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Paper quotations, real quotations

By Kevin McCoy
Admiral Hyman Rickover is remembered for many things. Among them is his dim view of "paper reactors", that is, nuclear reactors that exist only on paper. Over at Wikiquote, there is a reasonably long quotation from The Admiral that details how paper reactors differ from real reactors. It is said to be taken from the Journal of Reactor Science and Engineering, June 1953. I have seen the same quotation elsewhere, with the same source cited.

It'’s always good form in the nuclear industry to cite sources, but they have to be the right ones. In this case, I'm not convinced that the source is correct. I have spent a couple of hours with the online catalogs of several research libraries, including the libraries of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the John Crerar Library at the University of Chicago, and the Library of Congress. I always come up with the same result: there is no listing for the Journal of Reactor Science and Engineering, and the journals with similar names do not seem to go that far back in time.

I have one other reason to think that The Admiral'’s discussion of paper reactors and real reactors is from a different source, but it is a very tenuous reason. During a chance conversation, someone told me that he thought the quotation was from Rickover'’s testimony to a Congressional committee that wanted to know why his projects were overrun. The last part of the quotation would be appropriate for such an occasion: "Yet it is incumbent on those in high places to make wise decisions and it is reasonable and important that the public be correctly informed. It is consequently incumbent on all of us to state the facts as forthrightly as possible."

Do any of our readers have memories long enough to identify the real source of this quotation?

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