Harold V. Lichtenberger (April 22 1920, Decatur, Illinois - 7 December 1993, West Simsbury, Connecticut) was an American physicist who was most notably involved in the planning of the Chicago Pile-1.
Life
Lichtenberger graduated from Millikin University in Illinois with a Bachelor's degree in 1942. During the construction of the first reactor CP-1, he was part of a suicide mission (Liquid control squad, with Warren Nyer andAlvin C. Graves) as the bottles with cadmium solution neutron absorber would pour through the reactor if the control rods failed.[1]
Lichtenberger designed and tested, with Albert Wattenberg, the first heavy water reactor (Chicago Pile-3) and, led by Walter Zinn, a number of other reactor experiments at Argonne National Laboratory by, among other things, the first breeder reactor EBR-1 and the boiling water reactor BORAX III, the first reactor in 1955 for an entire town (Arco in Indiana with 500 kW) supplied with electric power.[2] He became director of the Idaho Division of the Metallurgical Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, where new reactors were tested.
In 1954, experimental reactors were also at a test site in Idaho, headed by Lichtenberger, and was brought by manipulating the control rods systematically critically and exploded.[3]