Nikolai Dollezhal (1899-2000) was a Soviet scientist in energetics, a designer of nuclear reactors, a Professor, an Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1962), a corresponding member (1953), a twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1949, 1984) a Winner of three Stalin Awards (1949, 1952, 1953), of a Lenin Prize (1957) and two State Prizes of the USSR (1970, 1976). He developed the theory of self-acting valves of a reciprocating compressor. Dollezhal was the Chief Designer of the reactor of the world's first nuclear power plant.
In 1943, he took the lead of the Research and Design Institute of Chemical Engineering. Since 1946, he was involved in the Soviet Atomic Project, designing the first industrial nuclear reactors for the production of weapons-grade plutonium, that is, water-graphite plants with the vertical arrangement of graphite columns and water cooling channels. After successful tests of the atomic bomb in the summer of 1949, he started to develop power reactors for shipboard installations. In 1950, SKB-5 was established, which, under the leadership of N. Dollezhal, began to develop the reactor design for the world's first nuclear power plant.
In 1954, a reactor plant of the water-cooled type was designed for submarines. In the same year, the world's first nuclear power plant in Obninsk came into operation, the heart of which was the “AM unit” - the USSR first pressure-tube nuclear reactor of the water-cooled graphite-moderated type.
In 1952, Nikolai Dollezhal took the lead of the Special Institute, aka NII-8 (presently, Dollezhal Research and Design Institute of Power Engineering - NIKIET). The Institute designed reactors of all basic types: power-producing, commercial and research reactor installations. Later on, the institutes of N. Dollezhal and I. Kurchatov jointly designed a dual-purpose (later on purely power-producing) RBMK reactors. In 1961, N. Dollezhal initiated the “nuclear” Chair named Energy-Converting Machines and Installations at the Moscow State Technical University and headed it for 25 years.
The postage stamp provides a portrait of Nikolai Dollezhal and an ideograph of atom against the background of the Dollezhal R&D Institute of Power Engineering.
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