Sounds Like A Nice Guy. Not!
- Lucian@going2paris.net
- Jan 12, 2023
- 1 min read
Hidden Hills
January 12, 2023
Lewis Strauss was the person who said nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter." He also lead the campaign to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance in 1954.
In fairness, Oppenheimer did retard the research effort into developing the hydrogen bomb after WWII, which is one reason why the Soviets developed one slightly sooner than we did in the early '50s.
Strauss was a businessman, not a scientist or engineer. It's curious they put him in charge of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Or maybe not. For most of the history of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the commissioners were predominately scientists or engineers, with backgrounds in government, academia, the Navy, and occasionally industry. However, the recent trend is to award congressional staffers with the well-compensated commissioner jobs. Today, four out of the five sitting commissioners (including the chair) have no technical degree, and four out of the five sitting commissioners (including the chair) are former congressional staffers. It's an unfortunately symptom of our increasingly politicized government that political bloodline matters so much more than education, experience, and demonstrated competence, even in …