Engineer Memoirs
Q:
Did you design the course for operators yourself?
A:
Yes, and no. The outline of it, I did. I got Admiral Rickover to let me visit Arco, Idaho,
which is where he had the prototype for the Nautilus. He had built a plant out there in
Idaho Falls, actually, at the National Reactor Testing Station. He had set up his training
course there.
He wouldn't let anybody go there because he had an absolute thing about not bothering
his people. He didn't want a stream of visitors diverting the attention of his
management out there from the work.
But he did let me go and I went out and saw what he had done. The course involved
a lot of academic work to get people knowledgeable about nuclear matters, chemistry,
steam, and so forth, although, of course, the Navy used a lot of steam. But the course
included thermodynamics and all that. The second half was hands-on experience with
the Nautilus prototype reactor.
I came back from that trip and made up the idea for our course. To get going, we
decided to contract with the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The brother of Dr.
Gil Quarles, who was with the Corps of Engineers for many years as a civilian science
adviser to the Chief, was the dean of engineering of the University of Virginia at
Charlottesville.
We asked three schools to submit proposals--Virginia, North Carolina State, and
maybe Penn State. I am not sure. Penn State and North Carolina State were very much
into nuclear power education. Virginia was just starting. One great virtue of Virginia
was its proximity.
In the end we picked Virginia. We sent the crew members down there in the summer,
and they had about two months of purely academic work. There were two points.
First, if you were going to get enlisted men to do this, we were talking about
understanding more about mathematics and more about physics and more about
chemistry and more about mechanical engineering than most enlisted men in the Army
knew. We weren't prepared to take just a high school graduate. We wanted a person
that had had an education equivalent to having completed either a freshman or a
sophomore year in college. The only way to get them there was to have this course.
When that was finished, we brought them back to Belvoir, where the plant was being
built. We put them in the plant, and they started working as members of the
contractor's force, because the contractor was responsible for doing the 700-hour test.
What we wanted to do, which was exactly what Rickover had done--he had pioneered
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