EMPOWERING THE NAVY

Most people would be deathly afraid to drift hundreds of feet underwater penned in a steel tube that groans and creaks as it strains against crushing pressure.

And compounding the tension by trapping a nuclear reactor in that tube would seem unthinkable, but in the fall of 1949, Robert Gordon '35 left a comfortable job at Westinghouse Electric to build such a contraption. His work over five years helped create the world's first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus.

When the Navy decided it needed a sub capable of circling the globe unencumbered by fuel tankers, it asked scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to design a nuclear reactor capable of powering such a vessel.

The proposal that came back from Oak Ridge was "fine in theory, but very radical in a practical sense," says Gordon, who has published a memoir on the once highly classified work that went into the operation.

The practical problem was that two of the metals needed to contain and control the reactor-zirconium and hafnium-were "ideal but unavailable."

"The world supply of these two then rare metals was measured in ounces," he says, and their level of purity was, well, "very inadequate." For Gordon, who was the manager charged with developing the metals, this posed, as he wryly puts it, "a major immediate problem."

Ironically, both of the proposed metals needed to help nuclear subs cruise the oceans could be found in shoreline sands. So Gordon set about looking for a way to derive pure elements from the beaches.

"The first problem was that we couldn't just melt zirconium with conventional equipment because then it would combine with the oxygen and nitrogen in the air," he explains. His team designed a new kind of melting process that operated in helium, away from the oxygen and nitrogen that could contaminate the zirconium.

But that was the easy part. Then the team had to find some mixture combining zirconium with other metals to help it maintain strength and resist the corrosive effects of the 600-degree water a nuclear reactor creates.

They didn't have much time. The cold war was beginning, and the Navy wanted to be the first in the seas with a nuclear sub, so it had imposed near-impossible deadlines on the design teams.

"We quickly went to a seven-day, 24-hour operation," Gordon says. And Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was in charge of the project, "never stopped trying to add a 25th hour to the day."

After gathering as much information as they could about different metals to strengthen the zirconium, Gordon's team met in his office one morning and simply voted on which metal to mix in. The team members went home that night hoping their brand-new melting method and unproven choice of metal mixture would contain and control the thermonuclear reaction that would power the world's first nuclear submarine.

On January 21, 1954, five years after Gordon had received a call requesting his service for his country, Mamie Eisenhower, the president's wife, christened the Nautilus as it was launched into the Thames River in Connecticut. The metals Gordon and his team had designed had stood up to every test thrown at them, and continued to control the onboard reactor for the life of the sub until it was retired 20 years later.

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