Abstract
Lacking core values
In 1942,1 worked on the Manhattan Project, serving on the Enrico Fermi/Walter Zinn team as custodian of special materials. In one particular case (which I recall in my 1999 memoir Pursuit of Plutonium), I detected and reported a gap in the assembly of the first pile reactor, which if not remedied might have resulted in an unfavorable outcome and possibly the abandonment of this approach to the fission chain reaction, and the ensuing efforts to develop plutonium-production and power-generating technologies.
It might also have steered me away from a 30-year career in nuclear materials management.
“A key incident,” I wrote, involved Westinghouse cubes [1-inch cast uranium cubes]. The incident was “vital to the success of the experiment and to the acceptance of the importance of inventory control.
“The urgency of completing the pile required that a night shift be established to continue the piling of the graphite bricks into which the uranium oxide and metal lumps were embedded. The metal cubes, being of greater contribution, were to be reserved for the central core area of the pile.
“I missed the whale, but I hit some guy from Greenpeace.”
“Dr. Alvin Graves was in charge of the night shift of high school student laborers, who stacked the pile. Dr. Graves and I operated on a drawing account basis. I set out the number of boxes of cubes he estimated he would need for the night, and in the morning I would find his signed receipt for the number used, which I then reconciled with the number remaining.
“On one morning the number removed from the boxes was far less than the number signed for, and I reported the discrepancy to Dr. Zinn, who then ordered the last few layers of the pile torn up. This disclosed that a large region of the core consisted of drilled graphite blocks with empty cavities that should have been filled with cubes. Undoubtedly, this would have thrown off the calculations for predicting the behavior of the pile.”
Hedgesville, West Virginia
Please see pages 54-55 for more anecdotes about the first chain reaction, the sixtieth anniversary of which will be celebrated on December 2.
Make that 11
Your summary of 10 of the inter-national treaties to which the United States does not subscribe (“Going It Alone,” July/August 2002) is shocking enough. Unfortunately, there are more. Another important treaty was described by Ellen Goodman in the Washington Post and reprinted in the Guardian Weekly, July 18-24, 2002. She wrote:
“Twenty-three years ago America helped the world community write an international women's bill of rights. Since then 170 countries have ratified the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
“The treaty has been a tool in the long, slow evolution toward women's human rights.
“But who has not ratified CEDAW? Countries like Somalia, Sudan, Iran. And the United States of America.
“This year, I thought we would leave such embarrassing companions behind. After all, the Bush administration offered a tepid ‘general approval’ for the treaty early on. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee finally held hearings in June.
“But on the way to ratification, women's rights took a right turn. First, the conservative watchdog John Ashcroft declared that the treaty needed more ‘study.’ Then last week, Colin Powell made it clear to Joe Biden, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that the State Department is not cramming to finish this ‘study.’ Powell's letter placed the women's rights treaty behind 17 others waiting for Senate approval.”
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada
More money needed
Michael S. Reidy, in his review of Science, Money, and Politics by Daniel S. Greenberg, (July/August 2002 Bulletin), quotes from an unnamed senior research physicist at Yale who wrote in the New York Times that Congress “has cut the budget for basic research every year since the 1970s.” Reidy remarks that “a cursory glance at budget documents would have demonstrated how far such rhetoric strayed from reality.” This raises the question, How far from reality? The answer: not very far.
As the author of that op-ed (“Wanted: American Physicists,” July 23, 1999), I should point out that my piece was concerned with the fact that fewer and fewer Americans were going to graduate school to study physics, and that as a consequence classes at many of our graduate schools, including some of the best known, were made up primarily of students from abroad. The op-ed attempted to explain why Americans had become disillusioned with academic physics as a career.
In that context, it is clear that the quote refers to basic research in physics at universities. If one looks at the data, it may not be literally true that the budget has been cut every single year. But the trend is unmistakable. Funding for the Energy Department's Office of Science, which supports more basic research in the physical sciences than anybody else, has lagged badly, especially during the 1990s. There are also serious problems with physics funding at the National Science Foundation, a fact that foundation director Rita Colwell has explicitly acknowledged.
Reidy echoes Greenberg's analysis when he states that “the singular goal of science policy for the past half century–the pursuit of more money–has been won.” The only battle that may have been won is that the budget for the National Institutes of Health has been doubled. This should be applauded. But for other important areas of science, including much of physics, funding has been, and continues to be, inadequate. I admire Dan Greenberg as a journalist, and I agree with him that science and politics are so closely coupled that scientists can ignore the political arena only at their peril. But the contention that claims of a financial crisis are nothing more than self-serving myths is grossly at variance with the experience of scientists actually doing research.
American Physical Society, College Park, Maryland
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Update
More head trauma
The hole discovered earlier this year in the vessel head–the top of the container that houses the reactor core–at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant was bad, but it could have been much worse.
Leaking coolant water had caused an accumulation of boric acid that, over a period of years, ate through the six-inch-thick carbon steel vessel head. As the Bulletin reported in the July/August 2002 issue (“Nuclear Safety: Uh-Oh in Ohio”), “the only thing that contained the radioactive, highly pressurized coolant water inside the vessel was the thin skin of stainless steel cladding.” That non-corrosive lining, about a guarter of an inch thick, had begun to bulge outward because of the pressure inside the vessel; if it had been breached, a serious loss-of-coolant accident would have resulted inside the containment dome.
Plant licensee FirstEnergy Corp. downplayed the possibility of that happening. But now it appears that the reactor's safety was more compromised than first believed: Metallurgical laboratory analysis of the damaged head has revealed that not only was the liner thinner than previously known, but the cladding also has a crack three-eighths of an inch long and of an undetermined depth where it was exposed to the corrosion.
Despite this revelation, the congressional inguiry into the original incident at Davis-Besse has guietly ended, although the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will continue its investigation.