Engineer Memoirs
I projected not only the positions down at the plant level, but staff positions that we
would have to fill in the Office of the Chief of Engineers and elsewhere around the
world that we would need to have somebody that had education in nuclear energy.
The net result was many more officers than they had been talking about sending to
graduate school. Once he agreed to it, we didn't have that much trouble from the
Assistant Chief of Engineers for Personnel in supporting this.
Sturgis himself, I would imagine, was interested, but I don't remember any contact with
him. I remember when we had the dedication ceremony for the reactor at Belvoir,
Secretary [Wilber M.] Brucker of the Army and Mr. [Lewis] Straus from the Atomic
Energy Commission came down and officiated jointly.
Q:
That's a pretty momentous occasion.
A:
That was, and I had to arrange it.
I'll tell you an amusing story. We wanted this ceremony to demonstrate the military and
peaceful uses of nuclear energy. For the military use, we got a radar, one that would
twirl around. For the peaceful uses we got a printing press from one of the topo units.
We put them up, one on either side of the platform, so that when the switch was
thrown, these things would start running.
I told Lampert that we had it all set up, and in case the plant wasn't running, we would
just use the power from Fort Belvoir to run these things. He thought that was terrible.
He said, "This is supposed to be a demonstration of a nuclear plant." I said, "Well, all
right, but I want to cover the contingency that we may have a momentary outage or
something. We wouldn't want to have all these important people there and have them
throw the switch and there be no juice." Actually, the plant was running and there
wasn't any problem.
Q:
I guess preparations for that were pretty frantic--24-hour coil windings and stuff like
that?
A:
They had troubles. They had a short in the winding of one of the poles of the generator.
They had to pull the thing and take it to Baltimore.
I think General Electric supplied the generator. But it might have been Westinghouse.
It was one of those two big companies. They had to pull the thing, take it up there, and
rewind the coil. The work involved a process of drying. When a generator is made, they
use an epoxy to cement the whole thing together, because when it is turning at high
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