Nuclear Pioneers: EBR-I

they must realize that they may have given a demonstration of a gift to the world who will provides energy for millennia it's important because it starts that whole part of the nuclear story that leads to electrical generation using nuclear power at 123 p.m. low dissipators from the generator were connected - electricity flows from atomic energy on December 20th 1951 near Idaho Falls a small group of men led by a physicist named Walter Zinn change the modern world forever by directing electrical current - for simple light bulbs it was the first peaceful use of atomic energy experimental breeder reactor project number one or EBR one the world's first fast breeder nuclear reactor was also the first reactor built by the Atomic Energy Commission at the newly established national reactor testing station on the plains near Idaho Falls Idaho it would become the most cost efficient and dramatically effective research tool in the history of a nuclear industry everybody had proven that we we can make a nuclear bomb but it had it hadn't been proven that you could make a reactor work over a protracted period of time safely to do work ah peaceful work Walters in had worked on the Manhattan Project with nuclear pioneer and Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi Fermi had directed the effort that led to the first controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942 it was family who encouraged Zinn to explore the new concept in reactor technology Fermi who was also in Chicago at the time I was pushing Sam a little bit on his side why not have a fast reactor because a fast reactor will generate more fuel you burn so you might as well get the whole basket at once with a normal fission reaction without any breeding you only use a very small percentage of the uranium and the earth in fact the only Iranian and available to you in the earth is about seven tenths of a percent of that that could be mined the rest of it would be useless without this concept of breeding deposits in the United States and Canada I think we're pretty much unknown at that time and most of the uranium was coming from Africa so it was thought to be a fairly scarce raw material to start with which of course added incentive to decision to the concept or to the idea that if we're going to use uranium to produce energy we better use it very efficiently you have in the core the core this highly concentrated in Physiol isotopes u-233 or plutonium 239 you surround the core of the reactor with either uranium 238 or thorium 232 and any neutrons that don't get caught up or captured in a fission reaction will find their way out and be absorbed by u-238 or thorium-232 to the deuce additional fissile isotopes uranium 233 and plutonium 239 so this process can be made so efficient that you can actually breed more fissile material with tonin 239 uranium 233 then the original fissile isotopes at your fission the bulk of the research design work in testing for the EBR 1 was done at Argonne National Labs in Chicago in the late 1940s in addition to physicists walters in shows practical engineers for his team hands-on innovators who were given the freedom to invent it needed some people on his staff a lot of both things he had theoretically that coming out his ears and they could analyze the hell out of everything but they didn't have experience of domi things and I was a builder and I think he recognized that we had all these support groups and they were machining mock-ups and they were machining the uranium and they were welding the cladding so we learned as we went along and became aware of what other people are doing and so it was an education for us perhaps the most ambitious decision on EBR one was to use a liquid metal coolant an alloy of sodium and potassium called nak nak which was highly unstable when exposed to air or water using a liquid metal coolant would allow neutrons leaving the core of the reactor to strike the breeding blanket of u-238 at high speed increasing the potential to breed more reactor fuel but as Samus well it leave something to be desired if you use it a lot if you can keep the air away from it it's quite safe the knack would be run through a circulation system that had three layered tubing to ensure that no water or air could come into contact with the volatile liquid metal the loop would also be charged with argon gas so that air would not find its way into contact with the neck the only difficult problem or very demanding problem has to do with the transfer of heat from an alkali metal sodium or nak to water or steam because those two fluids cannot come in contact so very special attention has to be given to making leak-tight steam generators because your older product errs is too pristine with the heat that's being generated dbr1 and also the EPR - which ran for thirty years never incurred a steam leak we ran loops for roughly four years in Chicago so that everything was tested Emmylou in Chicago before it came out here and there wasn't any doubt that everything was going to run and I believe this was in what was ins idea he wanted a sort of a backup reliability of cooling of the reactor even during operation as well as one of a shutdown so what we used was it would normally be turned with a gravity system the coolant to the reactor was stored in a what we called the gravity tank which was above the reactor so that the coolant flowed from this tank through the reactor and done down to a drain tank a pump would pick it up there and pump it up back up to the gravity tank EBR one was designed in such a way that come hell or high water the cooling would continue in fact that reactor was only run on an eight-hour day basis we went home at night because the plan was completely unattended and the plant naturally took care of the cooling by natural convection after four plus years of design and testing in Chicago Zinn and his team moved the EBR one project to Idaho Falls the national reactor testing station had been proposed by Zinn and established on a desolate stretch of land used by the Navy during World War two to test its big guns Idaho Falls then a town of about 25,000 people was a remote outpost compared to Chicago I had the impression that the people who were here appreciated an opportunity to be participating in another kind of pioneering I don't know how sentimental people were at the time but there was a lot of rhetoric around about you know this is a this is a new enterprise this is science and there was a terrific feeling of patriotism I think also construction of the reactor building had begun in early 1950 before Zinn and his team arrived when I got to Idaho Falls the construction was nearly completed on the building the Bechtel corporation was the contractor had built a relatively conventional building was sort of special provisions for equipment and so forth all of the critical reactor reactor components and and related equipment was constructed in Chicago the first offices for the project were in the Rogers hotel in downtown Idaho Falls Zinn began hiring local workers to help build the new reactor again he sought men who could solve practical problems our local farm boys were very ingenious about figuring out how to do things I think it helped a lot out there because then the boys from the east knew all of the how the things were supposed to work but they didn't know exactly how to make them work it was interesting because everybody in them days you would come into the reactor building you go to the control air into the change room everybody wore coveralls everybody engineers along you didn't know who was who there wasn't a man up there that didn't put on the pair of coveralls and pitch in and help I'll tell you if you didn't do it you didn't say the biggest adjustment the Chicago engineers had to make was the daily 70 mile round-trip commute across the Prairie to the construction site people drove like crazy the policemen were reading the local police were afraid to be out there we would remove the governors and we would put the drill down into the speedometer so that it pegged at the top indicating that we were driving at top speed that was wrong but that's how independent we were building EBR one was part science part seat-of-the-pants practical engineering the reactor building had a complete machine shop and Zinn trusted his team to invent on-the-spot solutions we had ordered three ion chambers how does she call the central shops they came in and not on one of them worked that that Newman pet it he said well it looks like we're gonna have to take another three months for central shops to make us up to more and he stood there scratching his head he says can you make an ion chamber what the hell is an ion chamber I have no idea I didn't want ion chamber for my whole wall and he'd give me as a drawing he says how long would it take you to make him he says we need to I made two of them in five days and Abel's worked by August of 1950 the reactor was completed and its systems ready for initial testing 48 kilograms of precious uranium-235 had been fashioned into 169 pencil-thin fuel rods to form a core the size of a football surrounding the core were 192 rods of natural uranium the material that would be bred into the usable reactor fuel by neutrons escaping the core reaction outside the tank containing the rods was a thick outer blanket of natural uranium bricks forming a cup around and below the core the cup would be placed on a hydraulic lift so that it could be lowered below the reactor to replace bricks or shut down the reactor in emergency situations the Argonne National Laboratory had to make a commitment to the to the military that if they were given this material they would be able to return it in usable form which means it would have to been reprocessed if if effort been using a reactor and a laboratory built a facility specifically capable of doing that if they read if the case in Roy's initial testing began as a reactor was slowly brought up to power but the 48 kilograms of uranium proved insufficient to take the reactor critical the army just gave us what we asked for and we didn't ask for the right thing and we didn't get enough fuel to go critical so it was our own fault well we never run a fast reactor or either remember I can't run any reactor before so it was a learning experience they had to open up these fuel loans with your tubes with the random slugs inside and open them up they took the slugs out they made them a little bit larger in diameter by squashing them they actually took these little cylinders which are about the size of a diameter of about a pencil and about three inches long and they squeeze them a little bit to make them a little bigger in diameter and a little shorter and that made the reactor a little more compact plus they added some fuel like I think was about four kilograms and then rebuilds a few lungs to ship them back to Idaho the new fuel loading arrived in the fall of 1951 and tests began as a reactor was run closer and closer to critical finally in December of 51 Zinn decided it was time to bring EB r1 up to full power we didn't bring thereafter up to power until about seven o'clock at night we sent all the maintenance people home and all the secretaries and there was only as regular crew is there engineers and a few technicians and we were all sitting inside the control room watching it when they flipped the oncoming line off and flipped it on to the turbine and we had they just took it over sweet beautiful and then we went out there and wired them for light bulbs to it plug them in and they lit up then why we were generating our own power that proved as far as we were concerned that we had electrical engineer energy there was no cheering it was done the first peaceful use of atomic energy had been accomplished in the log walters in wrote at 123 p.m. low dissipators from the generator were connected electricity flows from atomic energy well in addition to seeing the effects of the lightbulbs and electricity Zen said we should go put something up on the wall and have everybody sign it and so I got a ladder and found this space up on the wall that was fairly clear and and so I wrote what he said that the first time electricity was generated from atomic energy at this site December 20th 1951 and everybody signed it that was there it was just a little bit too neutral it ought to have something that would be a little bit more attractive so I drew this devil looking figure with wind blowing out of it and so that's what was written up above there and then we went home I don't think that I realized at the time how important it was no I really don't I guess is because I was young and I hadn't been in the field long enough to know it was all about and I don't think I realized that it was really an important moment in world's history it wasn't any big deal for us I mean you know what thank God it's over see we'd spent months trying to get that damn thing up the power so when it finally got there oh hang on husband share it's gonna stay with the reactor up and running a new phase of testing began and as is the case with any new technology not everything went as predicted we started running the reactor three shifts a day just run some time in on the reactor and we realized that we were losing reactivity at two faster rate I mean you just shouldn't lose reactivity the physicists were very capable of calculating how much reactivity I lose you lose something you burn up a gram of fuel a day and there's a lot of rules of thumb and we didn't agree with any of those reactivity dropped below what was necessary to keep the core up to power a new fuel loading of 55 to 60 kilograms was ordered from the military but more critically every time power was increased the reactor would surge beyond the desired level and then return to the correct one or suspected to be a mechanical effect but it needed to be established so with the doctors in decided was - this ought to be established by experiment I remember he wrote a letter to the Commission explaining it there was a certain amount of Hazard result of me and some damage might be incurred he was given a go-ahead to do the experiment we're in the process of designing ABR - and we wanted to know if there was a mechanical effect and so we want to understand it the experiment was designed to run the reactor with the liquid metal coolant in a static State or not flowing the core would be overheated to test whether the fuel rods were distorting by bowing inward causing the fluctuating power levels and started up the experiment they were going to run it for 500 seconds and they watch the reactivity as the reactor heated up no flow remember that and finally it kept getting going up faster and faster and faster the whole thing was bowling and they're gaining speed is the power went up he's going up faster and faster on the curve so the Lakeman burger was there and he said take it down we'll take it down was not no no no man clay chur well the operator didn't know what he wanted I mean if he wanted a scram everybody knew of scram lies there was a handle and control room ceiling where any one of the seven physicists could have reached up and scrammed it nobody had the presence of mind scram it so the power went through the point of inflection started down then it turn around started back up and it started up and Ernest I mean it was going moving and so it melted some of the core the core of the reactor was badly damaged and had to be replaced which took nearly two years then notified the Atomic Energy Commission he met with some criticism later in the year when the accident was revealed to the public Zinn was quite disturbed by the fact that there was a sort of a fuss made afterwards after the experiment somewhat critical of the fact that the experiment was conducted and he was disturbed by that because he said where we run experiments to learn things and we learn things during that meltdown what happened instead of fuel melting and in forming a puddle that could go critical again the fuel actually foamed because it mixed with the coolant and it was self dispersive that was a very important feature what they learned that in fact we exploit later on when we made safety arguments for metal fuel and fast reactors but what we learned from a BR one was the beginning of the whole thought process of how to make breeders as safe as possible we discovered that you could make them quote inherently safe so that an accident like you had a TBR one could not happen could not possibly happen because it would shut itself down just in physical principles I believe as EBR one was the Kittyhawk the nuclear power industry from the standpoint of its real long-range potential which I firmly believe we haven't even really begun to scratch at this time it was important because it proved the principle that a nuclear reactor could be controlled and operated in such a way as to generate electricity reliably ultimately now I look back at the accomplishment of Walters in and in his colleagues with EBR one in today's world and it was absolutely incredible and with respect to the people themselves they were so fortunate to be at the right place at the right time to make such a beautiful contribution to the world eebee are one the world's first fast breeder reactor was an operation from 1951 until 1964 and during that time it was the basis for much of the knowledge we have today on the physics and operation of nuclear reactors it was the first to use a sodium potassium liquid metal coolant the first to generate electricity from nuclear power and the first power producing reactor to use plutonium as a fuel and at a cost of less than three million dollars for construction it may have been the country's greatest nuclear bargain it was the key that would unlock a vast atomic resource there's no doubt in my mind that the technology that these people demonstrated December 20th 1951 well in fact they wanted the true historical accomplishment said that we've ever seen you you

Channel: IdahoNationalLab

Views: 129,855

Keywords: Nuclear, Pioneers, Fukushima, engineering, reactor, careers, science, research, recherche, ciencia, wissenschaft, nucleaire, energia, energie, energy, laboratory, scientist, power, radiation, meltdown, fission, core, hazard, contamination, decontamination, biohazzard, steam, electricity, atomic, atoms, fissile, dialogue, earthquake, tsunami, cooling, systems, pumps, storage, water, hydrogen, explosion, fuel, rods, radioactive, exposure, seawater, fire, plant, control, room, transformer, evacuation, IAEA, Chu, safety, Grossenbacher, natural, disaster

Id: KncekYvqyWs

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/Unhappilydivorced]

Really? All by itself?

[u/methamp]

In other words, it was run by robots? In the 50s? Humans cause the most error in these types of situations.

[u/minorsea]

It was because it used NaK in it's reactor so when it overheated, instead of a meltdown, the reaction just stopped