Elusive Dream

What had happened to the nation's glamorous program for peacetime uses of nuclear energy? In 1946, the Manhattan District had predicted that an experimental atomic power plant would be ready for testing in two years. But last week this plan was still far from realization. Grumbled Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, "It seems as though every reactor is always two years off." What had gone wrong?

Daniels Pile. Admittedly, the Manhattan District had been over-optimistic in its prediction. When it plunged into the power project two years ago, no one had made more than a start on any of the major technical problems. Skilled scientists and industrial engineers were at a premium. But the Army had a mild, sharp-nosed little chemistry professor named Farrington Daniels, who took on the job of designing a full-sized nuclear reactor to produce power. By mid-1947, Daniels and his team were well into the vast problems confronting them. They reported that the basic difficulties should be solved within a year.

Then the Atomic Energy Commission (which took over from Manhattan District) yanked the foundation from under the Daniels pile. Practical work on a $10-20 million power plant was premature, it said. The wise course was to abandon a frontal assault on the problem and switch to a low-priority program of cautious, long-range experimentation.

Loud protests greeted the decision. Even scientists thought that AEC put the horse behind the cart. They felt that power plants were not a problem for cloistered academicians, but for engineers. Some industrialists grumbled that if AEC's slow, cautious approach had been tried on the internal combustion engine, physicists would still be riding to work on their bicycles. Monsanto Chemical's Executive Vice President Dr. Charles Thomas has argued: "We can't go out today and build a power plant that is a very good power plant. But to go from A to E you have to try B, C and D. That's the way industry works."

"If You Don't Work." Last winter AEC agreed to launch another major assault on the power problem. Then, under urging from the military (who had become more & more interested in atomic propulsion for ships, aircraft, etc.), AEC decided to centralize its power projects at the Argonne laboratory near Chicago. Under the supervision of hardheaded, 41-year-old Director Walter Zinn, Argonne will choose between three different approaches to a power reactor. Construction on one of them will be started early next year.

A fortnight ago, AEC took another step. To coordinate AEC's major technical programs, it picked as its deputy general manager Production Expert Carleton Shugg, onetime general manager of the Hoboken and Brooklyn divisions of the Todd Shipyards Corp. and for the past year the manager of operations at AEC's Hanford plant.

Both steps meant that the power program was back on the tracks at last. But the delay had been costly. Said Argonne's Director Zinn: "I don't know how far away power is. The only way to find out these things is by work. If you don't work on it, it gets even farther away."

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