Wiener in the 1950s

[Monte Davis]

It would be helpful to know more about your:

"According to records from the former Atomic Energy Commission, Norbert
Wiener had two contracts with the federal government to work on the
development of nuclear power from 1953 through 1957. One of the contracts
was with the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, Washington.  Wiener's
task was to help develop the fast-flux reactor at Hanford designed *solely*
to generate plutonium for nuclear weapons."

It's hard to reconcile with the following, from Steve Heims' "John von
Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life
and Death":

"In the 1950s [Wiener and mathematician Dirk Struik] talked a good deal
about questions of conscience and politics. Wiener was getting offers from
various companies and the Defense Department, and he would seek out Dirk to
discuss them. In the end, of course, he always refused such offers."

Now, the DoD was not (quite) the AEC, and Heims does tend to put Wiener on
a pedestal relative to von Neumann, the Bad Scientist in his diptych, but
he's a competent enough historian of science that unless the contracts were
still classified when he wrote in 1980, I think he'd have heard of them...
and he's honest enough that he'd hardly have ignored them in a book
precisely on the moral and social ends of technology. 

Wiener had zip, zero, *no* expertise in nuclear physics, reactor design or
operations, and was not a hardware type at all, so "to help develop the
reactor" has to be wrong. Conceivably the AEC might have hoped to apply
either his stochastic-process theory (Brownian motion etc) to some kind of
reaction probability, or cybernetics to control of feedback in the
system... but the whole thing seems anomalous. As I say, it would help to
know more details.

A technical nit for Adam: while a fusion reactor wouldn't yield radioactive
isotopes from the fuel, its intense neutron flux -- which is what carries
energy out from the plasma to the heat-exchange system -- *would* gradually
induce radioactivity in the steel and other materials of the containment
structure, magnets, etc. Not nearly as vicious or long-lived as fission
products, but still many, many tons of stuff to be dealt with when the
plant is decommissioned.

-Monte