Jules Guéron
Jules Guéron (born June 2, 1907 in Tunis ; † October 11, 1990 in Paris ) was a French chemist who had an important role in the French nuclear engineering program.
Guéron's parents were both teachers at the Alliance universelle in Tunis. Guéron attended the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris and studied chemistry at the Sorbonne and received his doctorate in physical chemistry in 1935 under Marcel Guichard . He was one of the first chemists to be promoted by the then newly founded CNRS and went to Strasbourg as a lecturer after completing his doctorate. He turned to the CNRS for funding because he was refused to take his experimental apparatus built for his doctorate with him, and it was on this occasion that he met Lew Kowarski for the first time . In Strasbourg, the physicist Jacques Yvon was a colleague and he first heard of the newly discovered nuclear fission in 1939 through a lecture by Frédéric Joliot . Before that, he had done something completely different (chemical kinetics). In 1939 he was drafted (and was sent to the United States on a shopping spree for laboratory supplies in 1940) and in 1940 he followed General de Gaulle's call to London as part of the Forces françaises libres . There he worked in Cambridge and then in Canada on the Tube Alloy Project of the British and Canadians to develop the reactors and the atomic bomb. Other French people involved were Bertrand Goldschmidt , Pierre Auger , Hans von Halban , Lew Kowarski. The aim was the construction of heavy water reactors and the extraction of hatched plutonium, with Guéron working in the chemistry department in Montreal and Chalk River. The French group also had contacts with the American Manhattan Project and was concerned about de Gaulle's very reserved attitude towards the Americans. Guéron finally clarified in a conversation he obtained in Montreal in July 1944 with de Gaulle about the imminent completion of the American atomic bomb and its effects.
In 1945 he was involved in founding the CEA , the French Atomic Energy Commission, and headed the chemistry department. In 1951 he became the first director of their research center in Saclay . From 1958 to 1968 he was Director General for Research and Education at Euratom . 1970 to 1978 he was a professor at the University of Paris-South . He also advised Framatome from 1976 to 1981 . He died of a heart attack while walking in the street.
1960 to 1969 he was secretary of the International Commission on Atomic Weights and Isotropic Frequencies (CIAAW) of the IUPAC. He was an officer in the Legion of Honor .
His brother-in-law, Étienne Hirsch, was a senior French official and President of Euratom.
Fonts
- Ozone. Masson 1931
- The Economics of Nuclear Power, Pergamon Press 1956
- L'Énergie nucléaire, Presses Universitaires de France 1973.
- Les matériaux nucléaires, Presses Universitaires de France 1977.
Web links
- Obituary in the New York Times, October 23, 1990
- Archives of Gueron at the EU (with biography in the 2006 inventory)
- Oral History Interview with Spence Weart 1978 (American Institute of Physics)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Oral History Interview by Guéron with Spencer Weart 1978, AIP, part 1
- ↑ Guéron, Oral History Interview 1978 , Part 2
- ↑ He wrote an obituary for Guéron, Hommage à Jules Guéron , Paris 1992
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Guéron, Jules |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French chemist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 2, 1907 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Tunis |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 11, 1990 |
| Place of death | Paris |