Editorial

Abstract

George Miley, Editor in Chief of Laser and Particle Beams, celebrated his 60th birthday on August 6, 1993. While born in Shreveport, Louisiana, he was raised in western Pennsylvania, in the heavily industrialized area around Pittsburgh. Influenced by his father's position as a chemist in an oil refinery, George Miley decided to pursue a career in chemical engineering. When he was admitted into Carnegie-Mellon University his junior year in high school, he immediately entered the Chemical Engineering Department. When he entered graduate school at the University of Michigan, his interests turned to nuclear sciences, and his PhD research dealt with the effect of radiation on chemical reactions. He graduated with a dual chemical/nuclear engineering degree. It is a pleasure to see how George's career led him to the study of lasers and particle beams. Several plasma courses stimulated his interest in fusion, and his first job was in the advanced theory section of the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (KAPL), where he felt he would learn more about "practical" nuclear systems. (KAPL was renowned for its work on naval submarine fission reactors.) Although at KAPL for only 2 years, Dr. Miley gained a wide reputation for his work on burnable poisons to extend reactor core lifetimes and his development of calculational methods for lifetime estimates. Admiral Rickover took a special interest in the work of this young scientist because of its obvious importance to naval reactors. He even took the unusual step of requesting that Dr. Miley spend 1 week locked in one of the submarine simulators so that he would "fully appreciate the importance that the crew placed on the accuracy of lifetime calculations." When he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1961, his main interest was in fission reactor dynamics. He immediately set up a combined theoretical/experimental program on reactor kinetics and neutron wave propagation, publishing several pioneering articles on these topics, and reporting the first measurement and theory for neutron wave propagation in a moderating medium in response to a reactor pulse. In 1963, he developed the concept for a nuclear-pumped laser after reading one of the first books on electrically pumped lasers. Later, he discovered that his concept had been anticipated by 6 months by another scientist, Lloyd Herwig of United Aircraft Corporation. But, by then his study of nuclear pumping had begun in earnest.