Robert Dautray (nonfiction)

Ignace Robert Dautray, born Kouchelevitz on February 1, 1928 in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, is a French engineer, former scientific director of the French Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) and former High Commissioner for Atomic Energy. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, section mechanical and computer sciences, and of the French Academy of Technology.

Biography

Born in France, to a Belarusian father who came to France in 1905 and a Ukrainian mother who came to France in 1902, he escaped the Holocaust during the Second World War.

After the war, he prepared as a free candidate for the entrance exam to the École nationale des arts et métiers. He was awarded the top promotion in the promotion that entered Paris in 1945 (Pa45 promotion). On the advice of his professors, he passed the École polytechnique exam in 1949, where he graduated as a major, then joined the CEA/Saclay in the mathematical physics department headed by Jacques Yvon, Jules Horowitz, Albert Messiah, Anatole Abragam, Claude Bloch, Trocheris, etc.

Scientific Director of the CEA, he contributes to the development of atomic applications after scientific work on isotopic regulation and the construction of experimental reactors (Grenoble high flux reactor). He is working on the process of separating uranium isotopes. He is the director of the Phébus large laser program. Dautray was High Commissioner for Atomic Energy from 1993 to 1998.

Dautray recounted his memories, especially his difficult youth, in his book of memoirs, published in 2007. Chairman of the Scientific Programs Committee of the National Space Center (CNES).

He also addressed the problems of climate change (radiative transfer: greenhouse effect).

Scientific work

Almost all of Dautray's professional activity has been devoted to the physical sciences contributing to nuclear energy, both in reactor physics (reactor control and command, breeder reactor physics, Pegasus research reactors, high-flow reactors from the Von Laue Langevin Institute, etc.) and in the physics of reactors.) and upstream of the fuel cycle (control command of the uranium isotope separation plant) as well as downstream of this cycle (formation and physics of plutonium and other actinides isotopes, descendants of fission products, activated structure nuclei, etc.).

In addition, Dautray participated in the establishment of the basic physical sciences for the sciences of high densities and powers of materials and electromagnetic radiation (state equations, opacity, radiative transfer, discontinuities of high velocity flows, interface instabilities, laser implosions, thermonuclear reactions, non-linear neutronics of high velocity media of nuclei making the neutron transport and plasma physics equations non-linear, etc.).

Dautray has contributed to the development of the mathematical methods necessary to model these phenomena. Robert Dautray co-chaired with the EDF Studies and Research Department the CEA/EDF digital analysis summer schools.

There was a controversy over the attribution to R. Dautray of the paternity of the French H-bomb. Experts dispute it, highlighting Michel Carayol's work (see for example Pierre Billaud, La véridique histoire de la bombe H française, La Pensée universelle, 1994 and the website http://www.bombehlaverite.com[archive]). See also http://ecodemystificateur.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2011/06/30/Robert-Dautray[archive].

• Jacques-Louis Lions (nonfiction) - colleague