Early life Milton Shaw was born in
Knoxville, Tennessee, on October 5, 1921. He had two sisters, Ruth and Genevieve. He joined the Navy later that year, where he was sent to the Navy Propulsion School at
Cornell University. Following the end of the war, he worked at the Naval Engineering Experiment Station and Testing Laboratory (EES) in
Annapolis. He studied under Weinberg until 1951, at which point he began work with Rickover. Shaw became Rickover's designer of surface-ship propulsion systems. for the development of the USS
Nautilus, launched in 1954, the first
nuclear submarine, and the USS
Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered
aircraft carrier, launched in 1960. After leaving the Naval Reactors Bureau in 1961, Shaw worked for the
Secretary of the Navy as Senior Technical Assistant for Research and Development. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing all reactor research and development. Several reactor safety research programs were underway at the AEC. Among these was the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor (MSBR) program, which culminated in the
Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) at Oak Ridge. At the time, interest in extending the supply of nuclear fuel led to substantial research into breeder reactors. The competing designs included the MSBR and
Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor. Shaw, with his Naval Reactors background, moved to stamp out research into reactor safety, and towards what he saw were the two proven reactor designs: the
light-water reactor and the LMFBR. In particular, in spite of the project's apparent successes, Shaw was directly responsible for the cancellation of the MSRE, and is credited with Weinberg's ouster from ORNL. In 1973, with considerable criticism mounting of the AEC's regulatory programs, the
Nixon administration installed
Dixy Lee Ray as chair. She quickly moved to separate the reactor development and regulation segments of the agency, prompting Shaw to resign in protest. Shaw later worked as an energy consultant, and taught as a visiting professor at
Carnegie Mellon University and
MIT. He also gave numerous interviews to journalists about nuclear technology. == Personal life ==