Word: reactors
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pumps to circulate the high-pressure, radioactive water had to have perfection never demanded before. The shield to enclose the radioactive parts was a formidable problem. So was the control system whose function is to keep the reactor from destroying itself and the submarine...
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...
...this time the word had spread that something extraordinary was centered in Tempo 3. As confidence in Rickover grew in the Navy, a second nuclear submarine, the Sea Wolf, was scheduled, and General Electric was commissioned to build a different reactor for it. Named SIR (Submarine Intermediate Reactor), it will use neutrons of "intermediate" speed and molten sodium as a working fluid. It is now taking shape near Schenectady...
...spite of all the uproar, he had not spent much of his thinking time on the selection board. Too much was happening. The Nautilus was growing fast. So was the Sea Wolf. In the blank-walled building on the Idaho desert, a crucial moment was approaching. The prototype reactor was almost complete; preliminary tests had been encouraging. On March 31 the AEC announced that the reactor had "gone critical." In AEC language, this means that it was producing power...