Hyman George Rickover was born in 1900 in the all-Jewish village of Makover in Russian-occupied Poland. His father, Abraham, was a tailor, and the Rickovers were the poorest of the poor. The future did not look bright. The expressed objective of the Russian government was to convert one-third of the Polish Jews to the Russian Orthodox religion, force one-third to leave, and kill the rest. The Rickovers chose the second option, working west across Germany in 1905 and finding passage to New York City at Antwerp, Belgium. Young Rickover, the future admiral, reportedly burst into tears at the sight of an oceangoing ship. His older sister, Fanny, reports that, "The boats were so big, they frightened him.”

The family landed in New York and moved west to Chicago. Rickover added income to his father’s tailoring work beginning at the age of 9. He would later sum up his childhood as a time of "hard work, discipline, and a decided lack of good times." While attending John Marshall High School in Chicago, Rickover had a full-time job delivering Western Union telegrams by bicycle. By fate, he was appointed a Western Union messenger at the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1916, where he met Congressman Adolph Sabath, a fellow Jewish immigrant from Czechoslovakia.

naval reactor design, the Windscale units had to use natural uranium in metallic form. No other country had the luxury of large industrial — scale uranium enrichment, and early reactor designs in other countries seemed to all rely on natural fuel. Rickovers naval reactor design also used uranium fuel in oxidized form, considered advantageous because of its high melting point. The Windscale had to use pure uranium metal, to maximize the poor reactivity of its unenriched uranium. Unfortunately, uranium metal has a low melting point, and it will catch fire in air and burn like gasoline.

A Windscale reactor simply pulled air in one side of the building with a fan, blew it through holes in the pile of graphite and fuel, and sent it up a smokestack, to cool the reactor as it converted U-238 into Pu-239. A large fiberglass filter at the top of the stack was supposed to trap fission products that could escape the reactor core. As might be predicted, on

In 1918, Sabath nominated Rickover for appointment to the U. S. Naval Academy, and he won a coveted place in the class of 1922.

Never known as one to enjoy a party, Rickover quickly gained a reputation as a silent scholar, learning to stay up long after lights-out for studying. Promptly after reporting to the academy, Rickover came down with diphtheria and missed several weeks of introductory instruction. He struggled to overcome his late start by avoiding weekends and sociable get-togethers as he withdrew to the privacy of his room. He was academically above the mean, but his abysmally poor military drilling skills pulled down the class average.

After additional education in submarine school, Rickover was assigned service in the submersible boat S-48. It was a cramped, damp working environment, and he and the crew seemed in constant danger from the failure of unreliable equipment. A sister submarine, the S-49, had recently suffered an explosion of the storage battery, and the S-5 and S-51 boats had sunk with all hands for reasons unknown. U. S. Navy submarines were risky transportation at the time, and within 40 miles of leaving port, the battery in Rickover’s boat, the S-48, caught fire while running on the surface.

Rickover was able to evacuate the crew to the narrow, wooden deck. He went back down into the smoke-filled boat to the battery hold, found the fire, and extinguished it. From that moment on, he decided to make submarines the safest and most pres­tigious service in the armed forces, in time, he would succeed in glorious fashion.

October 1,1957, the Windscale Pile-1 was running hot and the fuel caught fire. Released into the surrounding countryside were 20,000 curies (750 tbq) of radiation up the smokestack, making it the second worst reactor accident in history. It took a while, but eventually the graphite moderator also caught fire as the fuel glowed bright red. Inadequate instrumentation and cost-saving construction measures were blamed. The British nuclear establishment, shaken by the Windscale experience, improved its engi­neering and built a carbon dioxide-cooled graphite reactor named Calder Hall. This reactor produced 50 megawatts of electricity, as well as pluto­nium for bombs, and it went online on August 27,1956. It was the world s first commercial power reactor.

Canada started its own nuclear program immediately after World War II, using knowledge gained by Canadian scientists on temporary loan to the Manhattan Project. An impressive research complex was built at

Chalk River, Ontario, and a 10-megawatt research reactor came online in 1947. It was named the NRX, or the nuclear reactor experiment, and it would have the dubious distinction of experiencing the world’s first core meltdown on December 12, 1952. The Canadian reactor at least did not use graphite as the moderator, but it did use natural uranium fuel, and to achieve criticality with the low U-235 content a highly efficient moderator was needed. Heavy water, produced in Canada, was chosen, with ordinary or light water run through tubes in the reactor core to act as coolant.

The combination of heavy water moderation and light water cooling was a weakness in the design, as a loss of light water by boiling or leakage would actually improve the use of neutrons, causing the power level to increase out of control. Through a series of unfortunate errors, the power level ran away, melting a portion of the reactor’s metallic uranium fuel. Several months of cleanup were required to remove radioactive contami­nation from the failed fuel, and the U. S. Navy sent 150 nuclear-trained personnel to help. Among the workers sent was Ensign James Earl Carter (1924- ), future president of the United States during the most critical

period of nuclear power development. Ensign Carter developed a cautious attitude toward nuclear power during his duty in Canada.

The hidden advantages of Admiral Rickover’s unrealistically expensive excursion into nuclear power production, using exotic materials, relent­less testing, and a cost-is-no-object attitude began to make grudging sense in the nuclear world. To approach a nuclear power economy from a sen­sible, businesslike, cost-saving direction was possibly not the best strategy.

Rickover’s submarine was a nuclear-powered weapons platform, armed with the latest undersea torpedoes, but this warship was not built by the armed forces. Technically, it was built and owned by a civilian agency, the AEC, and to administer the project Rickover had to be a member of this new organization. The Congress, after months of intense debate among politicians, military planners, and nuclear scientists, presented the McMahon Act to President Truman. He signed it into law on August 1, 1946. This law transferred ownership of all nuclear weapons, uranium stockpiles, and research facilities from the army to the AEC. David Lil — ienthal (1899-1981), former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority and a capable public servant, was named chairman.

Being head of the AEC was rough duty in the early days, and chairmen changed every few years. Bare-knuckle politics, communist infiltration, Soviet bomb-making, and controversial regulatory stances took their toll. The existing nuclear labs, hastily built during the war, were reorganized

into a network of national laboratories. The first formed was Argonne National Laboratory, created near Chicago by Enrico Fermi’s CP-1 proj­ect. The Oak Ridge Laboratory, Los Alamos, and Hanford soon followed, and additional laboratories would be built all over the country.

The AEC made itself the only legal buyer of uranium, and by artifi­cially setting the price high hoped to increase the incentive for prospect­ing, particularly in the old vanadium mining territory in the Southwest where uranium could be extracted as a by-product. By December 1949, there was a uranium rush, begun by an article in the Engineering and Mining Journal detailing new AEC bonuses. Miners, geologists, and prospectors bought radiation counters and began sweeping the Four Corners area of the Colorado Plateau. One particularly impoverished prospector, Charles A. Steen (1919-2006), unable to afford a Geiger coun­ter, made a massive find using unconventional geological theories. He made claim to a huge, concentrated uranium deposit in the Big Indian Wash of Lisbon Valley, southwest of Moab, Utah. His single “Mi Vida” mine would produce all the uranium the AEC could use for the next decade. To replace his tar-paper shack, Steen built a $250,000 mansion overlooking the works.

On December 8, 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) delivered a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. It is known as the “Atoms for Peace” speech, and it was the tipping point for international focus on the potential uses for nuclear power in a world without war. It was a profound and noble speech, and a quotation from it follows:

To the making of these fateful decisions, the United States pledges before you—and therefore before the world—its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma—to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.

Hoping to avoid a protracted nuclear weapons race with the Soviet Union, Eisenhower tried to emphasize the possible beneficial uses of nuclear energy, with particular interest in electrical power. To back up his words, Eisenhower then launched a declassification effort, taking any documents sealed during the Manhattan Project that were not directly related to bomb production out of secret status and making the information avail­able worldwide.

THE BORAX REACTORS IN IDAHO

In 1949, the lack of uranium fuel resources in the United States was con­sidered serious, so the earliest government-funded nuclear power project was to build a plutonium-fueled breeder reactor. Walter Zinn (1906-2000), the Canadian-born head of the Argonne National Laboratory, led the design of the first power reactor, designated Experimental Breeder Reac­tor One, or EBR-1. Dr. Zinn had been in nuclear engineering from the very beginning, having worked with Leo Szilard in 1939. He had manned a control rod at Fermi’s CP-1 experiment in Chicago in 1942.

EBR-1 was built in the barren desert of Idaho, 18 miles (29 km) south­east of Arco, and it first achieved nuclear criticality on August 24, 1951. On December 20, the secondary steam-coolant loop was switched into a turbogenerator, and electrical power was generated for the first time using nuclear power. Enough electricity was generated to light exactly four bulbs. This modest triumph was added to in 1953, when analysis of the fuel proved that it was making more plutonium than it burned, thus proving the breeder hypothesis. On November 29, 1955, a slight operator error led to a partial core meltdown, which seemed the fate of a few early reactors. EBR-1 seemed unstable at high coolant flow rates, as the rushing liquid metal coolant would buckle the fuel rods and cause the power to rise. It was not the behavior desired in a power source.

In 1952, Samuel Untermyer II (1912-2001), a mechanical engineer from MIT who had worked with Walter Zinn at Argonne, theorized a bold simplification of Rickover’s compact pressurized water reactor. The PWR required two coolant loops. An inner loop ran water through the reac­tor core, transferring out the power and keeping the core at well below melting temperature. The water was under pressure, so that it would not boil. The secondary loop of water ran through a heat exchanger, or steam generator, transferring power out of the inner loop and into turbogenera­tors. Untermyer suggested eliminating the inner loop, boiling the cooling water to steam in the reactor core, instead of in an external steam genera­tor. This would eliminate much plumbing and pumping, and it appealed very much to the mechanical engineers.

Nuclear physicists were skeptical, arguing that a chaotic boiling of water in the core would result in unpredictable controls, spoiling one of the great advantages to light water moderation and cooling. Untermyer promised that just the opposite was true. The fact that the moderator was allowed to boil in the reactor core would lead to greater stability, and not less. If a steam bubble develops in a reactor core, then moderator is dis-

placed out of the core. With less moderation, the average neutron energy goes up, and the fission rate goes down. Power drops. If the water becomes too cool, then bubbles stop forming. The density of the water increases, and the moderating quality of the water improves. The fission rate climbs. Power goes up. Not only would a boiling water reactor, or BWR, be stable, it would be self-controlling, with no need to constantly adjust neutron­absorbing control rods to keep the power level steady. Lose coolant cata­strophically in an accident, such as a pipe rupture, and the reactor shuts down instantly, just as in a PWR being designed for the navy.

The BORAX-1 experimental boiling water reactor was built in 1953, and the experiments had to be performed in the summer, because there was no building housing the reactor and snow would cover it in the winter. The core tank was semi-buried, four feet (1.2 m) in diameter and 13 feet (4 m) high. The small reactor performed perfectly, proving Untermyers hypothesis. In 70 experiments, the core was put through severe runaway situations that would have surely melted a lesser design and proved that the BWR provided inherent protection from water-loss hazards. As a final ultimate test, the scientists decided to subject the reactor to the worst possible accident situation before dismantling it. They rigged the control rods to blow out the top of the core, subjecting

the reactor to prompt supercriticality. There was nothing worse that could happen to a nuclear device.

The results of this experiment were somewhat larger than predicted. The instant power increase and the resulting steam explosion carried away the entire control rod mechanism, weighing 2,200 pounds (998 kg), and released 135 megajoules of energy, the equivalent of 70 pounds (32 kg) of high explosive. Pieces of the uranium fuel were found up to 200 feet (61 m) away. Still, the reactor was no longer generating power immediately after it had exploded. This was the worst that could happen, and the BWR concept had proven to be a highly advantageous reactor design.

In 1954, BORAX-II was built, this time having a tin building over it and producing 6.4 megawatts of steam. It proved an important point, that fuel contamination in the single coolant loop would not be a problem, as had been suggested, and in 1955 a turbogenerator was added. For an hour on July 17, 1955, it was connected to the local power grid, and it provided electricity for the city of Arco, the entire BORAX test facility, and part of the National Reactor Test Station. Arco, Idaho, thus became the first city in the world to be powered solely by nuclear energy, and the experiment became BORAX-III.

Samuel Untermyer was the sole inventor of the boiling water reactor, and he was granted U. S. patent number 2,936,273 in 1960. Today there are 90 boiling water reactor plants operating in 10 different countries. It is possibly the safest power reactor design in the world.