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1972: NASA hell of a year (20)
enter Alvin Weinberg

"It happened that I was caught amid a perfect storm, a storm started by NASA, an agency I had never worked with.

The space agency had made the unfortunate decision to fly a nuclear reactor in space, to try and seduce the nuclear lobby in Congress.
Unfortunately their bargain somewhat leaked in the press, and then to antinuclear activist Ralph Nader. Needless to say, a force 12 mediatic storm soon engulfed NASA, the AEC and people like Chet Holifield, Howard Cannon and Clinton Anderson.

As much as I disliked Nader opinions, he voiced evident concerns about the safety of flying a nuclear pile above our heads.
What happened was that Nader concerns echoed similar worries I had with ground-based nuclear powerplants; and, against my own will, the storm started to blow in my direction.

Things reached a point when Chet Holifield summoned myself into his office.

He just sat and told me, bluntly

"Alvin, if you are concerned about the safety of reactors, then I think it may be time for you to leave nuclear energy"

I was speechless, and so angry that, at some point I considered having dinner with Ralph Nader, which sister Claire I knew very well (she worked at Oak Ridge).
But Claire told me Ralph was quite buzy blasting NASA at Cape Canaveral.

The day Apollo 16 launched there was a march and protest rally by campaigners at Kennedy, people with kids and hostile banners. The Cape security people kept them well away from the launch site and from the main public viewing areas.
The protests were repeated for Apollo 17 launch in December.

Of course Ralph Nader was there all the time. Shouting and passing anti-NERVA brochures.

“Someday they will be a nuclear runaway above our heads - because NASA space reactors are designed with a positive temperature coefficient.
Just pretend I don’t know what I’m talking you about ? Yeah, It took me a while to figure this stuff out.
Look: suppose the temperature of your core rises. And suppose that the core is designed so that when it heats up, the reactivity drops — that is, the reaction rate automatically falls.
That’s what’s meant by a ‘negative temperature coefficient. In that case you have a negative feedback loop, and your reaction falls off, and the temperature is damped down. It’s kind of self-correcting; the whole thing is stable.
But in the case of NERVA, that coefficient is positive, at least for some of the temperature range.
So when the temperature goes up, the reactivity goes up, too, and the rate of fission increased, leading to a further temperature rise.
And so on, until – KABOOM ! a nuclear inferno orbiting only a hundred kilometer above our heads…”

Nader then passed brochures to the excited crowd. Frightening brochures – Claire send me one.

And here’s what the brochure was telling the reader.

“It is an ordinary day in the nuclear space program, with a NERVA rocket quietly orbiting Earth at a height of two-hundred miles.

The engine is getting started. Liquid hydrogen is gushing out of the big fuel tank and pumping into the cladding of pressure shell and engine bell, and will be reaching the radioactive core about now, where it will be flashed to vapor as hot as the surface of a star.
The core temperature begin to climb, following the curve laid out in the manuals – and no, it doesn’t. The rise is too fast.

Down on the ground the computers work constantly to update the numbers; then, a mismatch in numbers of different vintages, fifteen or thirty seconds old… the NERVA core is overheating.

More hydrogen is brought through the core, that is supposed to take away some of the excess heat.

Still no respons, maybe there is a problem with a hydrogen feed line; or maybe a pump has failed; or maybe it is cavitation, somewhere in the propellant flow cylinders.

Whatever the cause it is already too late, and the core’s temperature continues to rise.
Let’s send a command to the engine’s moderator control to slow the reaction in the NERVA core, reduce the temperature that way.

Still no response. Now the temperature has gotten high enough that the fuel elements have been distorted or even melted, and it would be impossible to insert the control elements into the core.

It now unravels with astonishing speed. Power surge through the overheating core. The resistance to hydrogen flow through the core sharply increase. Bubbles build up everywhere.

The nuclear fuel assemblies are starting to break up. Pressure rise abruptly in the propellant channels, which are also beginning to disintegrate.

The whole structure of the core is now collapsing. The pressure in the reactor begin to rise, at more than fifteen atmospheres a second. And, because of the massive temperatures, chemical and exothermic reactions are starting in the core. The increased pressure inside the reactor backs up to the pumps, and the pumps’ feedback valves burst. With the pumps disabled, the flow of hydrogen through the core stops altogether. Cooling is dead.

The reactor’s main relief valves triggers, venting hydrogen to space. That offers some respite. But the discharge is brief; unable to cope with the enormous pressures and flow rate, the valves themselves are soon destroyed.

And then the massive pressure starts working on the structure of the pressure shell itself. The reactor control has been lost, and it is now melting away… then a big hydrogen explosion ruptures the pressure shell.

Now is an out-of-control glowing radioactive core that has to be abandoned in orbit !”

I never knew how on hell Nader imagined such scenario, which was rather sci-fi that realistic. Still he had at least something right: the temperature coefficient thing. And that brought me once again to the Molten Salt Reactor, which had a hugelely negative temperature coefficient. In no way could it melt... hell, perhaps NASA should rebuild his NERVA as a Molten Salt Reactor. After all, early on my favourite reactor had had an aerospace background, being invented for the infamous nuclear-powered bomber...

Whatever, as of spring 1972 Claire Nader repeatedly told me her brother was too buzzy organizing the protest rallies at the Cape - he was definitively not available to me. Neither was he over the next weeks, until a disgusted space agency ultimately dropped any talk about a NERVA orbital test. Nader just had not a single minute to give me, and much less an evening.

With perfect hindsight, that was fortunate.

Nader extremism was, and still is distasteful, its attacks on nuclear energy being, in my own opinion, irresponsible. Incidentally, he was no better attacking NASA, which he presented as a bunch of morons flying flawed nuclear piles above our heads. My reputation would certainly have been damaged !

With or without Nader, however, it was clear that I was out of tune with the power within the Atomic Energy Commission such as Holifield and Hyman Rickover protégé Milton Shaw.

I had an example in my mind: that of poor Karl Ziegler Morgan, the chief of Oak Ridge health division. He had resigned in anger the year before, when he had expressed aloud negative feelings about nuclear safety - the same feelings I felt. I was torn as much as he had probably been.

Yet I kept my anger inside and, as time passed, it happened it was the right thing to do. I saved my head and stuck as Oak Ridge director until retirement age - 65, in 1980. I in fact retired slightly before that date, in 1979.

Instead of going to the Naders (Claire or Ralph), I confessed my anger to a good friend – Senator Howard Baker.

I had become friendly with Baker, the junior senator from Tennessee. He lived in Huntsville about fifty miles from Oak Ridge, and would visit the laboratory often. I enjoyed talking to him about our work, especially since he had a good layman's grasp of science and engineering - he had studied engineering before becoming a lawyer.)

Baker, too, had hard times with the atomic lobby – but in Congress, not with the Atomic Energy Commission.

Baker had just joined the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) and suffered a little against veterans like Clinton Anderson and Holifield.
At one of our Huntsville meeting he told me
"You see, Chet Holifield has set a good example for me, or bad, depending on the outcome, but his tenacity in seeing that liquid metal reactor becomes a reality has affected me. I am trying to emulate his example for the molten salt breeder, which might prove or disprove its feasibility."

I just approved that point of view.
Baker also told me about his difficult relations with Rickover.
"You have done a good bit of work on the breeder concept." he had told the admiral, to which the later replied "We are working on a light water breeder. Your favorite lab [Oak Ridge] is working on a molten salt type." an outrageous answer.
Baker was left to answer "Not my favorite. It is the only one I know anything about. This is a material distinction that I intend to supply one day."
He had felt humiliated. He told me funding for the Molten Salt Reactor was going to be cut in 1973, and that he would fought that decision to the very end but had little clout. He also told me to stay quiet, because he would need my services more than ever.
Well, he proved to be right.
Only weeks after my summoning by Holified things started to change at an accelerated pace.

The fire NASA had lit reached such proportions that it eventually accelerated the dismantling of the old Atomic Energy Commission by newcomers like Dixie Lee Ray.

As of 1973 the AEC was agonizing and, to the surprise of many, my old foe Milton Shaw was sacked by Ray. Meanwhile I went into a kind of stealth mode, waiting for the end of the storm.

When it finally stopped, I was still the happy director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory... until my retirement in 1980, aged 65."
(from: The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer - Alvin Weinberg)
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