Notes from Simpson and Levy (each wrote a book)

These guys are not always correct, but they have a very high batting average. Nuke engineering students should look at these books from time to time in their college library. I check them out now and then, and I'm placing notes here for reference to other entries in this blog. Simpson and Levy each made lots of dough, but that does not mean that the field is open today, certainly not for all; but then , it never was open to all in terms of really cleaning up the bonus dollars.

Now, when the bright nuke graduate goes for job interviews, and even before, he should think a bit of what he will not ask, but what he should be looking for. Here is one common sense suggestion:

"Here I am, a bright young nuke. I will be putting a lot of great ideas into this company. Who will get the bonus money if my ideas pay off?" Of course, this is not to be mentioned during the job interview.

John W. Simpson, Nuclear Power from Underseas to Outer Space, ANS 1994.

A very thorough book, not without errors.

Contributions from about 30 participants. It was edited by a freelance writer to render it “… as readable as possible for a broad audience.”

From page 79:

“AI-W had its share of Rickover incidents. He liked to put people down and make them feel their lack of expertise. At one meeting on reactor metallurgy, John Steifel, the project manager was the victim. The meeting convened late in the afternoon, broke for dinner, then continued into the evening. All during this time Rickover told Steifel to sit in one corner of the room and to not interrupt. Phil Ross, Steifel’s right hand man on technical matters, was told t do the talking – even at dinner. Rickover wanted to give the impression that he considered Steifel a technical idiot.”

From page 198:

“It started with some scale tests on the Special Power Excursion Reactor Test (SPERT) reactor on Idaho that cast doubt on what were then standard industry analysis techniques.”

From page 199:

Howard Arnold recalls joining as engineering manager in 1970, with about 600 engineers in his group. The financial people wanted him to cut the number of engineers on the basis that many of the plants being sold were really duplicates and that all that was needed was good project management. Soon thereafter it became clear that changes were needed in the business and that they could be turned into a profitable sideline.

Also from page 199:

“Where this couldn’t be done or wasn’t enough, we proposed an upper head injection system.”

From page 12:

“I was in Rickover’s office when Sam Untermyer came in carrying a shiny piece of pure crystal bar zirconium. He said they had removed the hafnium impurity, which would make excellent control rods, and the pure zirconium was ideal for cladding.” Note: Untermyer is not in the extensive INDEX.

From page 237 The GOCOs

These government-owned and contractor-operated faculties are called GOCOs.
Clearly, …the growth and decline of various projects in the nuclear enterprise provided an opportunity for maintaining and developing the nuclear experience base within the company.

From page 450
In the late 1960s, Westinghouse invented and developed an ice condenser containment concept in which several million pounds of tetraborate ice are stored in the containment. … effective up to and including a double-ended rupture … one-half the volume of dry type … inherently passive … sold 10 reactors …licensed to Finns for two Russian …disadvantage in refueling…tight quarters

From Page 175 and 176 Westinghouse Testing Reactor (WTR)

The new commercial power industry lacked some of the essential tools necessary to so the job. That’s why the AEC urged them to build – and Westinghouse did decide to build - a nuclear testing reactor. Monty Schultz was the technical director fro the project under Edmund T. Morris, general manager.

The construction permit for the Westinghouse Test Reactor was issued on July 3, 1957, and it began operation at Waltz Mill, Pennsylvania on July 1, 1959.

It was a low-temperature water-cooled reactor. The fuel elements fuel elements for this reactor were totally different from those used in today’s power reactors. Instead of an assembly of 1200 or more tubes, 12 to 13 feet long and containing pellets of low-enriched uranium oxide, the fuel elements for WTR were four feet long and consisted of three concentric aluminum cylinders alloyed with fully enriched uranium metal and clad with aluminum.

The WTR operated on commercial contracts in which various material were inserted into the core and removed after a 21 day cycle. Shielded piping (loops) and associated control and monitoring consoles were located on the floor of the vapor container to allow materials being irradiated to be exposed to various environments.

The expended fuel from the WTR …

After a cooling period, the expended fuel …

We kept the WTR busy for five years, but not without problems. At 8:34 on Sunday, April 3, 1960, there was a partial meltdown of some of the fuel rods. This caused radioactive krypton and xenon gases to be released to the atmosphere. The site was immediately evacuated and plant personnel surveyed the surrounding area in Westmoreland County to determine the extent of the radioactive release. While the radiation levels were high within the site, they were not above allowed levels at monitoring stations outside the site. Westinghouse submitted a report to the AEC on July 7, 1960. However, the accident went virtually unnoticed by the press and the public at the time. There were no injuries and no adverse health effects reported at the time , nor have any been reported since.

The AEC required improvements to be made in the venting system before allowing the reactor to be restarted in October 1960. The reactor operated without further untoward incident until it was shut down.

Unfortunately, shortly after it was completed, the government … ETR … Plum Brook … WTR retired in March 1962.

The AEC approved plans for the retirement …

The former WTR head tank …

The NRC has begun a nationwide program to … decommission …during the cleanup process following the accident thousands of gallons of water were used that became contaminated …the soil and groundwater … cleanup will be … costly.


Salomon Levy, 50 years in Nuclear Power A Retrospective, ANS 2007.

From pages 73 and 74:

Several old issues and many new circumstances had to be dealt with in mid-1973 in the BWR Systems Department. The effectiveness of emergency core cooling (ECC) was back in the news. After suing a set of interim acceptance criteria to ensure ECC effectiveness, the AEC started a public hearing process on that subject in 1972. During that process, several participants were very critical of the methods of analysis and some went as far as predicting the possibility of reactor core melting. During the hearings, tests were conducted in a small, semi-scale, electrically heated model of the Loss-of-Fluid-Test (LOFT) facility being built by the AEC at Idaho. A couple of the experiments indicated that injected water during the blowdown phase of the accident may not reach the reactor core. The media gave coverage to those results and the safety credibility of light water reactors (LWRs) was damaged considerably even though it was shown later that the semi-scale test results were due to poor scaling, deficiencies in semi-scale operation, and perhaps the release of unconfirmed results.

From page 75

As pointed out in 1988 in NUREG–1230, Compendium of ECCS Research for Realistic Analyses, more than $700 million had been spent by 1988 to show that ECC systems can will function reliably.

From Page 90

When Dr. Beaton found out that I had resigned without having another position, he gave me a consulting contract to advise Bill Anders, the astronaut and the new vice president of Manufacturing. I was even more surprised when Dr. Beaton asked me to visit him in April 1978 and handed me a very large incentive compensation check for my work in 1977 and stated that I had earned it fully.

From Page 105

NUCLEAR POWER REVIEW COMMITTEES

From Page 150

ADVISORY ROLE AT INPO

From Page 159

I described the GE procedure available to employees to raise a safety issue and the management process to respond to it.

From Page 72

For example, I refused to consider a 9 x 9 fuel design to get a plant order in Germany because of its impact on the difficult ongoing asks, especially in manufacturing.

From Page 73

… I decided to investigate other openings at the department general manager level. When I arrived at headquarters, I discussed my preferences and the human relations person ...

From Page 161 – 162

I was next contacted to participate in an advance code review being conducted by Dr. L. S. Tong who was in charge of thermal hydraulic research for the NRC Research Branch. Tong held an early position at Westinghouse similar to mine at GE at the time and we knew each other very well even though at heat transfer technical meetings, we seldom talked about nuclear power for competitive reasons.
NRC had created an Advanced Code Review Committee and I was asked to become a member. The Committee function was to review the Los Alamos work to develop the transient reactor analysis code TRAC, for predicting the loss-of-coolant accidents (LOCAs) in PWRs.
…………….
The Los Alamos engineers were not as appreciative of attending the review meetings because they were getting tired of being told that they could not sacrifice the physics involved to simplify their computer simulations.

From Page ix

Also I wish to recognize the efforts of Karen Vierow, the chairperson of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) Book Review Committee, and of the committee members for their comments and advice. Professor Vierow spent a considerable amount of time getting the book approved by ANS and I am Grateful for her continued support. Finally, I wish to thank Randall S. Bilof and Lorretta Palagi for their excellent editing work.

Salomon Levy March 2007