James A. Lane was a research associate at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory (“Met Lab”) during the Manhattan Project. Prior to joining the Met Lab, he was a chemical engineer at DuPont Chemical Corporation.
He later worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. According to SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future by Richard Martin, Lane edited the book Fluid Fuel Reactors (1958) for the Atomic Energy Commission while at Oak Ridge (p. 10). The book describes the work conducted at Oak Ridge during the 1950s.
In The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer, Alvin M. Weinberg called Lane one of “ORNL’s first in-house energy futurologist” (p. 216). Weinberg gave Lane this title because Lane “was among the first atomic energy people to project demand for nuclear energy and to estimate possible costs of nuclear electricity generated from fully developed reactors” (Weinberg, p. 216).