Word: aec
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Many Secrets. The gist of the findings was that industry could not help AEC until AEC told industry much more about the atomic energy program. AEC should modify its sweeping code of secrecy, the committee said, since in many cases it was unnecessary and downright harmful to the program. Secrecy was carried so far, the committee implied, that businessmen often did not even know how or where to get the barest information...
...Also, AEC's contracts with industry* were found too vague, as were the lines of responsibility between AEC's scientists, who want to supervise everything, and industry's practical engineers, who are accustomed to autonomy in carrying out specific contracts. After the objective is laid out by AEC, the report held, industry should be permitted to get there by its own methods...
Example: the building of a nuclear reactor (for developing atomic energy for ship propulsion, etc.) at Chicago's Argonne National Laboratory was put off repeatedly while contractors and AEC argued on how the job should be done. Just this week, Westinghouse agreed to do the designing and engineering, but the haggling over terms of construction is still going...
...Many Slide Rules. In addition, AEC was charged with failing to bring certain problems out of the physicist's slide-rule realm into the everyday trial-&-error world of engineers who might solve them and perhaps make good use of the results in other industries. For example, Committee Member Isaac Harter, director of Babcock & Wilcox Ltd., got an idea from an atomic process that helped his company refine its continuous steel casting process...
...other hand, the committee frankly admitted that opportunities for commercial application of atomic energy are distinctly "limited as compared with the opportunities which exist . . . in other fields." Nevertheless, the committee thought industry would discover many "economically rewarding" activities if AEC would open up-and AEC, in turn, should benefit from industry's enormous know...