The control room of the Georgia Tech Research Reactor with Dave Cox at the console.
Stories Told at Night around the Glow of the Reactor
AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY DAWNED in Georgia, there remained two sure sources of income left over from the antebellum days: growing cotton and draining the sap out of pine trees. These two commodities, cotton fiber and turpentine, sold well to the industrial northern states, but to dress them up for sale required steel straps to bind the bales and steel hoops to hold the barrels together. The closest place to buy these necessary items was in Pennsylvania.
Finding this situation unacceptable, a mortgage broker in Atlanta, George Washington Connors, sold the concept of building a steel mill to a group of enthusiastic investors, and in 1901 the Atlanta Steel Hoop Company was formed. An old farm north of the city was the perfect place for it. The land, which had been fought over one afternoon in the summer of 1864 in the Battle of Peachtree Creek, was purchased from the brothers Kontz, A. L. and E. C., and Captain James W. English. The site was cleared; a sprawling complex of buildings, steam engines, and open-hearth furnaces was erected; and a railroad spur was laid. A workforce of 120 men was hired. Soon 50 tons of steel, formed into the desired articles, were rolling out of the mill per year, and Atlanta rejoined the industrial world after thirty-seven years of sleep following the Late Unpleasantness.
By 1907 the company was in explosive expansion, and the name was changed to Atlanta Steel Company. There were now more than one thousand people drawing pay at the plant. Good times rolled, and steel hoops, bands, nails, rivets, welding rods, rebars, and Dixisteel barbed wire piled high at the loading platform. Most hirelings lived within walking distance in the Home Park neighborhood that had sprung up south of the plant, from Fourteenth Street down to Sixth, with the main north-south venue being Kontz Street. It became the northernmost suburb of Atlanta, and as automobiles started being used for transportation, the streets were even paved. North of the plant, the deer still roamed.
Downtown was hustling and jiving, with a new vaudeville theater, the Forsyth, built at the corner of Forsyth and Luckie in 1911. Always striving to beat the Atlanta Theater over on Edgewood Avenue, the Forsyth Theater was pleased to snag a one-week engagement of the world-famous Harry Houdini, extraordinary magician and escape artist, starting April 19, 1915.1
Houdini was a truly rare event. The Handcuff King worked the Orpheus Circuit, which usually ranged west all the way to San Francisco, north to Boston, and south as far as Richmond, when he wasn’t entertaining Europe or Australia. To reach the masses in suburban Atlanta, some face time was in order. He hired a mule-drawn flatbed wagon on which he and his assistants could stand and perform. On Sunday, April 18, after church let out and lunch had been eaten, he parked it on the east side of Kontz Street, halfway between Sixth and Tenth Streets, where the steep hill was briefly interrupted by a flat, vacant lot. Across the street was the big, normally muddy backyard of the house at Sixth and Kontz. An artesian well in back of the house, fed by an underground tentacle of Peachtree Creek running north, kept the area in semi-swamp mode.
Harry Houdini stood on the wagon, rolled up his sleeves, and started shuffling cards. Soon, a small wad of curious wanderers collected in front of the wagon. Word spread rapidly by speedy-foot telegraph through the Home Park community. Some Yankee was giving a free magic show up on Kontz! The crowd, hushed and spellbound, grew to hundreds, taking up the entire backyard across the street. Children were hoisted to shoulders so that they could see, and women were asked to remove their hats. There is no record of what tricks the great magician performed that day, but he was over his handcuff-escape phase and was probably showing off with cards and his new East Indian needle trick.
He first swallowed a handful of needles, one at a time, sometimes having dramatic trouble getting them down. There were at least thirty-five needles of various sizes, up to two and a quarter inches long. He then ate a length of thread, which was actually a five-foot-long piece of highly visible white twine, swallowing a couple of inches per gulp. He paused for a second to settle his stomach, then searched around in his mouth with a digit, seemed to discover something by feel, then slowly withdrew the thread, held delicately between his thumb and forefinger. The string was so long, a couple of assistants had to support it as it slowly emerged. The needles were spaced at random intervals, hanging on the string. He had apparently regurgitated the needles and threaded them onto the string with his tongue. The crowd was amazed, and Houdini enjoyed sellout crowds at the Forsyth.
That December, the name of the mill was changed to the Atlantic Steel Company, and Kontz was renamed Atlantic Drive. World Wars I and II came and went, and the fortunes of Atlantic Steel grew as the demand for Dixisteel products increased. By 1952, 2,100 people were working at the mill. At that time the Georgia School of Technology, headquartered down on North Avenue, was striving to become a research university and was buying up property north of Sixth Street.
The change of technology from simple to complex had been in effect since a person picked up the first rock and found it useful for cracking walnuts. In the 1950s, the movement seemed to accelerate. While the steel plant, built with the most advanced nineteenth-century mechanisms, faded into the heavy industry landscape, the feisty trade school on North Avenue loomed large. The name was changed to the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 1954, the governor of Georgia appointed a Tech graduate, Frank H. Neely, forward-looking industrialist and the head of Rich’s department store, as chairman of the Georgia Nuclear Advisory Commission. Under aggressive prodding by Neely, Georgia Tech built the Radioisotopes Laboratory Facility at the southeast corner of the intersection of Sixth and Atlantic Drive in 1959, and plans for a large nuclear research reactor were laid down. The old house at the top of the hill on Atlantic was demolished, and the Electronics Research Building was erected with the parking lot paved directly over the artesian well, ensuring that there would always be a curious wet spot there. Sixth Street was renamed Ferst Street.
Behind the Electronics Research Building, right over the spot where the crowd had congregated to see Houdini on a fine April afternoon, a large hole was excavated, down to bedrock. Here was planted the Frank H. Neely Nuclear Research Reactor, a multipurpose neutron source, designed by the General Nuclear Engineering Corporation in Dunedin, Florida. The main building was a gleaming white steel cylindrical structure with a domed top, connected to a two-story annex having offices, a classroom, laboratories, and special shops for nuclear work. It was issued an operating license, no. R-97, by the Atomic Energy Commission on December 29, 1964, and proceeded to entertain with its own form of magic, doing tricks that would have baffled Houdini on a daily basis, doing everything from driving a LASER cavity with neutrons to investigating Legionnaire’s Disease.2
By 1975, I was an eager PhD candidate at Georgia Tech wanting to do an experimental thesis dissertation using the impressive 5-megawatt, heavy-water moderated reactor. Funding for such work had pretty much dried up by then, and I had watched as the last of the Era of Great Reactor Experiments disappeared over the horizon, but I was determined, as a candidate must be, to do something significant.
There was much to be learned. First of all, the operations staff at this facility was an underpaid, diversely tempered gang of refugees from the Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory and the nuclear navy, unappreciated by the Institute as a whole, and under constant bombardment by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do nothing wrong while generating neutron flux peaking at about trillion neutrons per square centimeter per second in the heart of a major metropolis. Thrown in were the nuclear scientists, ranging in personality from mildly eccentric to bat-shit crazy, and the ever watchful, ticking radiation counters of Health Physics. One thing these men had in common was that they all seemed to drive sports cars, from Fred Apple’s bug-eyed Triumph to Bob Kirkland’s Austin-Healy.
As an unfunded grad student with vague plans, I had little to stand on, but it became clear that if I was going to succeed as an experimentalist at this place, then the operations staff would have to want me to succeed. I would have to study them, connect with them, find their likes, their loves, fears, politics, and hatreds, and I would eventually have to convince the entire backbiting, claim-jumping, loosely coupled conglomeration to work together on my project, slaving away doing three shifts a day. They had to see me as basically competent, quick to learn, confident in my knife-edge narrow field to the point of cockiness, and one who would see and acknowledge the essential value of experience, something of which a grad student had vanishingly little. For my peculiar project, I had to run the reactor balls-to-the-wall for many hours to build up the iodine poisoning, then drop the power, level out, and map the axial neutron flux periodically as the iodine burned off, the net reactivity of the core increased, and the control-blades slowly sank into the reactor, maintaining precise criticality. It was harder than it sounds.
I spent many a day sitting in the control room, absorbing the atmosphere and a surprising influx of tales not told in the Real World on the other side of the air lock. Here, there was no sunlight, no passage of days or contact with anything happening outside. With the reactor stabilized and on autopilot, as it usually was, the only sounds were the ticking of a certain multi-pen chart recorder as it changed horizontal position on the paper roll or the squeaking of the deteriorating bearing in a swivel chair. The operations men, usually not a particularly talkative lot, under this condition of isolation would start to open up, spilling old government secrets or their guts. Orren Williams, a grad student working as a reactor operator, leaned back, put his feet up on the console, and described the beautiful, highly intelligent woman he was seeing and the house he was going to buy as soon as they were married.3 There were tales of service on the Nautilus nuclear sub, the Enterprise nuclear aircraft carrier, and odd bits from the national labs, from Brookhaven to Los Alamos.
The control room of the Georgia Tech Research Reactor with Dave Cox at the console.
The most unusual individual of the lot was John Moon. He was one who did not own a sports car. Instead, he drove a 1965 Mercedes-Benz 190Dc diesel sedan, painted white-gray, flogging it fifty miles down from Dawsonville every morning. By pure chance, I owned an identical car, the same color and with a serial number that was sequential with his. That was my immediate connection to this particular reactor operator.
The author, sitting on top of the reactor with his neutron counting equipment. The computer in the rack at right was built from scratch in the electronics shop downstairs. Notice the hole in his shoe.
Moon had been an operator at the Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory (GNAL), and his reputation ran in front of him, warning away the meek and sensitive. Moon was something of a wild man. He was the type who would eat a roach off the floor on a dare or decide to test the emergency escape tunnel after lunch.4 One night we were at the console, running at one megawatt, and Moon was disclosing the secrets of his former place of employment as the reactor ran on autopilot while I took mental notes. A young student observer interrupted to ask an undergraduate question: “Mr. Moon, does a reactor glow when it’s running?”
The author on top of the reactor core, with the shielding removed, installing his axial instrument thimble in V-14.
John Moon shifted slightly in his chair, cut a wicked smile, and touched his fingers together. “Why, yes, it does. Would you care to see it?”
“May I?”
Moon turned slowly in his seat and addressed his fellow reactor operator, David Cox, who was resting quietly. “Mr. Cox, go pull vertical fourteen so we can show this fellow what the core looks like.” Dave roused himself and complied with due care, using the remotely controlled polar crane to lift the concrete plug on V-14 gently off the reactor face and put it aside. This was the glory-hole for my experiment, and the upper and lower shield plugs had already been removed. I raised an eyebrow. Moon wasn’t really going to send this kid to peer down the hole, was he?
No, he wasn’t. Dave, being cautious not to stand over it, maneuvered a big, 45-degree mirror over the open hole and turned it to face the control room. The bright Cherenkov light coming from the naked reactor core, eleven feet down, washed through the glass wall of the control room and overdrove our retinas. The gamma rays went straight up out of the hole and through the steel roof of the containment building.
“Huh,” mused the undergraduate. “I thought it would be red. You know, like a stove eye.”
We chuckled. No, young man, the reactor glow is a lovely shade of blue.5
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1This was actually Houdini’s second show at the Forsyth Theater. The first was announced in late December 1911, and his engagement was January 1–6, 1912. To have him appear in Atlanta was still a world-class novelty in 1915. Working back from the original story, I believe that the 1915 show is the one depicted here.
2The Houdini story was first told by Georgia governor Lester G. Maddox. Upon his election in 1967, Maddox was treated to a tour of the Georgia Tech campus, and he was particularly intrigued by the nuclear reactor. He was invited to the control room, located high and overlooking the reactor bio-shield in the containment building. The operations crew encouraged him to sit at the control panel, where he put his feet up on the console and spun his tale about what had been on this spot back in the day. The governor didn’t know anything about nuclear research, but he knew a lot about Atlantic Drive. He had grown up in a house right down the street, and he quit high school to work in the steel mill.
3Williams’s description of his beautiful, highly intelligent love interest, who was working downstairs in the reactor complex for a nuclear medical research foundation, sounded so irresistible, immediately upon graduation I married her, following a brief courtship. Our thirty-eighth anniversary is coming up in 2017. Orren Williams never talked to me again.
4Moon’s favorite stunt while idling at the control console was to ask a fellow operator, in this case Dean McDowell, did he know that bees can only sting you through open pores, and further that pores open only as you take a breath? If you simply hold your breath, a bee cannot sting you. McDowell found this claim difficult to believe, but Moon just happened to have a bee right here, under an inverted urine specimen cup. He took a deep breath, held it, and slipped his palm under the cup. The bee, mad as hell, tried repeatedly to stab him, to no success. See? “Let me try that!” McDowell enthused. He took his breath, slid his palm under the lip of the cup, screamed, and flung the bee-cup combination ceilingward. Moon collapsed with laughter. His palm was so heavily callused, there was no way for a bee to stick a stinger in him. The escape tunnel was at GNAL, not at Georgia Tech. It was a steel pipe, 3,600 feet long, just wide enough for a man to crawl through, leading from the underground control room of the Radiation Effects Reactor to the main gate at the “lethal fence.”
5The Georgia Tech Research Reactor was shut down and de-fueled in 1996, for fear that international athletes would storm the building and steal the 97 percent enriched metallic uranium fuel during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. The facility was decommissioned in 1999. It took a few years to knock it down and haul away the remains. Atlantic Steel was down to four hundred employees by 1997, but they were still turning out Dixisteel barbed wire. The mill was bought by Jacoby Development in 1998, erased from the old farmland, and replaced with a residential/commercial development named Atlantic Station. Neither facility, the reactor nor the steel mill, will ever be built again.