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The spark of the Super: Teller–Ulam and the birth of the H-bomb—rivalry, credit, and legacy at 75 years
In early 1951, Los Alamos scientists Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam devised a breakthrough that would lead to the hydrogen bomb [1]. Their design gave the United States an initial advantage in the Cold War, though comparable progress was soon achieved independently in the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom.
Advanced Reactor Safety (ARS) SPeaker
Dr. Lester Towell is the Director of Operations at ACU’s NEXT Lab.
Dr. Towell earned his bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics from Abilene Christian University in 1990. For the next four years, he served in the US Navy as an instructor at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando, FL where he taught Reactor Principles and Physics. In 1995, Dr. Towell joined the Computer Information Systems department at Howard Payne University and moved to the Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing (NEXT) Lab at ACU in 2020 as the licensing manager for the first university advanced reactor in the country.
Currently, Dr. Towell serves as the Director of Operations for the NEXT Lab at ACU which is designing the world’s first molten salt research reactor. The mission of the ACU NEXT Lab is to provide global solutions to the world’s critical need for energy, water, and medical isotopes by advancing the technology of molten salt reactors while educating future leaders in nuclear science and engineering.
Last modified April 3, 2024, 6:44am PDT
