Word: reactors
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Dials & Smoking. Dr. Dobbins' report noted many oddities. At sea, he said, the danger that radiation from the reactor which drives the sub may damage the crew's health is negligible, so effective is its lead shielding. But in port (where pre-atomic subs represented no hazard) the danger skyrockets: part of the shielding may be removed for nucleonics technicians to work on the power plant. Another oddity: though detectable radiation gets into the air and might conceivably build up to health-hazard proportions, it does not come from the reactor. The heavy villains are the radium-painted...
Hoping to float a nuclear-powered tanker by 1961, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Maritime Administration last week awarded design-study contracts totaling $400,000 to General Electric Co. and Manhattan's George G. Sharp marine-engineering firm. The plan is to install a boiling-water reactor in a conventional T-5 tanker, now being built by Ingalls Shipbuilding Corp. at Pascagoula, Miss. The Sharp company also is designing the first U.S. atomic passenger and cargo ship, the N.S. Savannah, for launching in 1960. The Government hopes that lessons learned in building the Savannah will make the power...
...including a smaller 5,000-kw. plant it built at Pleasanton, Calif, to get experience. G.E., like the others, thinks that if it could build three big plants in a row, it could learn enough to produce competitive power. But G.E. has no plans at the moment. As one reactor builder says: "Private industry has found that there is no money in atomic energy and no prospect of making any money...
...commercial nuclear power is so new, so complex and so costly that private companies cannot carry the burden alone. Says President Newton I. Steers Jr., of the Atomic Development Mutual Fund, Inc. (assets: $45 million), a onetime AEC official and longtime private-power advocate: "There isn't a reactor manufacturer in the U.S. who doesn't favor Government assistance to get them over the hump...
Last week the argument revolved around whether the U.S. ought to design and build an entirely new aircraft for nuclear power (time estimate: four to six years) or install a reactor to power an existing-type plane (time estimate: three years). The Navy said that it could adapt several of its seaplanes, including the experimental Martin P-6M multijet Sea-master or the old Mars, now up for sale, added that it would be safer to test a nuclear plane over sea than over land areas, where a crash might expose civilians to explosion and radiation. The Air Force said...