In the summer of 1950 President Truman had committed the U.S. to the development of a thermonuclear weapon because the Soviet Union had exploded their first nuclear device the previous summer. Truman wanted a more powerful bomb based on hydrogen fusion. A group of physicists, many of whom had worked on the Manhattan Project, were assembled at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A  group of these physicists often met at the Fuller Lodge for lunch.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering a move to eliminate the “Linear No-Threshold” (LNT) basis of radiation protection that the U.S.

       I have been blogging a lot recently about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. After the end of the Cold War in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was hoped that nuclear disarmament would proceed and humanity could remove the dark cloud of nuclear war for its future. Unfortunately, although nuclear weapons have been reduced by about eighty percent in the U.S.

       It being Labor Day, I thought that I would take this opportunity to talk about labor as it relates to the nuclear industry, including mining, milling, enriching, nuclear fuel manufacture, nuclear plant operation, nuclear weapons production and nuclear waste handling. Most of the media attention on the nuclear labor force is focused on the highly trained nuclear technicians that carry out tasks in the international nuclear industry that require a high level of training and skills.