Engineer Memoirs
could go in and check the oil level in the morning and look at it again at night. Here we
were: we could save on transportation of fuel, but we required a big crew.
The point of all this is the following: we never came up with a package power plant that
was just a package that you could pick up and put somewhere and it would run itself.
Q:
The Belvoir plant was initially named optimistically APPR1.
A:
That's right, and that was the goal. I think two things: one, the approach to the
program didn't focus enough on the amount of development that would have been
needed to achieve a true package plant. It was done on the cheap; maybe that's all the
money they had. But they were also trying to demonstrate economy, don't forget.
Second, the technology was never there. One of the things they were counting on was
that the aircraft nuclear propulsion program was spending millions. There was a feeling
among all of us that we would get all the spinoffs from that. If they could make a plant
that would go on an airplane, we would get all that technology, all the development on
the fuel, the development on the operating system, the instrumentation, and it would
be very easy to adapt that to the package plant.
The aircraft nuclear propulsion program was a bust. It was not a good idea, and they
finally woke up to the fact and stopped spending money on it. So that source of
unlimited R&D [research and development] went away.
The other thing is I don't think the technology was there. If you look at the trend in the
nuclear industry, they have gone to very big plants because only in a big installation can
you afford all the complex instruments that are necessary to make sure the thing
functions. If you have a huge plant, then all this instrumentation doesn't represent a
large fraction of the cost. If you have a small plant, you still have to have all these
instruments, and it becomes a very large factor in the cost of the thing.
It didn't pan out. The technology wasn't there. I remember having a considerable
argument with Bill Gribble about this. I kept saying they weren't spending enough
money on this. He kept saying that I had inflated the personnel numbers, that I was
requiring too many different people. I said, "Well, I am not requiring any more different
people than any civilian power plant has. They have all these people. If you are going
to put them all up at the end of nowhere in Alaska where nobody can get there for nine
months, you are going to have to have them on the site because if something goes
wrong, and you are relying on this plant, you are going to have to have somebody there
to fix it."
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