Rickover and Policy Entrepeneurship - by Charles Yang

As long-time readers of this substack know, I am a big fan of Admiral Hyman Rickover, “Father of the Nuclear Navy”. For those unfamiliar, Rickover was a lifelong naval officer who led the development of the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine and civilian nuclear power plant. He also built Naval Reactors, an institution that endures to this day with an unmatched safety record in building and operating nuclear reactors. In an age of renewed interest in how the U.S. can once again build infrastructure, distilling the key to Rickover’s success is even more important, a task I have attempted previously. Thanks to some generous funders, I recently visited the U.S. Naval Academy Archives in Annapolis to digitize a large portion of the Rickover Papers, a collection of Rickover memos, speeches, and testimonies donated by his estate in 2023. That digitized corpus is now live, including over >1800 pages of never-before-seen speeches, memos, and testimonies from Rickover’s tenure. In the proc

As long-time readers of this substack know, I am a big fan of Admiral Hyman Rickover, “Father of the Nuclear Navy”. For those unfamiliar, Rickover was a lifelong naval officer who led the development of the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine and civilian nuclear power plant. He also built Naval Reactors, an institution that endures to this day with an unmatched safety record in building and operating nuclear reactors. In an age of renewed interest in how the U.S. can once again build infrastructure, distilling the key to Rickover’s success is even more important, a task I have attempted p