At the end of World War II the United States was in the rare position of being the only country to own the Ultimate Weapon, which was both good and bad. It was good in that the Soviet Union, under the much-maligned Joseph Stalin, was unlikely to start a fight in Europe as long as the United States could blow up a city using a single bomb. It was bad in that the secrets of its construction would be impossible to keep. The process of building the Ultimate Weapon was applied physics, and any country with the will, the expertise, and a well developed industrial infrastructure eventually would be able to independently discover the necessary steps. Nuclear physics did not recognize good and evil, and it would reveal itself to any sufficiently clever team of scientists. It was only a matter of time.
In the middle of the Manhattan Project the British became concerned about a lack of cooperation with their dearest ally, the United States. British scientists were allowed to work at Los Alamos and add needed expertise and heavy lifting to the extreme effort being put into the bomb design, but they were not allowed anywhere near production facilities, such as the plutonium-converter reactors at the Hanford Works. The Americans seemed to be getting as much work as they could out of the Brits, while making sure that they would take home a minimum number of secrets. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, managed to convince President Franklin Roosevelt that a clear-cut agreement was needed, under which the two close allies would share all expertise and data concerning the atomic bombs. In Quebec City on August 19, 1943, the Quebec Agreement was formally signed. A major section was entitled “Articles of Agreement governing collaboration between the authorities of the U.S.A. and the UK in the matter of Tube Alloys.” The Canadians, having provided several nuclear physicists to the effort, were included in the information-sharing policy. An extended Quebec Agreement was signed at Hyde Park, New York, on September 18, 1944, pledging full cooperation in military and civilian nuclear pursuits after the war. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, and soon after the modified agreement seemed to have been misplaced.152 No foul play was suspected, but it was as if the document had never existed.
The new president, Harry S Truman, saw no need to share anything with anybody concerning the atomic bomb. The British had made recently also a back-door agreement to share things with the French, and this did not please Mr. Truman. By 1946, nobody was happy, and the Brits were on their own. So were the Canadians. In August of 1946 the United States Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act, known as the McMahon Act. It forbade the passing of secret atomic energy information to any foreign country, including Britain or Canada, on pain of death.
The Soviets were certainly never part of any information-sharing agreement, and although they were technically allies during the war, they were purposefully kept out of the bomb-development loop. The Soviet leaders developed a great interest in nuclear technology when they figured out that the United States was working on it. Efforts for a quick startup were hampered by a distracting takeover of the country by the German Army, a lack of nuclear scientists, and no research facilities. Still, they had to plan for a post-war world, and they made up for everything they lacked with a disciplined, well entrenched espionage operation, stealing enough information to save them years of expensive research and development.
No one, as it would turn out, could conduct spy-craft quite as well as the Soviets. In the heart of the Manhattan Project, in the nuclear physics labs in Los Alamos, they had three spies: Klaus Fuchs, a physicist loaned by the British, code-named CHARL’Z; Ted Hall, a physicist from the University of Chicago, code-named MLAD; and David Greenglass, a machinist, code-named KALIBR.153 With information gathered by these operatives, the Soviet scientists were able to build a faithful copy of Enrico Fermi’s Chicago Pile reactor in 1946. Under the leadership of Russian physicist Igor Kurchatov, the village of Sarov became the Soviet version of Los Alamos. It was named Arzamas-75, because it was 75 kilometers from Arzamas, but, on second thought, the name was changed to Arzamas-16, just to be confusing.154
With the ability to skip the early developmental mistakes, tedious calculations, and measurements that the Americans had made, the Soviet nuclear device was developed in a remarkably short time. By 1949, the RDS-1 bomb was ready to test.155 It was almost a dead-ringer for the Fat Man bomb, although it had two dish antennas on the front for the radar altimeter, looking like the wide, weepy eyes of a cartoon character. A dark cloud rose to mushroom shape over Semi-palatinsk, Kazakstan, when it went off in secret on August 29, 1949, yielding the explosive equivalent of 21 kilotons of TNT.156 The United States intelligence services named it Joe-1, and its successful detonation changed everything sooner than was expected. The United States no longer was the sole owner of the Ultimate Weapon. Parity of superpowers was acknowledged, and the Cold War commenced in earnest.
Great Britain wanted in, and the only way was to build and atmospherically test its own atomic bomb. The Brits had certainly brought back enough expertise from Los Alamos to do the technical work, but they lacked some of the abundant natural resources of the United States and the Soviet Union. To develop a nuclear device in the 1940’s required a wide-open space where nothing was trying to live, in case of an accident or a large-scale radioactive spill. There were no such deserts on the British Isles, and furthermore there was no spare river that could be used as a source of fresh, running coolant. The best they could do was to set up a plutonium production facility on the Cumbrian coast, overlooking the Irish Sea. They named it Windscale, for a bluff overlooking the seaward side. The production reactors would have to be air-cooled, and the exhaust would hopefully blow out over the ocean, and away from inhabited Britain.
The Brits were in a hurry to catch up with the Russians and the Americans, so they pushed the plutonium conversion process, using short irradiation times. This produced plutonium that was unusually rich in the undesirable contaminant Pu-240. The Pu-240 tended to fission spontaneously, and it made bomb cores more dangerous than usual to handle. Running continuously, the two production piles were barely able to make enough plutonium for a test, much less to populate an arsenal with plutonium-based bombs, but it was the best the Brits could manage in the post-war economy.
Sir John Cockroft was recalled urgently from his nuclear work in Canada, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority was established, and the British version of the Los Alamos Laboratory was built 16 miles south of Oxford, at an abandoned RAF airfield. It took its name from the nearby village, Harwell, and the Atomic Energy Research Establishment was founded and headquartered there. The planners found the old aircraft hangars perfect for concealing nuclear secrets, and proceeded to build a reactor with the charming name GLEEP. The letters stood for Graphite Low Energy Experimental Pile, and it was a basic copy of the X-10 pile at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Using things learned by running GLEEP, the Harwell group then built BEP0, or British Experimental Pile 0.
The British goal was to test a Fat Man device by August 1952. They were running a bit behind schedule when they finally lit one off in Operation Hurricane, detonating in shallow water just off the Montebello Islands of Western Australia on October 3, 1952. War planners were still concerned with the sneaked-into-the-harbor means of atomic bomb deployment, so they wanted to see what it would do in a simulated port in a ship. They mounted the bomb in the hold of the sacrificial HMS Plym, a 1,370-ton frigate, 2.7 meters below the water line.157
The device exploded smartly, yielding 25 kilotons and leaving a saucer-shaped crater in the seabed, 300 meters across. The HMS Plym evaporated.
The other leg of the formerly allied triumvirate, Canada, had no interest in conquering the world, but was intrigued by the possibility of a nuclear power source. As early as 1942 the Canadians had seen the future and had established a nuclear research laboratory in Montreal, under the National Research Council. When experiments grew large and dangerous in 1944, the facility was moved from its urban environment to Chalk River, Ontario, about 180 kilometers northwest of Ottawa. There was no lack of uninhabited wilderness in Canada, but Chalk River was a good compromise. It was far enough from civilization, but there was still an access road leading to it.
And so the first nuclear reactor outside the United States was thus built at Chalk River. It was given the name ZEEP, meaning Zero Energy Experimental Pile, and it first went critical at 3:45 in the afternoon on September 5, 1945. The race for nuclear power was on, and there were four runners. Although not actively engaged in nuclear weapon production, the Canadians did supply some needed plutonium to the United Kingdom for the Hurricane test in Australia.
The competitors, the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, would each be able to claim a prize for first in the quest for power. The United States, seeing no future in uranium-based power, proceeded to investigate the complex, technically difficult design and construction of a fast plutonium breeder reactor, named EBR-1, in 1949. It was a bold step, building a reactor that ran on plutonium and would produce more fuel than it burned, but it seemed to be trying to solve too many problems simultaneously.158 At 1:30 P.M. on December 20, 1951, EBR-1 became the world’s first electricity-generating nuclear power plant. It produced sufficient power to light exactly four 200-watt bulbs.
The first civilian power station in the world was built in Obninsk, Russia, about 110 kilometers southwest of Moscow. Construction began on January 1, 1951, and the first startup was June 1, 1954. The plant had the unimaginative name APS-1Obninsk, or Atomic Power Station 1. The reactor was a dangerous mix of technologies, with both a graphite moderator and water coolant. Reactors designed using only water had a moderator and coolant that couldn’t burn, and reactors designed using only graphite had a moderator and coolant that couldn’t explode. The Soviet design had a coolant that could explode (water turned to steam) and a moderator (graphite) that could catch fire.
The reactor design was designated AM-1, or Atom Mirny 1. Peaceful atom. On June 26, 1954, the 6 megawatts of electrical power from the APS-1 were switched into the power grid, making it an official first. The reactor design would be scaled up into a design known as the RBMK. The RBMK reactor design would become well known in 1986, at a place near the town of Pripyat in the Ukraine, named Chernobyl, the site of the infamous nuclear disaster.
Great Britain, with great ceremony involving Queen Elizabeth II turning the switch, would claim title as having the first nuclear power station to deliver electricity at commercial levels. They argued that the Obninsk pile was semi-experimental, and its mere 6 megawatts hardly made it practical. The Calder Hall nuclear power plant was first connected to the electrical grid on August 27, 1956, and was officially in business on October 17 the same year. The plant consisted of four graphite reactors, cooled using carbon dioxide gas and generating a respectable 50 megawatts each. The coolant in this case could neither explode nor catch fire.
The British agenda were both hidden and mixed. The Calder Hall plant looked like a civilian power plant, and it did put electricity on the grid, but it was intended to make plutonium for the nuclear weapons program and replace the obsolete Windscale reactors. It also had a commercial purpose. Although it was still cheaper to produce power by burning coal, the government was in constant fear of an economy-crashing coal miners’ strike. By having an alternate source of electricity, the miners would think twice about shutting down the island with a work stoppage, or so it was hoped.
The Americans were only months behind the Brits in their introduction of a true commercial nuclear plant. On a site atop the Simi Hills, overlooking Simi Valley to the north and the edge of Los Angeles, California, to the south, was built an impressive test facility, named the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Santa Susana specialized in building high-performance rocket engines and exotic nuclear reactors. Lacking the inclination of other countries mentioned to build something practical, the crew at Santa Susana built a reactor using metallic sodium as the coolant. It was named, naturally, the Sodium Reactor Experiment.
Sodium has one attractive property. It is much heavier than hydrogen, deuterium, or carbon, so it does not slow neutrons down to thermal speed as they rip through it, and thus maintain fairly fast speed. If the reactor is designed with so much excess reactivity that it does not need the advantage of slow neutrons, then the fast neutrons are able to transmute non-fissile U-238 into plutonium. On the downside, sodium is opaque. Using it as a reactor coolant means that you cannot just look down into the tank and see how your reactor is doing. At room temperature, it turns solid, as it is a metal. You cannot just drain it out of the tank. Oh, and it burns upon contact with the oxygen in the air, and in water, it explodes. The smoke is pure sodium hydroxide, or lye, which eats everything from shoe-leather to aluminum girders. The hot dogs at Santa Susana couldn’t wait to build a reactor using it.
The Sodium Reactor Experiment went critical in April of 1957, and it started feeding electrical power into the grid on July 12, 1957. It provided power to 1,100 homes in the Moorpark Area. On July 13, 1959, it had the distinction of being the first reactor producing commercial power to suffer a core meltdown in the United States.159 Tetralin, an organic compound used to cool the sodium pump seals, leaked into the coolant circuit, carbonized, and blocked cooling channels. With one third of the fuel melted, the reactor was a loss, but there were no injuries. A large volume of radioactive gas was quietly vented into the atmosphere over a period of several weeks.
Canada remained actively engaged in the development of nuclear power, coming up with its own, unique designs. Canada lacked the ability of the United States to synthesize graphite or Britain’s ability to mine it out of the ground, and it takes many tons of graphite to build a classic pile. The Canadians also lacked the ability, held in the early years only by the United States, to enrich natural uranium and use less efficient moderating materials. There was only one alternative, and that was to go where the Germans had been trying to go during the war. They used heavy water as a highly efficient moderator, allowing them to burn unenriched uranium, just as it comes out of the ground. It takes a lot of heavy water, about 15 tons, to fill a reactor vessel, and it is a rare occurrence in nature, and so a plant was built at Chalk River to extract it, molecule by molecule, from river water.
Atomic Energy of Canada and Canadian General Electric gained fame for their heavy-water reactor designs, named CANDU, or CANadian Deuterium-Uranium. The first nuclear power plant in Canada was a modest-sized CANDU unit, 22 megawatts electric, in Rolphton, Ontario. It would be the first in a constantly improving series of distinctly Canadian reactor designs.
This was all well and good, but on a policy-making level the United States Government had to address nuclear matters at a different level. The McMahon Act, which had cut off our former allies from access to considerable American expertise and materials, also brought into being the United States Atomic Energy Commission, or the AEC. The first chairman was David Lilienthal, former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Vigorous, politically nimble, and idealistic, Lilienthal was an excellent choice for the job.
The missions of the AEC were bold, productive, and schizophrenic. The AEC was expected to promote nuclear power, explore its promises, but also control it with an iron hand, be a watchdog, and protect the public from it. On top of these functions, the AEC took control of all nuclear weapons, the weapons laboratories and production facilities, and every gram of uranium in the United States. The Air Force did not own or control the atomic bombs they were tasked with dropping out of airplanes. If you found a chunk of uranium ore in your back yard, it did not belong to you. It belonged to the AEC. A nuclear plant, be it civilian or military, could not buy fuel to burn in the reactor. They had to borrow it from the AEC.
The nuclear weapons labs, hastily thrown together during the war, were organized and expanded under the AEC, and they became a network of National Laboratories. The first was Argonne National Laboratory, formed from the remains of Enrico Fermi’s Metallurgical Lab in the Red Gate Woods, near Chicago. Soon to follow were Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford, and the AEC started building new facilities in anticipation of further weapons work. Labs and production facilities were mirrored, so that one could sustain a direct hit from a nuclear strike, and there would be another one just like it elsewhere. Hanford was mirrored at Aiken, South Carolina, and it was named the Savannah River Plant. It had an array of plutonium converter reactors, just like Hanford, taking coolant from the Savannah River. Los Alamos was replicated at Livermore, California, with the laboratory named after Ernest Lawrence, and the big K-25 uranium enrichment plant at Oak Ridge was built again in Paducah, Kentucky.
There were crises big and small, but the most glaring problem was a lack of the primary material for nuclear work, uranium. There was no guarantee that the U.S. could count on a steady stream of ore from the Congo region of Africa, or even from Canada. In December 1949 Lilienthal’s AEC made a creative move. As the only legal buyer of uranium, the AEC was free to set the price, and it set it artificially high. Uranium became more precious than gold, and an article placed strategically in The Engineering and Mining Journal hit the sweet spot, promising that the government would buy all the uranium that could be found. Overnight, a uranium rush was created, with miners, geologists, and prospectors sweeping the Four Corners area of the Colorado Plateau for uranium deposits. An industry was immediately created, building portable Geiger counters. Millions of counters were sold to professionals and amateur uranium hunters, and much of the country was scanned for telltale radiation on a square-foot basis.
One impoverished ex-oil geologist, Charles A. Steen, lacked the funds necessary to buy a Geiger counter, but he had some radical theories about where uranium lives. It was known that uranium had been found in vanadium mines in the Southwest, and these sites were being picked over enthusiastically, but Steen’s theory, known to his geological colleagues as “Steen’s Folly,” held that uranium collected in anticlinal structures, as did oil. He, his theory, his wife, and five children moved to a tar-paper shack near Cisco, Utah. His only tool was a borrowed diamond drill, and he put it to vigorous use.
On July 6, 1952, Steen found the most massive uranium deposit known to exist. It was in the Big Indian Wash of Lisbon Valley, just southwest of Moab, Utah. He named the mine Mi Vida, or My Life. Thanks to the fixed market for what he dug out of his mine, he was able to replace his tar-paper home with a quarter-million-dollar mansion with swimming pool, greenhouse, and servants’ quarters. He had his prospecting boots bronzed, and was known to fly his private plane to Salt Lake City for weekly rumba lessons. The AEC never again wanted for uranium ore. In 1960, stockpiles exceeded any projected needs, and the value of uranium dropped precipitously.
Being head of the AEC in those early days was rough duty, and the person holding the position usually burned out in a few years. Communist infiltrations, Soviets setting off atomic bombs, and political brawling took a toll on the hardiest of D.C. insiders. Lilienthal dropped out from pure exhaustion and a need for a better paying job in 1950. Gordon Dean stepped in, just as the U.S. Government was deciding what to do about the threat of Soviet atomic bombs. There was only one action to take: the Americans had to build a bigger bomb.
Edward Teller’s enthusiasm for hydrogen fusion weapons, or “the Super,” had seemed over the top back in ’45, but his wild ideas were getting a hard second look by late 1949. In 1950 he gladly left his teaching position at the University of Chicago to work full time on the new crash program. By this time primitive digital computers, notably the ENIAC at the Army Research Lab and the IBM Harvard Mark 1, were ready to grind some numbers. The first serious work by computers in the United States was to model some of Teller’s many ideas for hydrogen fusion bombs. In simulation, none seemed to work. Teller’s idea was to use the explosion of a standard fission bomb to heat tritium and deuterium to the fusion point, but there was too much energy loss before fusion could become self-propagating. Progress slowed as physicists threw theories at each other and tempers boiled. Teller managed to piss off everyone within range.
Into the fray waltzed Stanislaw Ulam, an enormously capable mathematician who had escaped Poland on the eve of World War II and had come to Los Alamos at the invitation of Johnny von Neumann. It was Ulam who had proven Teller’s hypothetical bombs unworkable, but he saw merit in the concept, and he had a newly modified plan. Instead of collocating the fission and the fusion components, they should separate them. Let the fission bomb go through the first stages of exploding into a plasma ball, and use the shock from the explosion to compress and heat the hydrogen isotopes into fusion. This idea would require modification, but the key invention of a sequential staging of the explosion, from fission to fusion, finally bumped the project forward.
So was born one of history’s truly unholy alliances, and of it came the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb.160 Teller had to admit that the idea was solid, but he argued that the intense front of x-rays from the fission bomb would hit the secondary device before the shock would, and it would be more than sufficient to compress a cylinder of deuterium-tritium to the fusion point. Simulation, mechanical design, and finally, construction of a test device proceeded.
In 1952 Teller, still the H-bomb diva, was able to leave Los Alamos and take possession of a new laboratory complex in Livermore, California. It was named Lawrence-Livermore. Although it was meant to take over the H-bomb development from Los Alamos, by that time the project was in the fine-tuning stages, and on November 1, 1952, the world’s first hydrogen bomb was sitting in a two-story building on an island in the South Pacific, ready to be triggered.
It was more of a science project than a weapon test, as the device was far too large to be carried in an airplane, and it required a cryogenics plant next to it to keep the hydrogen isotopes in liquid phase. The bomb was on Elugelab Island at Eniwetok atoll, topped by a 300-foot television and radio telemetry tower. An above-ground tunnel filled with helium was constructed to connect the bomb on Elugelab to the island of Bogallua, 3.5 miles away. On Bogallua turbine-driven, water-cooled, high-speed cameras were set to record light, gamma rays, and neutrons as they emerged from the exploding bomb and were conducted through the helium tunnel. In one, brief instant much would be recorded and learned from this test. The official name of the device was Ivy Mike, but the people who worked on it just called it The Sausage.
The Ivy Mike countdown zeroed at 7:15 A.M. local time, and Elugelab Island became a large, underwater crater. It no longer appears on any map of the South Pacific. Performance exceeded all expectations, at nearly 1,000 times the power of the bomb that had wiped out Hiroshima. Teller was probably correct in thinking that he would not be welcomed at the test site, and he chose to watch the explosion on the seismograph at UC Berkeley. After seeing the needle on the pen-chart recorder take a wide swing, he telegrammed three words to his colleagues back at Los Alamos: IT’S A BOY. The fireball alone was over three miles wide. The test was filmed by Lookout Mountain Studios, with a voice-over by actor Reed Hadley, and the film played for days over most television stations.
The euphoria lasted about three years. On November 22, 1955, the Soviets drop-tested RDS-37, a staged fission-fusion bomb, and ended another American monopoly.161 As scientifically interesting as it was, the development of hydrogen bombs only detracted from any effort to build a nuclear-based, civilian energy economy. Most of the money, attention, and physics talent seemed diverted to this grotesque and destructive offshoot of nuclear technology, and little useful information about hydrogen fusion was publishable.
As the world stood enthralled by the H-bomb game between the United States and the Soviet Union, Captain Hyman Rickover of the Navy kept pounding away at his dream of a nuclear powered submarine. He found himself in a technical area schizophrenically divided between fanciful, anything-goes designs and an immovable bedrock. Conventional wisdom in the late 40’s was to build a uranium-fueled reactor out of graphite, such as the big power reactors at Hanford. It was true that nobody had been killed at Hanford, but there was nothing inherently safe about a graphite pile. You could not get anywhere near it when it was running, and the failure of a pump or a valve would lead to a chain of damages. Lose water coolant through leakage or boil-off, and the reactivity of the pile would be improved, sending the machine into an exponential power excursion, as the graphite alone was a more advantageous moderator than graphite with water in it. Graphite reactors also had to be semi-continuously refueled, as the slight percentage of U-235 in natural uranium would burn down to a sub-critical concentration quickly.
Rickover correctly assumed years ago that plenty of uranium would be available, and now it was, thanks to the discovery in Utah, and so he designed the submarine reactor to use 50 percent enriched U-235. Using a high U-235 content meant that his boat could cruise the world at full speed for many years without refueling. This eliminated the dangerous step of having to swap out burned fuel in the middle of operations. It also meant that there was no need for a high-performance moderator, such as graphite or heavy water. He could use the hydrogen in common tap water to slow the neutrons, and so he could afford to waste a few neutrons. In fact, it would take as few as one bounce off a hydrogen nucleus to slow a neutron down to fissioning speed, so the slowing-down distance would be minimal. The reactor core could thus be quite small, about the size of a garbage can.
Having ordinary water as both the moderator and the coolant was a safety feature, because if you lost coolant you lost moderator, and the reactor would shut down automatically, instead of increasing power. So that the reactor would fit in the 28-foot form factor of the German submarine hull, Rickover worked on a pressurized water design. The coolant would be kept at high pressure, so it would not boil, and this allowed a minimum reactor vessel size, with no need for a steam separator at the top. The cooling water was kept in a closed loop and circulated with an electric pump. By keeping this primary cooling loop sealed, any radioactivity leak from a fuel breakdown was confined to the reactor vessel and a minimum amount of plumbing. Heat captured by the primary loop was then transferred to a secondary loop, also running on fresh water, by one or more water-to-water heat exchangers, acting as boilers. Nothing in the outer loop could become contaminated with radioactivity, and it would always be safe to do maintenance work involving the secondary plumbing.
Water boiled in the “steam generators” by proximity to the superheated liquid from the primary loop then ran a multi-stage steam turbine. The steam was then condensed and piped back to the steam generator, in a secondary, closed loop. By artful positioning of the maze of pipes, pumps, condensers, and steam generators, the entire power-plant, generating 50 megawatts of power at the propeller shaft, could be fitted in a conventional submarine hull, with plenty of room left over. There was no need to store thousands of gallons of diesel fuel or tons of lead-acid batteries in this new type of undersea vessel. Rickover’s design looked safe and forgiving, practical, and even implementable.
The design was excellent, but it was the implementation part that was hanging the project. Rickover persisted, trying every trick and ploy to get his submarine into the Navy budget. His design group visited Edward Teller, a celebrity in the high-appropriations end of nuclear technology, to beg for him to throw his weight around. Teller’s impressive eyebrows were raised by the depth of thought that had gone into the sub design. He liked it, and he wrote an urgent, insistent letter directly to the Department of Defense and Development Committee, as asked. The letter fell into a black hole and disappeared.
The Naval study group at Oak Ridge was already dissolved at this point. General Electric drifted further off into breeder reactor design, and the Daniels Pile power-station project lost speed. Rickover was recalled to Washington, back to his old post at the Bureau of Ships. He was given a lady’s powder room as an office and was named “Special Assistant for Nuclear Matters.” His job was to write an occasional report.
Considering this situation to be nothing but a test of will, Rickover proceeded to Oak Ridge to find what was left of the Daniels Pile design. The engineers on the project thought that a nuclear submarine was a good idea. If Rickover could be patient, they were working on a big power plant design, and it could later be scaled down to fit in a submarine. Rickover had an even better idea. Why not throw your funding into a submarine reactor? It would be easier to upscale a small design than to downscale a big design. The engineers saw merit in the change of direction. With his winning personality, and despite a high, whiny voice, Rickover had managed to turn the remains of the Daniels Pile program into a ship-building program at an Army lab that had just been turned over to the AEC. All he needed now was the approval of the United States Navy.
Getting the Navy to build a ship was more difficult than one might think. For this radical departure, Rickover would need the highest of high approvals. He would need the Navy’s principal expert on submersible vessels, the Chief of Naval Operations, a decorated hero of World War II, and former Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Ocean Areas. He would need approval from Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. Rickover sat down to compose a letter for him.
Preparing a letter for Admiral Nimitz was no small feat. He was not writing a letter to Nimitz, asking for a nuclear submarine. He was writing a letter for Nimitz, to be signed by Nimitz as if he had written it. That was how things were done. Such a document must go through the entire chain of command, being stopped at every step, changed, rewritten, sent back down, or simply denied. It took Rickover and one of his key Oak Ridge colleagues, Lieutenant Ray Dick, two days to build a proper draft.
After a month of rewrites, on December 5, 1947, the Nimitz Letter finally penetrated the Admiral’s protective coating and appeared on his desk. He was immediately fascinated by the proposal and its details, and quickly signed the letter. The Navy at long last wanted the Nautilus to be built. It was, however, a nuclear project, and so approval would also have to be granted by the AEC. Fairly quickly, on May 1, 1948, the project had full approval and funding. On August 2 Rickover collected his engineers from Oak Ridge and formed the Nuclear Power Division of the Bureau of Ships. First contractor was Westinghouse, receiving $830,000 to design the steam generator, a critical and distinctive component of the pressurized water reactor.
Rickover found the command structure of the Navy with the AEC wrapped around it to be frustrating and ponderous, and, in his high-strung opinion, the submarine program was dragging. His solution was to have himself named Chief of the Naval Reactors Branch of the AEC in February 1949. The move was bureaucratic artistry of the highest form, making Rickover the first man in Washington to command two different branches of government on the same project. He was able to write a letter to himself, immediately dictate a reply, and receive full interagency cooperation on all problems, big and small.
The growing nuclear group was moved into a ratty temporary building on Constitution Avenue, “Tempo 3,” across the street from the AEC, and money started to spill over the dam. Westinghouse was given enough monetary incentive that they agreed to design the entire reactor system. They bought the old Bettis Airport near Pittsburgh, tore it down, and built a pressurized water reactor laboratory.
As the engineering became more and more serious, technical problems never experienced by mankind sprang up and were knocked down one at a time. The solutions would forever affect the nuclear power industry, most notably the production of zirconium. In searching for the perfect material for the internal structures of a submarine reactor, zirconium turned up as ideal. It did not parasitically absorb neutrons, and it could withstand high temperatures without melting or sagging. Unfortunately, it was more precious than platinum, and one single reactor would require truck-loads of it. The project metallurgist had to break the news of the cost of zirconium to the excitable project head. It was $1,000 per gram.
“My God,” Rickover screamed, “$1,000 a gram is $454,000 a pound. A half a million dollars a pound!” Calming down, he asked, “So what’s the problem?” It was nice having a budget as wide as the blue sky.
The problem, in the end, was that all the zirconium known to exist could be put in a shoe box.
Rickover blinked. “Well, we’ve got to step this thing up. From now on you call me Mr. Zirconium, because I am going to figure out a way to get this stuff produced by the ton.”
Mankind had been aware of zirconium for a number of years, as its oxide, the zircon, is mentioned in the Bible, and the name is Ancient Persian, meaning “gold like.” At the start of Rickover’s program, pure zirconium metal had little industrial use, and it was produced by the extremely expensive “crystal bar” or iodide process invented by two Dutch chemists in 1925.162 Rickover found that the economical Kroll process of refining titanium had been extended to zirconium in 1945, just in time for his needs.163 Westinghouse was quickly browbeaten and shamed into industrializing the process, finding a usable zircon component in common beach sand.
Years later, when questioned by a Congressional Committee as to how in the world they managed to get the ore, machinery, and expertise to produce zirconium by the ton, the Westinghouse executive on the hot-seat replied, “Rickover made us get it.” By 1952 zirconium was being mined, milled, and produced in large quantities at low prices. It made the problem of procuring hafnium, needed for submarine reactor control rods, seem almost routine. Today, most reactor fuel assembly frames and tubes are still built using Mr. Zirconium’s metal.
Westinghouse suggested, sensibly, that the first prototype of a nuclear submarine power plant should be built with full-sized components, but spread out, in a linear fashion, so that each stage could be observed as it functioned. Fanning out the pipes and equipment in a large building would make a difficult project easier, less expensive, and more manageable. Rickover would have none of that. His first prototype would be wadded up in a 28-foot tube, and it had to be tested under water. It would, in his opinion, only waste time to start with baby steps. The first submarine reactor was built by Westinghouse and the Electric Boat Company of Groton, Connecticut, and it was mounted under water, but it was nowhere near an ocean. Those of little faith in the safety of Rickover’s dream insisted that first reactor be assembled in the desert of Idaho, near the town of Arco.164 If it exploded, publicity would be minimal, and a high order of secrecy would still be possible.
The submarine engine room was suspended in the middle of a simulated underwater environment, or a sort of gigantic fishbowl 18 stories tall and 225 feet in diameter, built by Chicago Bridge & Iron. The top secret installation was called the “Hortonsphere.”165 It took ten months to build the test facility. The reactor was given the unrevealing designation Mark A.
All the parts for this reactor and its auxiliary systems had been specifically designed and tested for shock resistance. Rickover was not going to build a flimsy submarine. To test the entire set of machinery in one exercise, a non-working version of the nuclear power system was installed in an obsolete World War II sub, the Ulua. Equipped with remote controls, the Ulua was guided out into Chesapeake Bay and dived to operating depth. A force of Navy destroyers then did what they enjoyed doing best, dropping everything they had on a defenseless submarine. Motion picture cameras running inside the sub during the severe pounding by depth charges recorded some equipment taking the shocks very well. It also showed some items falling apart, springing leaks, splattering against the wall, or simply exploding. Rickover gleefully sent the mangled remnants of supposedly shockproof equipment back to manufacturers for engineering enhancements, often with the accompanying note, “Shockproof huh? Take a look at this piece of junk!”
The result of this active testing program was impressive. It was a compact power system that was hardened against failure by depth charge. The Hortonsphere test of the Mark A was entirely successful, and it indicated that a crew could be locked into the same cylinder with a nuclear reactor without being subjected to dangerous radiation leakage, even with the boat under heavy attack. With the engine design proven, the keel of the Nautilus, hull number SSN-571, was laid with highly visible ceremony on June 14, 1952, in the shipyard in Groton, Connecticut. The President of the United States, Harry S Truman, was there, along with the Chiefs and Secretaries of the Armed Forces, the Chairman of the AEC, the Governor of Connecticut, and lesser officials of every type. Back in the third row, just out of microphone range, stood Captain Hyman G. Rickover, as pleased as can be.
The success of Rickover’s Nautilus project cannot be overstated. After the January 21, 1954 launch, and ten months of power equipment installation, the submarine first went to sea at 11:00 A.M. on January 17, 1955. President Dwight D. Eisenhower received the first message sent from the sub by the radio operator: “Underway on nuclear power.” For the next two years of shakedown trials the Nautilus would break all records, make all previous submarines obsolete, and generally perform beyond all hopes and expectations. Underwater constantly, it could outrun anything on the surface, and do so without a single radiation accident. No sailor was ever exposed to a harmful gamma, beta, or alpha particle aboard Nautilus, and it ran for 25 years of exemplary service. On February 4, 1957, the sub had logged 20,000 leagues of travel, under the sea. She was the first water-craft to cross under the polar icecap, and on August 3, at 11:25 P.M. Eastern Daylight Savings Time, the Geographic North Pole passed under the keel.166
The United States Navy, clearly seeing the benefits of this unique power source that was propelling the Nautilus, proceeded to convert much of its combined fleet to nuclear power, building reactor-driven aircraft carriers, missile cruisers, and bigger and better submarines. Rickover’s Westinghouse pressurized water reactor was certainly not the cheapest nuclear power reactor in the world, nor was it the simplest or the easiest to build, nor did it use the least expensive fuel. It was a design chosen for two reasons. It would fit in a sewer pipe, and it would not kill people standing next to it for extended periods. For better or worse, this odd off-shoot of the wide, post-war development of nuclear technology would become the most licensed, copied, and stolen reactor plant design in the world. To the nuclear engineers, it would simply be called “PWR,” or pressurized water reactor.167