The Energy Bulletin has published a post titled “Energy resources and our future” – remarks by Admiral Hyman Rickover delivered in 1957. The talk was for delivery at a banquet of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association St. Paul, Minnesota.
According to Energy Bulletin contributor Rick Lakin, it was pulled from archives with the help of an old friend of mine named Ted Rockwell who has written several books about his experiences as the Technical Director at Naval Reactors during the 1950s and 1960s.
It is fascinating to learn just how much of today’s energy supply situation could be predicted with reasonable accuracy based on the information available in 1957 when that information is evaluated honestly by engineers that do not have too much interest in politics or financial gain. It is a useful speech given in highly accessible language that should be read and understood by today’s decision makers.
As an experiment, I submitted the article to Digg – a site designed to help democratize the process of determining what is really news. If you like the article, please go to Digg and give it a “digg” telling others to go and read it. (Just do a search on the site for Rickover and look for the “digg” with a title of “Fortune telling – Rickover on energy resources circa 1957”.)
It would be kind of cool to expose this speech to more people who are generally interested in what is going on in the world and see what kind of traction it can get. It is not about new technology, but it certainly seems to have immediate applicability to today’s technical challenges.
