A Baby Is Born

In the little (pop. 600) town of Shippingport, Pa. this week, a man in a white protective suit will step alone into the spotless puzzle box of the world's most powerful atomic reactor. After he shuts twelve one-ton doors and gives the final signal, giant control rods will lift slowly out of the uranium reactor core to start a sustained chain reaction. At the moment the reactor "goes critical," a flow of 508DEG F. water will pass through the core chamber, starting a nuclear process that eventually will produce steam to generate electric power. After three years and $110 million spent by the U.S. and the Duquesne Light Co. on the Ohio Valley plant, the nation's sluggish private atomic energy program will show its first practical results.

Shippingport will be the first U.S. reactor to produce commercially on more than an experimental scale. When full power capacity of 60,000 to 100,000 kw. is reached around the first of the year, it should supply customers of the Duquesne Light Co. with enough electricity to light between 100,000 and 167,000 homes. It will still not be commercially competitive.

Compared to coal-driven plants in the Ohio Valley, which sell electricity at a rock-bottom 4 mills per kwr-h, or the national average of 7 to 8 mills. Shippingport power will cost as much as 65 mills per kw-h because of the high construction cost. Duquesne will tap the power only in peak-load periods.

Safety First. The high cost of Shippingport is due greatly to the need to test several versions of similar equipment to find out which is best for commercial power production. But for the AEC and dozens of private subcontractors that built it, Shippingport will provide the first really thorough investigation of nuclear plant safety--the main drawback so far to production for profit.

Though actually a model T compared to future reactors, its pressurized (2,000 Ibs. per sq. in.) water reactor is similar to the safe, older model that drives the atomic submarine U.S.S. Nautilus. To make absolutely sure that no radioactive water ever escapes, its 100,000 ft. of pipes are linked by 20,000 welds, each checked by X ray and coded to tell which worker made it on what date. The ordinary safeguards against the escape of radioactive rays are backstopped by the 5-ft.-thick walls of the plant.

To the expense of such caution was added the extra costs of a deliberate slowdown on construction to recheck everything in the process. For example, the 58-ton reactor core was lowered into place as slowly as three-thousandths of an inch at a time, a job that took 24 hours. But for Navy Rear Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who closely checked the building of the reactor at Shippingport (and of the Nautilus), the whole point was to make the plant "safe enough for my son to play in." To persistent questions from businessmen about the high costs, Rickover has one stock answer: "You people are asking for conception without sex."

AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss last week tried to head off mounting congressional criticism on the slowness of U.S. reactor development. Dedicating the AEC's $17 million experimental sodium reactor in the Santa Susana Mountains near Los Angeles, which will supply 6,500 kw. of electricity to the Southern California Edison Co., Strauss indicated that more Government money would now go into such advanced plants. Present plans already call for a $1 billion investment by the mid-1960s "in some 18 or 20 nuclear power plants serving homes and industries across our nation."

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