Burning Metal, Part 2

Those Magnificent Men and their Atomic Machines

Burning Metal: The Los Alamos Molten Plutonium Reactor Experiment and the History of the Fast Breeder

Part II

Back to Part I

With special thanks to Prof. R. M. Kiehn

Note on Notation

Money is going to be talked about a lot, but the value of the dollar has been different from year to year. In each case, unless otherwise specified, values will be given in the amount for the year in question, followed in parentheses by the equivalent value in 2011 dollars.

Change of Plans

But, as Los Alamos was preparing the third LAMPRE fuel loading, the nuclear energy landscape was changing.

In 1958 the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had set a target of making nuclear electricity cost-effective in regions with high fuel costs. In 1962, they decided they had just about reached that goal. Four private nuclear reactors and two joint public-private projects were producing power by 1962, and another ten were under construction, most of them Light Water Reactors (LWRs). In a landmark report to the president on civilian nuclear power in 1962, the AEC recommended that light water technology be handed over to the private sector. There were obviously further improvements to be made, but they would be evolutionary and incremental, and thus the domain of private enterprise rather than the AEC labs. Properly encouraged by the government, the light water reactor would be cost-competitive with coal and gas by the 1970s except in very low fuel cost areas. The AEC would focus instead on advanced reactor concepts, particularly breeders.

Burning Metal, Part 1

Those Magnificent Men and their Atomic Machines

Burning Metal: The Los Alamos Molten Plutonium Reactor Experiment and the History of the Fast Breeder

Part I

With special thanks to Prof. R. M. Kiehn

Note on Notation

Money is going to be talked about a lot, but the value of the dollar has been different from year to year. In each case, unless otherwise specified, values will be given in the amount for the year in question, followed in parentheses by the equivalent value in 2011 dollars.

In the Beginning

When the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was formed in 1947, it inherited from the Manhattan Project a sprawling empire of factories, test sites, laboratories, and development programs, organized around one purpose: the design and manufacturing of nuclear weapons. And for the first decade of its existence, that was the AEC's primary purpose as well. But the hopes of most of the scientists and engineers, and the citizens who paid their salaries, were not of weapons – they were of reactors, nuclear reactors to provide cheap, clean, abundant energy, energy to propel ships and planes, energy to free man from his age-old burden of labor, energy to bring permanent prosperity to the world.

In 1954, the AEC began to turn those hopes into reality. Although power reactor research had started at a low level before the AEC had even been formed, the requirements of national defense had limited most work to military applications such as naval propulsion. President Eisenhower's “Atoms for Peace” speech in December of 1953, along with growing pressure from the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, led to a steady expansion in the AEC's funding for civilian power reactor research. Developing a power reactor would be an immensely difficult, expensive, and time-consuming task. The AEC was well-armed for the challenge, with unprecedented public funding and the lion's share of the nation's talent in nuclear science and engineering. But what would a power reactor actually look like?

The reactors at Hanford, built during the war to make plutonium for bombs, were adequate for their task, but clearly unsuited to generating electrical power. And no one really knew what a power reactor would look like – after all, none had been built before.