20 Classic Atomic Energy Ads
March 7th, 2010
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From a more hopeful time when most saw nuclear energy and nuclear technology as the amazing and hopeful field that it is, these ads ran in magazines in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. They have a great positive and optimistic message combined with some inspiring symbolism and artwork. My favorite are the Union Carbide ads, but others here include ads from Honeywell, General Dynamics, General Atomics, The Railroad Association of America, Inco Nickle, Lockheed, General Electric and others. A few of these ads are not even for companies whose main activity was nuclear related, but noted that they were at least somewhat involved in the nuclear technology world.
I collected these classics from a number of sources. A few came from the excellent Modern Mechanix blog, while others came from Wikimedia, Erik Nitsche’s Flickr account and other websites. Since these images were scanned from original material and posted to begin with, I’m assuming that there’s probably no copyright issue here, either because the original ad owner doesn’t mind them being distributed or because they’re no longer under copyright. In any case, their use for documentary purposes should constitute fair use.
I really love these classics.
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Culture, Good Science, History, Misc, Nuclear, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 7th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Pretty neat. When I was working at Fermilab back in the 70’s, one of the guys had an old AEC sign with the “Atoms for Peace” logo on it.
Probably worth a fortune on eBay these days!
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March 7th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Brings me back – I remember a few of these when they were published.
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March 7th, 2010 at 9:35 pm
Thanks for posting these! I am working on new art images to promote nuclear energy and these vintage ads are very inspiring! On behalf of PopAtomic Studios thanks again!
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March 8th, 2010 at 1:26 am
Suzy Hobbs said:
Hi Suzy. I just glanced at your page. I LOVE what you’re doing and I’d love to offer any help I can in your efforts. It’s great to see that kind of broad based grass roots support.
Can I ask where abouts you are located? I’m just wondering if you’re American or not and if not from where and if so, what area of the country. these kind of efforts are terrific!
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March 8th, 2010 at 4:58 am
In the E=mc^2 poster, the booklet ‘The Atomic Revolution’ has a forward written by Gordon Dean (Chairman, US Atomic Energy Commission, 1950-1953). I have a book by him from 1954 titled ‘Report on the Atom’. It makes interesting reading, though it is a creature of it’s time, of course.
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March 9th, 2010 at 8:16 am
I think the most interesting of these posters are the the ones NOT directly related to nuclear companies. There is one for Nickel and one for railroads, both “riding” the nuclear train. Even though they are not building reactors or anything, they are advertising with the good name of nuclear power.
FAST FORWARD TO THE 2000’s
Car companies are adverstising with wind turbines in the background. Times have changed, I guess, and not for the better. Not only are the “revolutionary, environmentally friendly” new cars they are trying to sell actually the same-old-**** (TM), but they are also advertising with wind power which will never be more than a marginal fraction of the power mix.
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March 9th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Tales of Future Past has some great atomic power related pictures from past:
http://davidszondy.com/future/atomic/atomicpower.htm
BTW, this is great site, if you are interested about retro-futurism.
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March 9th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
For good reason companies do not piggyback on this industry. This was also the age where people had been indoctorinated to believe “nuclear excavation” was the future… we now know that with enough nuclear excavation, and you get a nuclear winter. Not to mention irradiating the area you just excavated.
Now comapnies which deal in nuclear things are banned from even doing business in progressive communities such as San Francisco and whole countries have gone nuclear free (like New Zealand).
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March 9th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Bruce said:
Bruce, you’re an idiot.
Congratulations, I try not to lower myself to ad-hom attacks or name-calling, but you’ve finally irritated me enough to make me do so.
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March 10th, 2010 at 5:31 am
While we’re on the subject of retro… check this out: Popular Science has webified all their issues from the start in 1872 ’til march 2009, including adverts (and ‘boy! was there alot of those… check out the issues around 1945).
http://www.popsci.com/archives
Also browsable at Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wzsEAAAAMBAJ
/Michael
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March 10th, 2010 at 8:05 am
Bruce said:
Who are “we” in this passage? A mental institute?
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March 10th, 2010 at 8:22 am
Obviously, nuclear winter is not a problem with just a few bombs. Otherwise we would already have had it with nuclear testing. Actually it’s questionable wether nuclear winter is even a possibility when all the arsenals of the worlds are used. Volcanoes throw out a lot more dust and it is rich in sulfur which is very good at cooling down the earth. Volcanic winters have been observed, but they were limited to 1-2 years. Nuclear winter is just a possibility, and only if a LOT of bombs are used.
The Russians did quite a few excavation project that were more than tests. Success was mixed, though. Explosions that large are hard to control and they can have unfortunate side effects like shifting rivers or causing landslides. Sometimes significant amounts of radiation escaped. By and large, nuclear excavations can only be done in relatively empty places like Russia because a large area of land needs to be evacuated. Disarmament policy as well as practical considerations killed the project in the end, but I’m sure they still have the plans in some safe in case they need to do some ‘emergency demolition’ on a large scale.
Satan_Klaus
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March 10th, 2010 at 8:51 am
This is somewhat offtopic, but I have a questions for the nuclear engineers on this site:
Lately, a lot of people have been pushing very small nuclear power plants (including, famously, Bill Gates). There are even concept drawings with a tiny reactor buried under a primitive african village. WTF? The last thing these people need is a handful of megawatts of nuclear power. It’s actually one of the few cases where solar is economic right now because it’s grid independent and has no moving parts in need of regular service.
( http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/why.html )
Can someone explain to me what the big benefit will be from having many small nukes around? I mean, sure, they may have some economy of numbers but isn’t it more efficient to build larger plants for industrial nations and just send diesel generators to Afrika and Alaska? Although emission free, nuclear power has not lived up to its 60s promise and is NOT free, and still more expensive than coal. What makes people think that Afrika can afford small nukes when they can’t even afford coal in many places?
I understand that local generation has some advantages like using the excess heat for remote heating or industrial process heat, and of course in case of grid failure. But do these advantages outweight the cost of having a team of highly trained service technicians travel all over the place to look after those things? Because even though they are advertised as ’self contained’ and ‘ no maintenance’, I don’t really buy that no one needs to look after them. As I understand, they WILL have turbines and these WILL need regular service. And what about the IAEA? Will they have to send teams of inspectors to hundreds of remote places?
Electricity is one of the few goods that is perfectly quantifiable, identical in quality no matter where it comes from (given good transformers and stuff), and easily transportable so what real benefit is there to be gained from small local production when there are still so many large, aging coal plants that could be replaced?
Satan_Klaus
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March 10th, 2010 at 9:02 am
Electricity is one of the few goods that is perfectly quantifiable, identical in quality no matter where it comes from
Sorry, but that postulate is wrong.
The quality of electricity is measured in things such as:
- Availability (it’s there when you need it)
- Capacity (it’s there in the amount you need)
- Controllability (it’s there in the exact right amount you want)
- Stability (no over- or under-voltages)
- Noise (lack of over-tones, under-tones, spikes or dips)
And also there are a few secondary points to measure that matters to most people:
- Price
- Ecological impact
- Maintenance requirements
- Grid stability
- Complexity
All of these points vary between different sources of electricity. Yes it is true that once you have established your power source and configured it properly to fit all your requirements, then all electricity is the same. But getting there differs hugely between the sources.
/Michael
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March 10th, 2010 at 9:16 am
Allright, I get it, I oversimplified. But that was not my main point.
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March 10th, 2010 at 9:34 am
Ok, more to the point:
Q: Why make small nukes?
A: Because it increases the diversity of available options for clean energy.
We’re gonna need every bit of clean energy we can get. We need as many options as possible for it so that when a decision maker is about to make a choice – be it for the entire EU/US/China/India, or for a small rural village in Unspecifiedistan – they are less likely to pick a polluting source.
Not granted that for said village a micro-nuke is probably not the first, best choice. But for many others it will be.
Nuclear plants of today have a big downside and that is they are huge, very investment-heavy and takes time to implement. This is a prohibotive factor for many decision makers.
Standardize micro-nukes and churn them out by the dozen, and you get around much of that problem.
/Michael
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March 10th, 2010 at 9:42 am
Satan_Klaus said:
It may come as a surprise that on of the last leftovers from the American Plowshares program (civilian nuclear explosions) are plans to use a nuclear bomb to shut down a massive natural gas eruption (methane volcano scale) should one occur in North America. It would seem that there is a theoretical possibility that a well blowout could get out of hand in this way, and someone decided that there should be a last ditch solution available to bring things under control. I have been told, but have not verified, that this is the only legal situation that a nuclear bomb could be used on Canadian soil.
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March 10th, 2010 at 11:35 am
Satan_Klaus said:
I think you ask a number of sensible questions that would need good answers. Here’s just one point: generating electricity with a diesel generator set takes about 70 gallons per MW-hour; if diesel is $3/gallon, that works out to over 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, for the fuel alone. That’s a very expensive way to make electricity. And if you are a Sudanese farmer making $2/day you won’t be buying / using much electricity.
Nuclear has the advantage in fuel cost (and compared to diesel, nuclear fuel is free). The question is (to summarize many of your points), can nuclear scale down to suit the small capacity grids in developing areas?
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March 10th, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Bruce said:
I’m not sure I’d put it that way. For one thing, nuclear winter is doubtful and certainly would need at least thousands of “nuclear excavations”
The concept of using nuclear bombs to create a mountain pass, harbor, canal etc is a valid one. It does work. The irradiation issue comes down to a number of factors. Nuclear bombs can actually create fairly useful subsidence craters and underground voids while being completely contained. Some of the craters at NTS are now used for waste disposal.
There were experiments with varying success at using very small nuclear explosions to create isotopes or for other purposes (even power generation) by using salt domes or other underground areas to contain material for recovery or to act as thermal mass.
Part of the issue of reducing fallout in an uncontained nuclear explosion has to do with the nature of the explosive and the fission-fusion ratio. In theory, a large H-bomb can be triggered by a relatively small fission primary. The US achieved fusion ratios as high as 85% in test devices. The Soviet Union went much higher. 90% is easily possible, but higher would generally only work in larger designs.
There are obviously some enormous challenges in making something like that work. Part of it is the fact that with such a huge earth-moving explosion it has to be a pretty remote site where there won’t be a lot of damage to any structures or inhabited areas in the region.
The Soviet Union went far further than the US in researching this area. Their program was known as Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy and continued well into the 1980’s.
They did come up with several potential uses for nuclear explosions that were proven to have potential. One was the use of underground nuclear explosions as a means of destroying huge amounts of hazardous chemicals, such as chemical weapons. The extreme heat of the explosion could guarantee complete decomposition of the chemical material.
The most successful use was the use of small nuclear explosions near sites of potential oil or gas deposits as a means of seismic sounding. The US had also demonstrated that nuclear tests provided excellent seismic sounding data. The Soviet tests used a 2.5 kiloton nuclear explosion in an area of hard rock near the area for survey. The single powerful seismic pulse provided unparalleled resolution of sounding data.
They also used a nuclear device to create lake Chagan, which is now low enough in radioactivity not to be much of a concern.
Satan_Klaus said:
I do think that these small reactors have enormous potential. They can be set up quickly and need relatively little maintenance and labor to keep running for extended periods of time. They can be prefabricated and theoretically mass produced.
There are certainly plenty of places that sorely need a reliable, relatively small, economical source of power: The Marshall Islands, Bermuda, Aruba, Barbados, Thull Air Force Base, the remote mining and oil and gas operations in Alaska and northern Canada, South Pole Station, McMurdo Base, the Canary Islands, Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Fiji, various parts of Africa.
It also remains to be seen whether clustering these reactors could be a viable alternative to a conventional nuclear plant with one or two much larger reactors. Conventionally, nuclear plants benefit from fewer, larger reactors – economics of scale. However, that could be challenged if smaller reactors could be prefabricated at a large enough scale. There’s some potential there, but it remains to be proven.
However: I’m a bit skeptical about these. The concept is sound from a scientific standpoint – there’s no technical reason you could not build small modular reactors. The issue I have is the degree to which they’re being sold (or over-sold) by small start-ups and underfunded operations. Designing a reactor is a complex matter. Designing non-conventional reactors like lead cooled fast reactors, gas cooled reactors and so on is even more complex.
I’d really love to see one of these concepts come to the market, but they’re starting to smell more and more like vaporware.
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March 11th, 2010 at 12:31 am
Oh to add one more thing about the small modular nuclear reactors – there is one which I do have confidence will eventually become a reality and be more than vaporware. The B&W mPower reactor, as it seems to have the backing of a solid company and is moving forward.
Unfortunately, it’s the most conventional and the least innovative of all the ones out there. It’s basically just a small PWR with a modular but otherwise conventional design and a core lifespan only slightly longer than most PWR’s.
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March 11th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
@ drbuzz0
I am in Asheville, NC. Thanks so much for your interest and support! I am doing my best to make Nuclear cool!
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March 11th, 2010 at 6:54 pm
Suzy Hobbs said:
Are you pictured on that site? I mean… An attractive young lady arc welding… A woman whose feminine beauty soothes the eye even as her plasma arc burns the retina. A chick so hot she could make me melt faster than she even melts that metal. The girly whimsical femininity of hot pink as applied to the strength and power of a welding mask, retaining a classic beauty that is all the more illuminated by the ionized air.
The smell of perfume mixes with the oder of ozone.
It is a rare occurrence that a situation is electrifying both literally and metaphorically.
There’s just something about arc welding.. It’s so iconic of creation and forging something through human ingenuity and raw energy combined..
And she likes nuclear energy… I don’t even know if that’s better or not. I mean, arc welds and likes nuclear energy? That’s like somehow figuring out a way to play baseball and cards simultaneously and then being dealt a royal flush just as you hit a home-run out of the park…
I could almost pull a Chem Geek Gregor on this one. (if you’ve been reading this site for like two years you would know what that means.)
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March 11th, 2010 at 7:24 pm
I’m sure what Doc means is that he’s delighted with your artistic efforts in service of pro-nuclear advocacy, and would be excited to collaborate with you on any suitable joint project you might be pleased to suggest.
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March 11th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
Jesus Doc, don’t scare her off…;)
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March 11th, 2010 at 9:32 pm
Finrod said:
Yes, exactly
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March 11th, 2010 at 9:41 pm
Art and Science, thats my thing, and arc welding certainly falls int that category! And I would be happy to help out with image development for ‘Depleted Cranium.’
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March 11th, 2010 at 9:55 pm
On a serious note: I want to put a badge for your site up on my sidebar, like Finrod has on the side of his site.
However, the badge as it is is not going to work well because it’s just a wee bit too wide to fit on the sidebar and also, you’ll notice the sidebar background color is green, and I think the badge would look better with a transparent background to overlay on that.
So I’d like your permission to edit the badge slightly. What I want to do is delete the white background and replace it with transparency, then scale the badge to be a bit smaller and finally, I’d like to change the style of the text slightly by making it somewhat larger and adding a stroke effect around it. The reason for this is that the light blue does not stand out well on the green background.
This is what I’d like to put on my sidebar: http://www.depletedcranium.com/popatomicwithgreenbackgroundsample.jpg
The only stylistic change is making the title bold and stroked, because if the original text is used against the green background of the sidebar it doesn’t stand out enough.
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March 11th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Fantastic! You should absolutely post it and thank you for the plug!
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