Donald Geoffrey Hurst, 1911-1999
Donald Geoffrey Hurst, physicist and former President of the Atomic Energy Control Board, died 6 October 1999 in Deep River, Ontario, aged 88. He was born 19 March 1911.
Canada's debt to Don Hurst has been, in typical Canadian fashion, largely unrecognized except by those who had the privilege of working with him. True, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, held senior positions at Atomic Energy of Canada, finished his formal career in the prestigious post of President of the Atomic Energy Control Board, and received two awards from the Canadian Nuclear Association, but the recognition of his achievements fell far short of what they deserved. Perhaps if he had been less of a nice person and more ready to blow his own horn his contributions to physics and to Canada would have been better known and more appropriately recognized.
He was born in England, came to Canada as a small child, and grew up mostly in Montreal. His university education took place at McGill where he earned his BSc in 1933, MSc in 1934 and PhD in 1936. He then had a year of post-doctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley (1936/37) where he worked with Lawrence's cyclotron. This was followed by two years at Cambridge University as an Exhibition of 1851 Scholar. At Cambridge he was a coauthor of the first scientific paper to come out of research on Cockcroft's cyclotron. He returned to Canada in 1939 and joined the Division of Physics at the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa. In 1944 he went to Montreal, and a year later to Chalk River, with NRC's Atomic Energy Project. This project became Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) in 1952 and by 1955 Don had become Assistant Director of its Reactor Research and Development Division and in 1961 was promoted to be this division's Director. In 1965-67 he took a two-year leave of absence from AECL to serve as Director, Division of Nuclear Power and Reactors with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. In 1967 he returned to Chalk River to become Director, Applied Research and Development. Three years later he was appointed President of the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB), the agency responsible for the safety of all nuclear activity in Canada and for Canada's contribution to the non- proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the world. He retired from this position in 1974.
"Retirement" was, however, illusory. Until 1978 he continued as chairman of the AECB's Reactor Safety Advisory Committee for Ontario reactors. From 1974 to 1985 he was Chairman and Canadian member of the IAEA's Senior Advisory Group for the production of Safety Codes and Guides (the NUSS program). He was Executive Director of the Royal Society of Canada from 1975 until 1977 when he became Honourary (i.e. unpaid) Executive Director, a post he held until 1989. Clearly these activities did not exhaust his talent or his energy. In 1987/88 he was Technical Adviser (Regulatory) to the Ontario Nuclear Safety Review and from 1990 to 1995 he was a member of the Technical Advisory Panel on Nuclear Safety (TAPNS) which reported to the President of Ontario Hydro. In the early 1990s he also found time to make major contributions to the writing of the technical history of AECL, "Canada Enters the Nuclear Age".
Recognition of Don's accomplishments came mainly from those who knew him best. The Canadian Nuclear Association gave him an Outstanding Contribution Award in 1990 and awarded him the W.B. Lewis Medal in 1996. The citation for the latter covered his career in the nuclear industry for over half a century, beginning in 1944 with his involvement in the planning of the control and safety circuits of the NRX reactor and ending in 1995 with his retirement from Ontario Hydro's TAPNS. The American Nuclear Society gave him the "Tommy Thompson" Award in 1994 for "distinguished leadership in the formative years of the Canadian CANDU reactor program and then as the International Atomic Energy Agency's director of the Division of Nuclear Power and Reactors" and for the important roles he played as President of the AECB and as Chairman of the Advisory Group for the IAEA's NUSS program. These formal recognitions came very late in his life. Perhaps of more importance to him was the obvious respect in which he was held by his peers; a respect that grew out of a combination of his scientific knowledge and ability, the diplomacy that characterized his interactions with colleagues, and his unfailing humanitarian approach to every problem he encountered.
His awards clearly show that Don Hurst was best known for his association with the development and regulation of nuclear power, but he also made major contributions to basic physics research in Canada. When the NRX research reactor came into operation at Chalk River in 1947 he set up a program to study the atomic structure of condensed matter using the then new technique of neutron diffraction. He and his colleagues built two instruments for neutron diffraction studies and, among other things, carried out a number of experiments on the structure of solids, gases, and low-temperature liquids, including pioneering measurements on the structure of liquid helium. These studies grew out of precision measurements of the fission and total cross section measurements of 233U and 239Pu.
His encouragement of younger colleagues contributed in no small way to the international reputation of Chalk River as a research centre of excellence. He would hold weekly evening meetings in his home where he and his group discussed the theoretical and experimental issues relevant to their research. Bertram Brockhouse, who joined the group in 1950 and began the inelastic scattering measurements that earned him the Nobel Prize, remembers these sessions well and, in his Nobel Lecture in 1994 as well as on many other occasions, gives unstinting praise to Don Hurst as his mentor.
In his administrative career he displayed the same qualities of integrity, good nature, decisiveness, objectivity, and perseverance that made him so well respected by his peers and by all those who had the privilege of working with him - he was not one to make people feel that they were working for him. He contributed immeasurably to the success of the reactor physics program at Chalk River and later to the smooth and efficient functioning of the AECB. His performance at the IAEA in Vienna and the AECB evidently impressed the international nuclear community so much that on his formal retirement in 1974 he was asked to chair the Senior Advisory Group for the IAEA's NUSS program. This committee had had a history of infighting and inefficiency but under Don's leadership it accomplished its goals and, over an eleven-year period produced over fifty regulatory documents that covered every aspect of the safety of nuclear activity. The success of this project owed much to Don's expertise in this field but it was his international reputation and, possibly more so, his unfailing patience and superb diplomacy that were even more responsible. While these last qualities earned him great respect it was his prodigious memory that amazed younger colleagues who worked with him on the AECL technical history in the early 1990s. He not only made helpful and succinct comments on the contributions of others but also wrote a 32- page summary of Canada's role in nuclear research and development that few if any could equal.
In addition to being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (since 1954), Don was elected a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society in 1964 and was a member of the Canadian Association of Physicists.
His life was not all work. He enjoyed trout fishing and was proud of his achievements as a household handyman. In later years he and his wife of nearly 60 years, the former Margaret McCuaig with whom he had two children, Dorothy and David, were active in lawn bowling. He maintained his interest in scientific research until the end of his life, attending Royal Society meetings until 1998, and enjoying heated discussions of new scientific developments at the AECL Retirees Wednesday Morning Coffee Club of which he was a charter member. He was indeed a scholar. A more significant epitaph would be: Donald Geoffrey Hurst, Gentleman.
A. David B. Woods