On April 19, 2005, a remote TV camera was sent down to see what was going on, and it confirmed that the radioactive soup had formed a lake in the secondary containment under the Feed Clarification Cell. The spill was nicely contained in the stainless steel liner of the containment structure, but it contained 44,092 pounds of uranium, 353 pounds of plutonium, and 1,378 pounds of fission products. It was the fission products that made it a problem, as no human being would ever be able to enter the room and repair the broken pipe, even when the solution was removed using existing steam ejectors. The only possibility is to repair the break using a robot, but building a mechanical plumber is proving to be difficult. THORP will possibly complete its existing reprocessing contracts, bypassing the accountancy tank, and close down in 2018.
The history of atomic accidents in Britain is thus a story of ambition, impatience, originality, and accomplishment under hard circumstances, marked by a spectacular incident the year that David Lean filmed The Bridge on the River Kwai. If you find yourself cornered by a force of Brits who rib you mercilessly about the SL-1 explosion, it is correct to remind them of the British Blue Peacock nuclear weapon, in which the batteries were kept warm by two chickens living in the electronics module aft of the warhead. It is an effective diversion, and it is almost true.[133]
Chapter 6:
In Nuclear Research, Even the Goof-ups are Fascinating
“If the oceans were filled with liquid sodium, then some crazy scientist would want to build a water-cooled reactor.”
Admiral Hyman Rickover pushed his passion for a nuclear-powered submarine as hard as he could without being formally charged with criminal intent, and he was rewarded with one of the most successful projects in the history of engineering. His finished prototype submarine, the USS Nautilus, was all that he had hoped. First put to sea at 11:00 a.m. on January 17, 1955, she broke every existing record of submersible boat performance, made all anti-submarine tactics obsolete, and never endangered a crew member.
At the end of World War II the Navy, whether it knew it or not, was ready for the improved submarine power plant of a nuclear reactor. All the groundwork was in place after the Army’s startling success in the development of atomic bombs and the infrastructure for their manufacture. As an engineering exercise, the task of reducing the size of a power reactor from that of a two-story townhouse to something that would fit in a large sewer pipe was seen as possible, but there were a couple of serious considerations.
First, there was the nagging dread of a steam explosion. It was one thing to lose a boiler or two on a battleship, but in the tightly confined spaces of a submarine everyone would be killed and the boat lost if a steam line broke. If a reactor were to lapse into runaway mode, the water coolant could flash into high-pressure steam and tear the sub in half under water. Experience was in short supply and it was hard to convince mechanical engineers that this was a very unlikely occurrence in those early years of nuclear power. The use of water in the primary coolant loop was considered too dangerous to pursue.
Second, in the early 1950s there was concern over the availability of uranium as reactor fuel. To build exactly one uranium bomb in World War II the United States depended on all the uranium ore that could be mined in the Belgian Congo and Canada. There was no guarantee that enough uranium would ever be available to power a fleet of submarines, even from multiple foreign sources working at maximum efficiency. Plutonium, on the other hand, was a perfectly good power reactor fuel and we had plenty of it. It was manufactured at the Hanford Works in Washington State. It was therefore obvious that a nuclear submarine should be fueled with plutonium, and to fission plutonium fast neutrons were optimal. It was best to have no neutron moderation in a plutonium reactor, and this meant that there could be no water coolant in the primary loop. The coolant would have to be something heavy and liquid, such as melted metallic sodium. It would run hot and thermally efficient at atmospheric pressure, putting no expansive stress on pipes and associated hardware.
Rickover strongly disagreed with this “fast reactor” philosophy. Unlike many engineers assigned to the nuclear submarine project, Rickover had paid his dues riding around in the ocean in submarines S-9 and S-48, which were feeble death-traps built in the 1920s.[134] He knew from miserable experience and alert observation that there is no such thing in a submarine as a pipe, tank, flange, or valve that will never leak. In fact, with the combined stresses of being crushed, twisted, hammered, vibrated, abused, and built by the lowest bidder, a submarine’s bilge ditch would slosh with a sickening mixture of sea water, diesel fuel, sweat, lubricating oil, salad dressing, vomit, battery acid, head overflow, and coffee. Anything in the boat that conducted or contained compressed air or any fluid was capable of leaking, regardless of how well it was welded together or tightened with threaded fasteners. The captain in an S-boat had to wear a raincoat when operating the periscope, and dampness covered every surface inside the craft. Running in cold water meant that standing in the control room you could peer down the centerline and lose sight of the end of the compartment in the fog.
The concept of cooling an engine with liquid sodium thus seemed wrongheaded to this experienced submariner. The slightest sodium leakage would react with water or with water vapor in the air, burning vigorously and leaving a highly corrosive, flesh-eating sodium hydroxide ash. Sailors could perish just from breathing the hot vapor. Furthermore, Rickover had confidence that when there is an attractive price put on a mineral, such as uranium ore, people will dig up the earth to find it. In time he would be proven correct on both issues, the difficulties of using sodium and the abundance of uranium. With the safety of the crew being his primary design factor, his uranium-fueled pressurized-water reactor became the standard for submarine propulsion and for most of the civilian nuclear power industry. With a well-trained and disciplined reactor operations crew, there was no safer way to generate power in a confined space.
There were several experimental liquid-metal cooled and breeder reactors built in the United States, beginning in 1945 with Clementine, and unforeseen problems with these exotic designs were experienced. Never was a serious sodium leakage encountered.[135]
The United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), starting work on January 1, 1947, had among its tasks the job of persuading private enterprise to build nuclear power plants. It was a noble goal, born of some very long-term projections. It was seen, even back in the late 1940s, that civilization would require more and more electrical power, and we could not generate it by burning coal forever. Coal and oil were seen as limited resources that were not being regenerated, and there were a finite number of rivers left to be dammed. Wind, used to make power since the days of the Roman Empire, was seen as too feeble and unreliable to meet the growing power demand, and solar power was limited to hot-water heaters in Florida. A plausible power supply for the future was nuclear fission, and it was not too early to begin an experimental phase of development.
A stellar committee met to come up with five nuclear reactor concepts to be prototyped and tested as candidates for the standard civilian power reactor. Uranium, the fuel of choice for all military reactors, was not seen as plentiful. Even if a hundred mines were dug, it was just another commodity that we would run out of eventually. Therefore, the ideal civilian nuclear power reactor would be a breeder, which paradoxically produces more fuel than it burns. Furthermore, the danger of a steam explosion should be minimized by vigorous application of the engineering art.
133
Although the use of live chickens, installed with a one-week supply of food and water, as a heat source was a serious proposal for the Blue Peacock (originally Blue Bunny) in October 1954, accounts of its implementation are difficult to find. Unfortunately, this specification was declassified on April 1, 2004, and it was immediately assumed to be an April fool’s joke. Tom O’Leary, head of Education and Interpretation at the National Archives, responded with: “The civil service does not do jokes.”
134
The USS S-48, built in 1921, was possibly the only submarine to find peril in a heavy snowstorm. She was returning home to Portsmouth, Connecticut, on the night of January 29, 1925. At about 6:30 P.M. off the coast of New Hampshire, the wind picked up and heavy snow started falling. With visibility zeroed, she ran onto the rocks off Jeffery Point, rolled off, then grounded again in Little Harbor. Early next morning, still stuck and listing badly, the battery compartment started taking water, and the ensuing electrolysis action broke down the salt water and released chlorine gas inside the sub. The Coast Guard picked up the crew an hour and a half later, and they were transferred to the hospital at Fort Stark for treatment.
135
At least no leakage problem while running. The USS