Document ZJz44yxep0pvkjBa7kedZ8oyL

3 Q1,ca,eM "otom-tpUM|no un" for rezeorch Is this otomte particle* whirl ot eitionomltol speeds In chamber urut,?-' fitent cyclotron ot Berkeley (lMv ot CalfU Charged mb- upper 184-fn. poleplece. Hugo magnet weighs thousands el ti ^ rather than enriched uranium. Most fmportent, the piles will run cold rather than at a high temperature, which would permit utilization of their tre mendous power output--even though this meant throwing another million kilowatt* or bo (as heat) into (he Columbia River. *On this Job, ACC's overriding ob jective is a quick and sure increase in plutonium production, with no chances taken. Advancement o( the nuclear art is a very secondary objective. Construction of the new plant at Hanford was one of the first decisions . made by the Atomic Energy Commis sioners when they took over from the Array. Out through much of last year, the project was seriously bogged down. Last September the bottleneck was broken. General Electric Co subcon tracted the design of the chemical sep aration plants to Kellex Corp, the M W Kellogg subsidiary that designed K-2S at Oak Ridge. At the same time an other subcontract was placed with Standard Oil Co (N. I.) to work out alternate designs for several particu larly tricky phases ol the chemical plonts. Still a third atternoiive is be ing explored by the Clinton Laboratory at Oak Ridge. Today, design is well advanced. GE's construction subcontractors already have preliminary work under way. By the end of the year construction will be going full blast, and it'll continue at a high rate until it begins to taper off in 1951. Materia] procurement for the new plant is already moving. HOW ABOUT ATOM POWER? The key fact about development of useful power from atomic energy is that no one in the U. $. needs atomic power very badly. . What atomic energy could provide in the near future, most technicians guess, is a practically unlimited source of electric power which would be a little cheaper, perhaps (at the busbar) than power from coal--more expensive, almost certainly, than hydroelectrio power. Ita more .peculiar economic characteristic would be that, as far as fuel is concerned, it would cost about the same anywhere--on top of the Andes or in New York City. No Urgent Heed. In a nation that possesses a 2000-year reserve of coal, such a prospect is not terribly exciting --economically speaking--to anyone outside the fuel business. Conceivably, it might.change the cost factors in plant location of some U. S. electroprocess industries--moving them closer to raw materials or markets. However, the University of Chicago's Cowles Commission, which has been making a study of transportation-free 4-mill power, thinks not U is considerations like these, rather than technical factors, which set the lime scale for useful atomic energy. You cen find competent technical peo ple who arc confident that on a work-itout-os-you-go-slong engineering basis they could deliver to you, if you .wanted it, a commercial-site reasonably eco nomical power plaot along about 1952. But the A EC doesn't want it much/fa The commission is scheduling iu power^ work to produce on economic plent y some lime around I960. Throughoot ; the Sixties it looks for steady Installs-(! lion of additional plants, so by 1970'] atomic energy might be supplying 20. fa 25% of the country's power needs . Si Atom Plants Abroad? The rest of .3 the world, however, is not likely to be:q so casual about power possibilities.^ The Cowles Commission thinks thst ox j the centra) European plain--the Bil-.'jJ kans and western Russia--there's s j combination of developed Industry, fudvj scarcity, and expensive transportatioaj that makes atomic power attractive. The coal-starved British, who hsrs.'^ budgeted about |I20 million for stem j work, ore believed to be stressing power,^ development in their program. So the first substantial power pltalt may well appear beyond U. S. borders, ' The one exception to U- 5. indii** s ference about power plants may tun .fij out, curiously enough, to be the Air Force*. Their Nuclear Energy f^ Propelling Aircraft project is built on Gj the long-jump psychology ihs* *"*.8 from a wiggle on an oscilloscope to ^ 1939 to Hiroshima in 1945. With Fam ^ child Engine and Airplane Co as priori- pal contractor, the object is to try to j build right away an atomic power planl-Jj for an airplane. j Pile_4>reicnt end Planned. The ?*i_ nuclear reactor in existence todaj Vj that is capable of delivering its energy AH output in usable form is the fsri 8* W iron reactor ot Los Alamos, N. M- TW 3ii" fueled with pure plutonium, do moderator, is essentially a ggill*) bomb. -jfoj reactor, which went into opera- gl'in November 1946, delivers its Serf? * ^"'r^ h'th temperature, ^.suitable for power generation. It bribed at Los Alamos as "a watch- at a high enough power level to provide a practical demonstration of the op erating problems to be expected in a commercial-site plant. During the past year a number of the technical problems standing in the way of power production have come close to solution. purpose affair to be rigidly conserved? Or is it plentiful enough to be regarded at a major power resource? Uranium itself la a fairly plentiful metal, but only one part in 140 is nsturally fissionable. If that were all, otomie energy would soon be a rarity. But when fissionable U235 Is con model ol a power plant" -ft, tecond high-temperature pile due ,, '(boo in Is one at the Brookhaven jfttesil Laboratory on Long Island. pjjg Is now under construction and il%M b completed next year. U may teruiLy deliver a, little electrical AEC hasn't decided yet B decision Is more o public reinihsft a technical one. The Brooktiven pile is simply a quickly designed Pito Technology. On the problem of heat-transfer fluid, of which much was heard a year ago, It now looks as 1/ the Smyth Report's suggestion of liquid sodium, alloyed with potassium to lower its melting point, would turn out well. Sodium doesn't absorb neutrons, does not become seriously radioactive, has good thermal properties. It docs re act violently with water. However, a special heat exchanger--complicated sumed in a reactor, producing power in the process, some of the U230 is transmuted into fissionable plutonium. This increases the supply of fuel. Then the question is: When you burn a pound of U235, how much plutonium do you get? Suppose you got only half a pound. Burning that half pound would produce a quarter pound, and so on. You'd end up able to use only one part in 70 of the total uranium. twf.to produce neutron beams and inform irradiations. It Is pretty much sj&py of (he existing pile at Oak gflje--air cooled, carbon moderated, &kd with natural uranium. It will operate at a higher power level, how ever. than Oak Ridge's 1000 kw, and Its ling sir will emerge hot enough to but workable--hat been developed to obviate trouble from this source. Nor does the problem of structural materials for reactors now look as ap palling as it did a year ago. .Metallic .titanium is being considered e a major load-carrying material that could re sist pile temperature, which may Still not good. But suppose you get a pound of plutonium out for each pound of fuel burned. Then you can eventually util ize all the uranium. And if you could get out more then a pound of plu tonium, you'd have a "breeder pile" that would constantly produce extra (enerste sieam. The limit on Its tunpersiure is the heat-resistance of v'tbe aluminum jackets that protect the Minium from corrosion. y Space it being left in the design for i'keai exchanger. But any power gen.waled won't even he enough to run wind-tunnel-sice blowers that force cool- ling ir through the pile. ^.The first reactor that can reasonably Jj-jbe considered a pilot plant for power eventually run as high as 2000 to 2500 deg F, some think. AEC metallurgists are studying structural properties of e lot of un familiar metals, such as beryllium and zirconium, that in the past hove been interesting mainly, aa alloying agents. Some of these here nuclear properties that make them valuable in themselves. Some of this work is already pro ducing valuable byproducts. Discov fuel for use In other piles. The same question applies to thori um, which is more plentiful than .ura nium. Exposed to a chain reaction, thorium is transmuted to Gsslonable U233. If one-to-one breeding is pos sible, this fact adds thorium to the potential energy supply. Otherwise it is just a scientific curiosity. What About Thorium? So what about breeding? Theoretically, it U possible. Mencrttion is the Zinn pile at the Ar/(fwme National Laboratory in Chicago. K,<\Cmstruction work on this only awaits "fyfiasl AEC approval. As a matter of ,Argonne was ready to start a year ery of ways to roll and extrude beryl lium, for instance, has resulted in Im proved windows for X-ray tubes. Similarly, the elaborate chemical n> gineering studies involved In the de When a U235 atom splits, U throws out, on the average, something over 2.2 neu trons. One of these is needed to split another U235 atom and keep the chain reaction going. If another neutron is jto. It will take a year and half to sign of the now Hanford plutonium used to transmute a U238 atom into jnfvo year* to build. plant are expected to work out separa plutonium, that leaves a margin for ' The Zinn pile's primary purpose will tion methods basically applicable to losses--if the losses are small enough. research, but it is being designed to power plants as well as to plutonium AEC*s guarded comments Indicate b workmanlike job of getting the producers. that in present piles the neutron losses .,,$pber out in usable form. It will be Fuel Breads. Foal. During the past are too great to permit breeding. But fast-neutron reactor using concen year, too, declassification of informa it ia believed that the new piles now trated fuel, will operate at a fairly high tion on the breeding problem has clari on the drafting board, would be efficient pwrer . level, and at a temperature fied one fundamental question: Is nu enough to breed fuel. ,v^?Prb1e to that of a tteom plant. clear fuel so scarce that atomic energy If it works out, that makes atomic V-., Two retetors specifically designed to mutt always be regarded as a special- energy e thousand-year resource. -UdPreduce electrical power are on the pSyAEC docket, but neither is in a very edition. One is the Daniels first projected by the Manhattan ^District In 1946, end then scheduled for ^topieilortihia year. Th* other straight power project ft Central Electric reactor scheduled Ato he built at the Knolls Atomic Power jj^hoiatory near Schenectady. No inJprtBstiojj has'been furnished about this NOHMHITARV DIVIDEND One immediate nonmilltary dividend from the aiom program U tbo avail, ability of cheap, plentiful radioisotope* ("tamed atoms"), baste tools tor measurement and obaervetfen. They are being Died today in nearly every branch of telence and, Increasingly, in wide oreaa of industrial experiment. To eover out-of-pocket eott to the government, AEC makes s nominal charge for the Isotopes. For cancer work, they ore furnished free. Me except that it .will . eventually run 66 |H6) POWER May