The contribution of nuclear energy to technological progress

The two decades spanning the mid 50's and mid 70's were a period of great expansion for the nuclear industry and for the nuclear research and development effort. A large production capacity was installed in North America, Europe and Japan, a stream of nuclear engineers emerged from the universities and ambitious R and D programmes were launched not only to support the present generation of nuclear reactors, but also to develop future generations of nuclear technology. In fact, the development of advanced nuclear reactors and of their fuel cycle was vigorously pursued in almost all industrialised countries. This was in recognition of the fact that uranium resources were limited, hence they had be rationally utilized, and that sooner or later nuclear energy would have to be used for non-electrical applications (e.g. process heat, metallurgical processes, production of synthetic fuels) in order to save oil and gas currently used for these applications. (orig./GL)