Word: nautiluses
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...service. He has wooed, bullied and won the Atomic Energy Commission in its secret strongholds. He has made great industrial corporations jump and like it when he cracks the whip. Some high Navy officers still deplore intense, single-minded Admiral Rickover, but when the first atomic submarine, the Nautilus, slides down the ways at Groton, Conn, on Jan. 21, the U.S. Navy will never be the same again...
...Nautilus. By Rickover's hard-driving methods and the work of his equally hard-working staff, the nuclear submarine (named Nautilus* almost by necessity) made spectacular progress. The hull and the radical propulsion system were designed simultaneously. Most iffy item, of course, was the nuclear reactor itself...
Engineer Rickover freely concedes that the reactor of the Nautilus will not be the best conceivable. "Sure," he says, "the scientists can think up thousands of reactors. But the Navy wanted a nuclear submarine, and it wanted one fast. We picked a simple type of reactor that we knew a lot about already. If we'd waited for the scientists, we'd still be fooling around...
...simple reactor of the Nautilus is not simple by normal standards. Its official name is STR (Submarine Thermal Reactor), because the neutrons that are its "fire" are slowed down to the "thermal" speed of molecules in everyday matter. Basically, it is a "core" containing enriched uranium,† cooled by ordinary water that is kept by high pressure from turning into steam. The water comes out of the reactor hot and radioactive. Tightly shielded against radiation, it goes through a "heat exchanger" (a kind of boiler), where it turns a second batch of water into high-pressure steam. The steam. which...
...Seawolf, which will take ten months to finish, will be powered by an improved atomic reactor of higher speed than that used on the Nautilus. Both boats, Secretary Anderson explained, will be faster and more powerful than any undersea vessels ever built. Said Anderson: "For the first time in history, the Navy will have the ideal vessel to send under the sea to combat enemy submarines lurking in the depths...