Professor Marshall Stoneham

Theoretical physicist

Professor Marshall Stoneham was a theoretical physicist who specialised in the defects of materials at an atomic scale – work which proved crucial in the development of nuclear power reactors.

Arthur Marshall Stoneham was born on May 18 1940 in Barrow-in-Furness to Garth Rivers Stoneham and the former Nancy Leslie. He was educated at Barrow Grammar School for Boys, which he later credited with such excellent science teaching that it produced three Fellows of the Royal Society in the space of 15 years. He was awarded a BSc at Bristol University and remained there to complete his PhD with Maurice Pryce.

Stoneham’s work made him one of the leading figures in the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell from the mid-1960s, an era when it became apparent that waste disposal and the challenges of finding materials to build the reactors themselves, not nuclear physics, were the key scientific issues for the nuclear power programme to overcome. He was particularly known for showing how the lightest atom, hydrogen, can move very quickly through metals even when they are relatively cool; this explained how the hydrogen atoms could gather at the boundaries between the microscopic grains of metal crystal within the material, causing it to become brittle and fracture.

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