John
Gittus was elected Regents’ Professor at the University of California in
Los Angeles in 1990. He is Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth,
England. He was a Director of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority
(later AEA Technology) and is now a Consultant to Governments and private
industry on nuclear and energy matters world-wide. His current clients
are
qBNFL
Plc,
qThe
UK Government’s Department of Trade and Industry,
qSerco
Plc,
qNTI,
Japan
qThe
Sumitomo Corporation, Japan
qAmersham
Plc the world’s leading radio pharmaceutical company,
qChaucer
Insurance Holdings Plc
Professor
Gittus is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (Britain’s top 1,000
engineers) and has Doctor of Science degrees from the Universities of London
and Stockholm for his published papers describing his research work. He
has held over 30 patents and published over 100 single-author papers in
learned Journals describing his personal research. He invented Nimonic
115, the strongest of the early creep-resistant alloys used for the hottest
turbine blades in jet engines and went on to develop a theory of creep
that forms the basis of many of his papers to the Royal Society and the
Philosophical Magazine. He used this theory to develop one of the world’s
first computer models of nuclear fuel elements, with which he forecast
that some of the fuel element designs then extant would fail as their lives
were extended in a quest for cheaper power. He was able to model the failure
processes and deduced remedies that have been applied throughout the world.
Fuel element failures are now rare, due in part to this early work.
He
held a series of senior posts in the UKAEA, where he headed the late Lord
Marshall’s Task Force at Harwell and produced the UK’s first nuclear-reactor
Probabilistic Risk Assessment, for Sizewell B. He became Director of the
R&D programme that underpinned the design details of Sizewell B.
He
was next appointed Director responsible for the restructuring of the UKAEA
and reported to the Chairman: leading a Task Force he was instrumental
in setting up and launching AEA Technology Plc, which is now subsumed into
Serco Ltd and totally funded through contracts with private industry and
governments.
He
left the UKAEA to become the first Director General of the British Nuclear
Industry Forum, where he gave further help with the restructuring of the
UK nuclear industry, a process that is still going on. When his term of
office there was complete he became a consultant, first to his successor
and then, quickly, to other nuclear companies at home and overseas. On
the death of Lord Marshall of Goring, Professor Gittus was appointed to
succeed him at Cox Insurance Holdings Plc, advising on the insurance of
the world’s nuclear power stations and other nuclear installations.
He
and Mr Michael Dawson now run Lloyds of London Insurance Syndicate 1176,
the biggest commercial insurer of nuclear power stations and other facilities
in the world.
Amongst
his published papers are two communicated to the Royal Society by P.A.M.
Dirac and describing Professor Gittus’s solution of a problem with the
structure of matter which Dirac said he himself had been unable to solve.
Entry
From Who's Who
Name
GITTUS,
John Henry.
Awards
DSc.
DTech; FREng 1989.
Positions
Consultant,
Amersham Plc, since 1999. Consultant, Chaucer Holdings Plc since 2002;
Consultant, Serco Plc (formerly AEA Technology) since 1993; Other Consultancies.
Personal
Details
Born
25 July 1930; son of Henry Gittus and Amy Gittus; married
1953, Rosemary Ann Geeves; one son two daughters.
Education
BSc
London 1st Maths 1952; DSc Phys London 1976. DTech Metall Stockholm
1975. CEng, FIMechE, FIS, FIM. FREng
Work
British
Cast Iron Res. Assoc., 1947-1955; Mond Nickel Co., R&D Labs,
Birmingham, 1955-1960 (develt Nimonic series high temp. super
alloys for aircraft gas turbine engines); United Kingdom Atomic
Energy Authority, 1960-1989: Research Manager, Springfields;
Head, Water Reactor fuel develt; Head, Atomic Energy Tech.
Br., Harwell; Director: Water Reactor Safety Research; Safety
and Reliability Directorate, Culcheth; Communication and
Information; Restructuring. Dir Gen., British Nuclear Forum, 1990-1993.
Consultant: Argonne Nat. Lab., USA, 1968; Oak Ridge Nat. Lab.,
1969. Visiting Professor: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale,
Lausanne, 1976; Univ. de Nancy, 1984; Regents' Prof., UCLA,
1990-; visiting Prof, Plymouth Univ., 1997-.
EditorinChief, Res Mechanica, 1980-1991.
Publications
Uranium,
1962; Creep, Viscoelasticity and Creepfracture in
Solids, 1979; Irradiation Effects in Crystalline Solids, 1979;
(with W. Crosbie) Medical Response to Effects of Ionizing
Radiation, 1989; (with P A M Dirac) Dirac’s Large Numbers Hypothesis.
numerous articles in learned jls.
Recreations
Old
houses, old motor cars, old friends.
Address
(office)
9 Devonshire Square,London, EC 2M 4WL. Telephone: +44 0207 387 9700
Mobile:
+44 7775 898 449.
Clubs
Royal
Society of Medicine.