In the end it may not result in any changes.
This is for a number of reasons.
65
One is that US exposure thresholds for workers are currently aligned with international standards.
It would be difficult for the US industry to operate on a different basis than the rest of the world when supply chains are global and kit is designed to meet currently recognized standards.
Another is that apparently the nuclear industry are not, so far as I can discern, asking for any changes to limits.
They instead are looking for changes to how some of the details are being applied, such as for example the criteria for deciding when respirators are required in low risk environments.
66
Some point to recent changes in UK regulations as an example of what they are looking for.
I will post a link to the new (November of 2025) UK regulations in the show notes.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-industry-principles-to-guide-the-application-of-as-low-as-reasonably-practicable-alarp-and-best-available-techniques-bat/ways-of-working-principles-to-guide-the-application-of-alarp-and-bat-in-the-nuclear-industry-accessible-webpage
This is about as much detail as I think I can comment on when it comes to this question, as I think it is a subject that requires a fair bit more practical knowledge of than I have in order to give a thorough and balanced answer.
--------------------
67 Question from Antoine
Were/are the designs patented?
Hi, Whiskeyjack.
Nice ep.
You said AGR, based on Magnox, was a nuclear reactor type that did not sell well outside the UK. I then started thinking if it were (is) possible to another countries to develop by themselves based on that project, or if it had (has) a commercial restriction for exploration of the technology.
I have yet to listen to the following episodes (doing little by little) and may learn better on the choices, but I felt free to present the question by now...
Thanks!
68 Answer
This is a very good question because it offers the opportunity to talk about a number of interesting things that haven't been touched on yet.
Let's cover a bit of background first.
69
A patent is a time limited right to exploit a defined bit of valuable technical knowledge.
Patents were involved from the very earliest days of commercial nuclear power, and I will give an example of this later.
A key point to keep in mind though is that the nuclear power field moves very slowly and it takes a long time for new knowledge to make it from the lab to commercial application.
Patents will often expire before they reach the point where they can be used.
70
Contracts on the other hand are legally enforceable agreements between two parties.
A contract may have a time limited life, but that is an arrangement between the parties.
A commercial nuclear power plant is a very large and complex bit of kit and not easily copied in detail.
It can be far more effective to cover designs under contracts and licenses than to rely on patents.
If a country wished to build their own nuclear power plants rather than buying them from someone else, there are a large number of companies who have commercial designs they are willing to license to third parties for them to build themselves.
Indeed a number of these companies base their business around licensing of designs or have other reasons for wishing to do so.
71
From a licensee perspective, it could take decades of work and hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to take a design from first principle to the ready to build state, wheras licensing a design give you a proven design right away.
As mentioned in previous episodes, there many types of reactor in the world.
The selection of what sort of reactor a country decides to buy often depends more on commercial considerations revolving around licensing terms and conditions than it does with respect to any technical considerations.
Here's an example which shows how South Korea decided to license a design, build it for themselves, and then export it to other countries.
72
KunMo Chung - Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, stated in an interview in 2019 that South Korea wanted to standardize on a single reactor technology in the early 1980s.
They had reactors from multiple different vendors, but wanted to license an existing successful design to produce for themselves and for the export market. One of the major factors in deciding to standardize was to allow them to improve operator training by focusing on one design.
Professor Chung stated that one of the key factors in selecting a design from ABB-Combustion Engineering was that he personally knew and had a good relationship with the Chief Technical Officer of ABB-Combustion Engineering going back to a time when Professor Chung had been studying and working in the USA.
73
On their side, ABB-Combustion Engineering were having financial problems and they needed a partner to help further develop their new PWR design. Also they stood to gain revenue from this partnership as well.
Based on this relationship, the two sides came to a business agreement and South Korea began producing reactors based on this design, while also continuing to develop and improve it further.
74
Here's an example of a case where the developers of a promising technology decided that they had more to gain by not patenting their technology.
Instead they decided to freely share their information in order to get other researchers elsewhere to help to advance the technology so that all could benefit from it.
75
In an interview Wacław Gudowski - Prof. Emeritus, Royal Institute of Technology KTH Stockholm
stated that the Soviets and later the Russian were the leaders in lead-bismuth cooled reactors.
These reactors use lead-bismuth liquid metal alloy as a coolant.
In the 1990s the Russian institute working on commercializing this technology were working with Western partners on nuclear technology in general.
They considered patenting this technology, but in the end decided to simply publish it openly.
76
Professor Gudowski had even smuggled $60,000 in cash into Russia to finance the patent application in order to get the Russian institute to publish their technology, but the money was not needed.
They based this decision on the judgment that it would take 20 years of R&D before the technology was ready for the commercial market, so they wouldn't see a penny on any patents anyway.
They were right on this, as it was another 20 years of R&D in Europe, Russia, China, and Korea before lead-bismuth technology was ready for commercial use.
77
It had already seen use in submarine reactors, but the commercial market demanded a more thoroughly developed technology to satisfy commercial needs.
By deciding to not patent the technology, the original developers gained from shared R&D rather than chasing the illusary gains from patent licenses on technology that was not ready for the commercial market anyway.
78
I said that patents were involved in nuclear technology from the very earliest days, and I will now turn to that story.
When I say the earliest days, I mean probably earlier than you are imaging.
I am talking about before WWII.
79
First though I need to give some background information.
France and Britain were working on nuclear weapons from the very earliest days of WWII.
In Britain's case this was called Tube Alloys.
Canada also was conducting nuclear experiments, including building an "atomic pile", but it's not clear if this had any clear practical goals or was done to understand the physics better.
80
If you read the Wikipedia version of history, it states that Tube Alloys was merged into the Manhattan Project.
However, participants have stated in interviews that this was not the case, and the Quebec Agreement which supposedly merged them makes no such mention of any merger of the projects, just the setting up of a board to coordinate efforts between the three countries, that is the US, UK, and Canada.
In fact the two projects didn't get along that well, and as we shall see below, a big part of that was disputes over patents.
###
81
The following is based on a paper written by Bertrand Goldschmidt, a French nuclear scientist.
Two of his colleagues, Hans Halban and Lew Kowarski played a critical role in early nuclear research.
Halban in particular was one of the greatest scientific names in nuclear fission.
In March of 1939 Halban conducted an experiment showing that neutrons were emitted by the fissioning of uranium.
82
In April Joliot, Halban, Kowarski and Perrin had a pretty good idea of how to use nuclear fission to produce energy and to make an explosive device and decided to file patents on their invention. Each of the four would receive a 5% share of any benefits and the other 80% would go to the research instittute they worked at in Paris.
I will now quote from Goldschmidt's paper.
83
The first two patents concerned energy production and were entitled "Device for energy production" and "Method for stabilizing a device for energy production." They roughly defined the principles of the main components of our present power reactors: moderator in heterogeneous or homogeneous arrangements, cooling fluid, control rods, protection shield. The third patent called "Method for perfecting explosive charges" was less brilliant from a foresight point of view though it proposed valid solutions for the trigger, the tamper, and the rapid obtainment of the critical assembly of a possible explosive device. Finally, nearly a year later, after Alfred Nier's experimental confirmation in March 1940 of Niels Bohr's theoretical prediction that uranium 235, the rare isotope of the mixture in natural uranium, was responsible for fission by slow neutrons, the French took out an additional patent on the advantage of using enriched uranium for the chain reaction.
End of quote.
84
In May of 1940, the CNRS, the French research institute in Paris, negotiated an agreement with Belgian mining company Union Miniere, who were the world's biggest producer of uranium, at the time a byproduct of radium mining, about a partnership for the world wide exploitation of these patents. However the agreement was not finalized due to the ongoing events in the war.
At the beginning of the war, the French government had approved the development of an energy generator - or a nuclear reactor as we would say today, with the intention of creating an engine for submarines.
85
With the fall of France, Halban and Kowarski travelled to the UK with their supply of heavy water where they were received by their UK counterparts, James Chadwick and John Cockroft. The British were already working on an atomic bomb.
In the UK the two conducted an experiment showing that it was possible to create nuclear energy using natural uranium and heavy water.
In 1941 the British nuclear project was reorganized and given the name Tube Alloys. In 1942 it was decided to move the work on a plutonium bomb to Canada, and Canada would pay for the project. A lab was set up in Montreal and Halban was put in charge of the project.
86
Halban had negotiated this arrangement by offering to arrange to have the French patents for world wide rights outside of France and the French empire transferred to the UK. In return the French team were to be given a key role in the British nuclear project.
The author of the paper I am referencing, Bertrand Goldschmidt, was a section leader in Montreal and a colleague of Halban from France.
The Montreal group cooperated with the American Manhattan Project and the two shared information and exchanged visits.
87
However, relations between the two began to break down, with a major cause of this being the Americans being unhappy about the French patents and Halban's arrangement to give the British world wide rights to them. The postwar commercial potential for nuclear power was seen to be huge, and this was a major bone of contention. The extensive participation of ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) engineers in the Tube Alloys project was also objectionable to the Americans. Presumably this had something to do with potential for ICI being involved in future commercialization of the technology. The American Dupont company, a commercial rival of ICI, was also heavily involved in the American atomic bomb project. The eventual result of this was that the US cut off cooperation with the UK-Canada nuclear project.
88
Finally Halban was forced out of the project at the insistence of the Americans, and he was replaced by John Cockroft who moved to Montreal to take charge of the project. The Americans now restore limited cooperation.
Kowarski was put in charge of building a heavy water moderated natural uranium reactor at a new site north of Ottawa at Chalk River. This reactor was turned on on the 5th of September, 1945, three days after Japan's surrender.
So in what was supposedly a titanic war for survival, key allies were falling out with respect to their ultimate weapon over issues of patents covering post war commercialization.
89
With the end of the war, the nuclear weapons project in Montreal and Chalk River was wound up.
Halban, Kowarski, and Goldschmidt returned to France and Cockroft to the UK where they all played senior roles in the nuclear programs of their respective countries.
John Cockroft played an important role in the development of the Magnox reactors which Antoine asked about.
The Chalk River Site remains as Canada's main nuclear research centre to this day, and Canada was to continue development of heavy water moderated natural uranium reactors.
90
The first commercial nuclear power plant was commissioned in the UK in 1956, roughly 17 years after the original French nuclear patents.
At that time, UK patents had a term of 16 years.
While I am not a patent lawyer, it would appear that these patents would likely have expired before nuclear power was ever commercialized.
So to answer the question about patents, the first patents on nuclear energy date to before WWII started, and the very first two were about nuclear power plants and it was only the third one which covered nuclear weapons.
--------------------
91 Thanks to other listeners.
A number of other listeners made comments saying they were really enjoying the series. I would like to thank the following for their kind words of encouragement. They helped make the work required to do this worthwhile.
They are
brian-in-ohio
mnw
Clinton
Antoine
bjb
Kevin O'Brien
Trey
L'andrew
Archer72
Jim DeVore
If you have commented but I have forgotten your name, or if the show was recorded before I got a chance to read your comment, I would still like to thank you.
92 Conclusion
I would like to thank all the listeners for their kind comments and insightful questions.
I hope that I have answered these questions to the satisfaction of everyone.
I look forward to hearing from all of you in future podcast episodes including those on other topics.
--------------------
Proceedings of the 29th annual conference of the Canadian Nuclear Association and 10th annual conference of the Canadian Nuclear Society. V. 1-3
https://inis.iaea.org/records/m2s41-40917
This has a paper by Bertrand Goldschmidt about the work of the French scientists in Canada.
--------------------
Provide feedback on this episode.
Ireland