Peng Shilu

Peng Shilu (1925 to 2021) was a Chinese nuclear engineer, hailed as the father of China's nuclear submarines and of its naval nuclear propulsion. Born in Haifeng County, Guangdong, the son of the revolutionary Peng Pai, he was orphaned before the age of four and trained in Yan'an, then studied nuclear science at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. After the Soviet Union refused help for nuclear-powered submarines in 1959, he oversaw the whole project and in 1968 proposed and led a land-based prototype reactor in Sichuan, completed in April 1970. China's first nuclear submarine, class 091, was launched in December 1970 and commissioned in 1974, and the first ballistic missile submarine, class 092, followed in 1981. In 1979 he became first chief designer of the project. In 1983 he turned to civilian nuclear power as deputy minister for water resources and electric power, leading the teams that built the Daya Bay and Qinshan nuclear power plants, and he was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.