Richard Meservey’s Interview
Richard “Dick” Meservey is a nuclear physicist who worked at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). In this interview, he describes the rewarding projects he worked on at INL including the Special Power Excursion Reactor Test and the Advanced Test Reactor. He lauds the unusual freedom that scientists enjoyed working in Idaho Falls, and explains why he came to love living in Idaho Falls.
Meservey: I have a bachelor’s degree in physics from Western Illinois University, back in Macomb, Illinois, with a specialty in nuclear physics. My professors realized that Idaho was one of the last places where they were still doing lots of physics work, and so they kept pressing on us to try to come to work out here.
Another fellow who worked at SPERT [Special Power Excursion Reactor Test], Jim Campbell, and myself were both seniors, and Jim came directly out here. I was probably a little bit chicken-hearted and decided I didn’t know anything about this part of the country. I decided, I’ll go to graduate school someplace close and if I like it, I’ll try to go to work there. If I don’t like it, I’m headed right back to Illinois.
I went down to Utah State to graduate school. While I was there, I looked around and talked to people. Actually, because of the site here, a lot of the students in the science department at Utah State were from Idaho Falls. I got to talk to them a lot and find about it, and decided I would come up here. Probably actually, I decided that early. Utah State’s a wonderful place and with all the mountains and the exciting things going on, it was a lot better than Illinois.
