Georg Stetter

Georg Stetter (1895 to 1988) was an Austrian-German nuclear physicist who directed the Second Physics Institute of the University of Vienna and was a principal member of the German nuclear energy project known as the Uranium Club. His pioneering use of electronics to measure the energy of nuclear particles earned him the Haitinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1926. On 14 June 1939 he filed a secret patent for generating energy by nuclear fission, describing a heterogeneous, moderated reactor of the kind later widely used; it was re-registered in Austria in 1958 and bought in 1971 by the Austrian Society for the Study of Atomic Energy. Around 1942 he led a group of six physicists and physical chemists measuring atomic constants and neutron cross sections, and in 1943 he also became director of the Institute for Neutron Research. Dismissed in 1945, he was later reinstated, turned to dust protection and aerosol research, and became a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1962.