Canada Enters the Nuclear Age: A Technical History of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited as Seen from Its Research Laboratories

A splendid work, about splendid work

Atomic Energy of Canada Limited was never especially large, but always punched well above its weight as a scientific & industrial research & development organization, supplying for many years much of the world's medical isotopes, making many important discoveries in basic physics, & developing a quite successful power-reactor system. To some extent, this can be attributed to the almost monomaniacal drive & vision of Dr Wilfrid Bennett Lewis, but his story is told elsewhere.
While Dr Lewis does make appearances, this book is the story of everybody else, & its sections are written by scientists & engineers who had a direct hand in, & often responsibility for, the efforts they describe. It is mostly very clear & straightforward in style, with especially technical material confined to text boxes, & personal reminiscences to footnotes. As an illustration of the latter, we learn that, in the course of one of the interminable hearings on nuclear waste disposal, an antinuclear "intervenor" (engaging in a favoured distraction tactic) demanded of one witness how long he expected civilization to last. The Commission Counsel was heard to grumble, "not as long as this Commission".
It is greatly to be regretted that, thanks in no small part to less-than-provident Governments, many of the most advanced & potentially useful ideas & techniques conceived at AECL have never fully come into use, & the organization itself has been essentially whittled away to nothing, a process to be seen at the conclusion of virtually every section of this book. Canada & the world are greatly losers thereby. But you will not feel yourself a loser if you buy a copy of this excellent work. The only quibble I could have with it is that it could have been printed on glossy paper, for clearer reproduction of the intriguing photographs & figures which occasionally appear.