John Large
Chartered Consulting Engineer (1943-2018)
John Henry Large (4 May 1943 – 3 November 2018) was an English consulting Chartered Engineer primarily known for his work in assessing and reporting upon nuclear safety and nuclear related accidents and incidents, work which has often featured in the media.
Early life
Large was born in Woking, but grew up in the East End of London. He was the son of a Fleet Street printer and the landlady of three pubs near Bermondsey. He was educated at a secondary school in south-east London then Camberwell School of Art, before studying engineering at Imperial College London.
Career
After university, Large moved to the United States to work on U.S. nuclear weapons projects. This required him to take U.S. citizenship, but due to the risk of Vietnam War conscription he returned to the UK.
From the mid-1960s until 1986 Large was an academic in Brunel University's School of Engineering, becoming a lecturer in 1971, where he undertook research for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, particularly on the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor design.
During the 1980s, Large was an advisor on nuclear issues to Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Tony Blair.
In 1986, he founded the London-based consulting engineers Large & Associates, which specialised in analysis of and reporting on failure of engineering systems, particularly in the nuclear field, which at one time employed up to 40 people.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) invited Large to visit China, Korea and Iran to give advice on their nuclear programmes. He visited Japan on behalf of Greenpeace following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and his first technical assessment confirmed a triple reactor meltdown well before it was officially acknowledged.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16731241. VIAF identifies the subject as 183253714. The Library of Congress control number is n2011055337. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1943, 2018, 1986 and 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Large” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.