Dr. Marcus' Room No. 9

9. Milestones and their Meanings
Gail H. Marcus, Consultant, USA

Profile (January 2008)
Dr. Gail H. Marcus is presently an independent consultant on nuclear power technology and policy.
She recently completed a three-year term as Deputy Director-General of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency(NEA) in Paris. In this position, she was responsible for the program of work and budget for the agency.
From 1999 through 2004, Dr. Marcus served as Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Nuclear Energy,Science and Technology. There she provided technical leadership for DOE’s nuclear energy programs
and facilities, including the development of next-generation nuclear power systems. Other responsibilities included production and distribution of isotopes for medical treatment, diagnosis andresearch, and oversight of DOE test and research reactors and related facilities and activities.
From 1998-1999, Dr. Marcus spent a year in Japan as Visiting Professor in the Research Laboratory
for Nuclear Reactors, Tokyo Institute of Technology. She conducted research on comparative nuclear
regulatory policy in Japan and the United States.
Previously, Dr. Marcus had been in the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). She served in a varietyof positions including Deputy Executive Director of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards/Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste; Director of Project Directorate III-3, providing
regulatory oversight of seven nuclear power plants in the Midwest; and Director of the Advanced
Reactors Project Directorate, where she was responsible for technical reviews of advanced reactor
designs.
She also served as technical assistant to Commissioner Kenneth Rogers at the NRC for over four years,
providing advice and recommendations on a broad range of technical and policy issues of interest tothe Commission. From this position she was detailed for five months to Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, where she was NRC’s first assignee to Japan, studying Japan’s
licensing of the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor.
Prior to her service at NRC, Dr. Marcus was Assistant Chief of the Science Policy Research Divisionat the Congressional Research Service (1980-1985). In this position, she was responsible for policy
analysis in support of Congress covering all fields of science and technology, and played a lead rolein policy analysis and development for energy, nuclear power, and risk assessment and management.

Organization:
From 2001-2002, Dr. Marcus served as President of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), an 11,000 member
professional society. She is a Fellow of the ANS and of the American Association for the Advancementof Science (AAAS). She is a former member of the National Research Council Committee on the Future
Needs of Nuclear Engineering Education, and served three terms on the MIT Corporation Visiting
Committee for the Nuclear Engineering Department. She is just completing a term as the elected Chairof the Engineering Section of AAAS.
Publication:
Dr. Marcus has authored numerous technical papers and publications. Her research interests include
nuclear regulatory policy, energy technology and policy, risk assessment and management, international nuclear policy, and advanced nuclear technologies.
Education:Dr. Marcus has an S.B. and S.M. in Physics, and an Sc.D. in Nuclear Engineering from MIT. She is thefirst woman to earn a doctorate in nuclear engineering in the United States.

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Dr. Marcus' Room No. 9I am pleased and proud to report that my firstbook has just been published. It is entitled Nuclear

Firsts: Milestones on the Road to Nuclear Power
Development, and it provides a historical overview
of the technological and other developments
around the world that have led to the nuclear
power program that exists around the world today.

I had several ideas in mind when I started thebook. I wanted to document milestones, but I had
in mind a particular kind of milestone―the first of
every technology or other achievement. I did notwant to cover every nuclear plant built. I did noteven want to cover the first in every country or in
every state of the United States. Those are important in their own spheres, but I wanted
achievements that were global firsts. I did notwant to cover the biggest of each type of reactor, or
the most reactors in a country, state, or site. These
achievements are certainly a kind of milestone, butI felt that they were milestones that could be altered over time―by the next larger reactor, or thenext country, state or site to build more reactors. A
first of a kind, I felt, would stand the test of time.
When I started the book, I truly thought there
would be only a handful of developments to report.
The usual historic references, after all, seem to be:
first, to Chicago Pile Number 1 (CP-1), where Enrico Fermi and his colleagues provided the first
proof of a sustained, man-made fission reaction
under a stadium at the University of Chicago on
December 2, 1942; second, to the lighting of theiconic four light bulbs at the Experimental Breeder
Reactor I (EBR-I) in Idaho on December 20, 1951;
leading, third, to the lighting of the town of Arco,
Idaho by power from the Boiling Water Reactor
Experiment III (BORAX-III) reactor on July 17,1955; and finally (at least in US accounts), to thestartup of the Shippingport Atomic Power Stationin Pennsylvania on December 18, 1957.

2Of course, I knew there were more milestones
than that, and that is why I started to write thebook. I knew from other things I’d read that someof the important milestones took place outside theUnited States, and in fact, that power reactors
began operating in the old Soviet Union and in theUnited Kingdom before the startup of Shippingport.
I wanted to identify when pressurized water reactors had first started operating. I knew there hadbeen reactors developed for space applications, fordesalination, and for other purposes. I believedthat the organizations and activities that sprung
up to support the fledgling nuclear industry madeimportant contributions to nuclear power development and should also be recognized. I wanted toinclude coverage of enrichment and reprocessing,and the use of different types of fuel.
But the more I delved into the history of nuclear
power, the more milestones I found. I kept discovering forgotten, or nearly forgotten, achievements
and events. Experiments from the earliest days on
all the technologies we are now labeling “new” and“advanced”―liquid metal reactors, molten salt reactors, gas-cooled reactors, and more. Many ideas
were tested very early on. Among them was a very,very small (1/3 of a watt!) demonstration of thegeneration of electricity from a reactor that took
place in 1948, several years before the four lightbulbs were lit in Idaho. And, of course, I turned up
a number of developments outside the UnitedStates. I ended up with a list of about 80 milestones for which I provided brief summaries.
I was struck almost equally by what I did not find.
One of the observations of what I did not find isparticularly relevant to a Japanese audience.
There were some countries, Japan among them,that are now major forces in nuclear power technology and operations, but that achieved very few“firsts” based on my definition. I did actually find acouple of true firsts for Japan, and reported themin the book, but I found none at all for China andKorea. It’s possible I missed something here orthere. However, the primary reason that there appear to be so few “firsts” from Asian countries is
simply that Asian countries entered the nuclear
power arena later.
This leads quickly to the conclusion that being
first is not the only measure of success, and certainly not the best measure of success. While being
first often confers some advantages, in the nuclear
field, the opposite seems to be true. As the book
amply demonstrates, the early nuclear experiments were beset with many accidents. The wholeworld learned from those, and many of our current
approaches to nuclear safety have their origins in
the hard lessons learned from the early accidents.
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Dr. Marcus' Room No. 9

Even leaving accidents aside, it is clear that the US
nuclear power program has suffered from the factthat it deployed so many slightly different reactor
designs, and that, in many cases, one utility, oreven one site, built and operated several different
types of reactors. Japan and France had the opportunity to observe the difficulties of that approach and to adopt another path.
Clearly, by almost every measure, the nuclear
programs today in several other countries match orexceed those of the United States and several of theother nuclear “pioneers,” despite the earlier start ofthe pioneers of nuclear power. Therefore, the apparent imbalance in coverage of different countries
in the book is not a reflection of the success of various national nuclear programs, but rather a reflection of the focus of the book on “firsts” thatlargely took place when only a few countries wereactive in the field. One might easily imagine that,
if someone were to write a new book on nuclear
firsts several decades from now, the mix of countries represented will be considerably different
than the mix in my book.
Despite the imbalance, I felt a book that provided
a historical perspective on the technology development would be of general interest among nuclear
professionals. Unlike other historical books, thisbook does not focus much on personalities orbackroom politics. Many of those books have beenwritten, and they are very useful, but they generally have not addressed all the threads of activity
in the early days of nuclear power. Rather, thisbook takes a look at the earliest efforts to develop
the various nuclear technologies―both those that
became the standards in the industry today, andthose that appeared (at the time, at least) to bedead ends.
The second thing I noticed that I sometimes could
not find was all the information I wanted about thehistory of a facility or event. This in fact surprised
me more than the imbalance between countries. I
had set out to assemble a standard set of information on each facility and event I covered―thedate it first started, size, fuel used, etc. I also
wanted to include a photograph of the facility or
event in the book, and I preferred to use a photograph taken about the time the facility started up.
I was amazed that sometimes pieces of what I
wanted were not available. It was difficult to findan exact date of startup. The information on thesize of the reactor and its fuel composition wasambiguous or contradictory (in some cases, because
there were changes throughout the life of theplant). Most surprisingly, in some cases, photographs were difficult to find.

3In thinking about this observation, I realized theproblems I was finding related to some of the work
I had done on knowledge management while I wasat the US Department of Energy and at theOECD/Nuclear Energy Agency. The concern inthese agencies was primarily about the loss of research data with the passage of time. In some cases,
the research data, although old, remained important, either because research facilities had beenclosed and experiments could not easily be repeated, or because of renewed interest in technologies that had been abandoned. The fact that, insome cases, even the most basic information about
the facilities is difficult or impossible to find isgraphic proof that there are basic deficiencies in
how we have documented what has been done in
the past.
Knowledge management is a topic in itself, and I
cannot cover all the many aspects of this importantarea in this essay. Let me simply say that one
would hope that, with all the advances in technologies for storing and sharing data, it will be easierto retain information in the future. However,technology is not everything. Human involvement
is still needed to decide what to store and to assurethat the storage is accomplished, and the evolutionof data storage media will probably necessitatecontinuous efforts in the future to assure that information is transferred to new media as old ones
become obsolete.
Of course, I hope the book is important to people
more for what I did find than for what I didn’t find.
I think in that regard that my most noteworthy
observation is, as I noted earlier, that so many of
the technologies we are now looking at again werereally conceived in the earliest days of nuclear
power development. In trying to look at why sometechnologies advanced and others languished, one
can see that the story gets very complex. Sometimes, one technology advanced over others because of another application. The most notable caseof this is the well-known link of pressurized water
reactors to the development of nuclear power forsubmarines. Sometimes one technology was abandoned because the original application envisioned
was abandoned, as was the case for molten salt
reactors for aircraft propulsion. Sometimes, one
technology was simply a little ahead of or behind
another in its development and there was an urgency to make a decision.
One could argue that some of these decisions
might not have been the best decisions. The bookdoes not try to second-guess history. Rather, I
might observe that some of these decisions are now
effectively being revisited in advanced reactor
R&D programs that are looking at some of theCopyright © JAPAN NUS CO., LTD. All Rights Reserved

Dr. Marcus' Room No. 9abandoned technologies. Thinking again to someone writing another history of nuclear firsts in thefuture, I imagine this could confuse the issue. Is
the real “first” the work done in the 1940s and1950s, or is it the work that will be done in the2010s and 2020s? That will be a problem for someother author to figure out!
More about the book, as well as a link for ordering it, can be found on my personal blog.
October 2010

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