
Hyman Rickover on Nuclear Reactor Designs (1953) [pdf] - nkurz
http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf
======
dctoedt
Another ex-Navy nuke here. More than 45 years later, I can still practically
recite both sides of my interview with the KOG,* which was necessary to get
into The Program.

Here's an excerpt. Important to the story is that I was escorted into
Rickover's office by a senior officer who was in training to be a submarine
skipper. Also relevant is that I was younger than the usual candidate.

KOG: Why do you want in my program?

Me: From what I've seen of the submarine fleet, there's a lot of
professionalism there; I'd like to be part of that. _[Later, in nuclear power
school, I switched to surface, and spent my sea time aboard the carrier USS
Enterprise.]_

KOG: So you don't think there's any professionalism in the surface fleet?

Me: I didn't say that, Admiral.

KOG _[to the escort officer]_ : Read back what the kid said.

Escort officer: Mr. Toedt thinks there's a lot of professionalism in the
submarine fleet and not in the surface fleet.

KOG: _[Angrily points out my personal failings, ending with:]_ You're shooting
your g--damn mouth off about something you don't know a g--damn thing about.
What do you think of that?

Me: That's not what I said, Admiral. _[At this point I started getting pissed
off.]_

KOG: _[More vigorous imparting of wisdom, ending with:]_ Have you learned
anything?

Me _[angrier than I 've ever been, before or since]_: Yes, SIR.

KOG: What's that?

Me: Not to shoot my _[pause]_ MOUTH off about something I don't know a
_[pause]_ thing ABOUT — SIR.

The interview went downhill from there, including inquiries about my sex life.
I figured I'd bilged the interview and would be heading for destroyer school,
which had been my preference anyway (the officers at my NROTC unit had
strongly "encouraged" me to apply for The Program instead). I was shocked
afterwards when the nice older lady congratulated me on having been accepted
to The Program and asked which of the two nuclear power schools did I want to
attend.

After the interview I realized that Rickover and the escort officer had
intentionally been f--king with me as one of his little stress tests, the
stories about which are legion [0].

* KOG = Kindly Old Gentleman. The nuke joke was that he checked the box for at most two out of those four things.

[0] [https://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2009/02/rickover-stories-
ne...](https://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2009/02/rickover-stories-needed.html)

~~~
Tade0
I wonder what his reaction would be if you went with something similar to the
Grand Budapest Hotel job interview scene.

------
nkurz
You are likely familiar with the quip that "While in theory there is no
difference between theory and practice, in practice there is." Here's a
delightful letter by "The Father of the Nuclear Navy" Admiral Hyman Rickover
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover))
on how that saying applies to nuclear reactor design. Excerpts:

 _An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic
characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is
light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (
"omnibus reactor"). (7) Very little develop- ment is required. It will use
mostly “off-the-shelf” components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It
is not being built now._

 _On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the
following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind
schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently
trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very
expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering
development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is
complicated._

It's a short two-page letter, so I won't excerpt more. It merits reading in
full.

~~~
pjc50
That really does sum up all the gaps between the promises of "too cheap to
meter" and the practical expensive reality. Doubly so for things that haven't
made it out of the lab at all, such as thorium reactors. There's always people
willing to give the "academic reactor" sales pitch for nuclear on here,
especially as a reason not to proceed with some scheme using a renewable,
proven but intermittent technology like wind or solar.

------
dredmorbius
It's Rickover's concluding paragraph I find most compelling:

 _Yet it is incumbent on those in high places to make wise decisions and it is
reasonable and important that the public be correctly informed. It is
consequently incumbent on all of us to state the facts as forthrightly as
possible._

That resounds today, especially with a novel current rapidly-spreading
challenge, and responses around the planet which fail all three of Rickover's
admonishments.

The essay itself has long resonated with me:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28q61o/hyman_g...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28q61o/hyman_g_rickover_paper_reactors/)

~~~
specialist
Off topic:

What are your thoughts about hoaxes, cults, groupthink?

I'm hoping to find explainers in the same way Sara Robinson and David Neiwert
have tried to study and understand authoritarianism.
[https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/08/cracks-in-wall-
part-i-...](https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/08/cracks-in-wall-part-i-
defining.html)

FWIW, I am scanning your prior posts (HN, reddit, mastodon).

I try to pay attention to "explainers" like you, Slate Star Codex, Gwern, Ezra
Klein, David Roberts (also Vox), Bill Gates, others. People who voraciously
consume info, synthesize it, and try to explain it to the rest of us.

~~~
dredmorbius
That''s a very complex topic.

Of possible relevance, and reflecting one current of my thinking:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothing_music_diets_art_management_theory_fad_as/)

------
nemosaltat
Prior navy Nuke- it’s hard to explain how much Rickover continues to permeate
the Navy Nuclear program. When you start your naval nuclear career, you still
literally have to go through Rickover. That is, the building where all naval
nuclear training begins is “The Rickover” in Goose Greek, SC.

------
selimthegrim
Rickover has a case to answer for the Thresher:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20170514181829/http://www.au.af.m...](http://web.archive.org/web/20170514181829/http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/airchronicles/aureview/1983/jul-
aug/schratz.html)

>Beneath the surface, however, was always the cold, unrelenting, ruthless
workaholic, undermining the bureaucracy while creating his own. His was a
management textbook for the inside operator, organized to the smallest detail,
intolerant of error, devoting everything including his personal life to a
cause, an obsession. Rickover established a constituency in Congress by
superior salesmanship of his own product and skillful sowing of dissension and
division in competing programs. Carefully slanting facts and covering up what
he did not want disclosed, he skillfully manipulated his two bosses to become
what the authors call "The Unaccountable Man." He destroyed any competing
nuclear program within his own organization and any person likely to emerge as
a competitor or successor. In time, he became increasingly conservative if not
reactionary, putting space between himself and any responsibility for failure
or accident. When the USS Thresher was lost in April 1963, he immediately
phoned the Bureau of Ships to dissociate himself from any likelihood of
failure of the nuclear plant in the incident. The bureau chief thought this
action "thoroughly dishonest."

~~~
selimthegrim
On the subject of this thread:

>The cult of personality produced other adverse side effects. Having achieved
brilliant success with the pressurized water coolant system in the Nautilus
installation, innovation in other types of plants was stifled. The USS Seawolf
plant, developed in tandem with Nautilus, utilized liquid sodium as coolant,
promising much smaller and more compact reactors. Because of limitations in
metallurgy, the system was unsuccessful. The program was scrapped, and its
obvious superiorities were never again reexamined, even after twenty years of
further progress in nuclear technology. Rickover put the kiss of death on
programs generated within the Office of Naval Research and elsewhere for
smaller, lightweight reactors that could reduce the enormous size and cost of
nuclear-powered ships. None saw the light of day; all were thwarted as
interference in his work. When nuclear power was adapted to surface use for
large combatants such as aircraft carriers and missile cruisers, new systems
apparently were not examined. For instance, a smaller and more efficient
combination of nuclear power for normal cruising plus an overdrive of
conventional gas turbine plants for high speed use had been proposed but was
not investigated further.

~~~
brians
We built one. It didn’t work then. He said it wouldn’t, and indeed it didn’t.
He’s been dead for decades, and we haven’t built a working one now—but somehow
it’s his fault!

------
JohnCClarke
Wow! I wish the thorium enthusiasts would all read this.

~~~
DennisP
Small molten salt reactors were actually built. They weren't just paper
reactors, even in Rickover's day. Now there are companies working on MSRs for
commercial use. There's more computer simulation than running reactors so far,
partly because governments are much more cautious now. But I'll also point out
that Rickover in 1957 had no idea what computers in 2020 would be capable of.

I think it's reasonable to suspect that we didn't find the best possible
reactor design six decades ago.

~~~
brandmeyer
The part that the computers help with - nuclear and thermodynamic physics ODEs
- isn't the hard part. A couple of sharp grad students can do that with
OpenFOAM and a modest workstation.

The hard parts are the operations, maintenance, building for robustness, and
enormous amounts of empirical field experience with the materials.

Rickover and his contemporaries judged - rightly - that those issues would
make MSR and metal-cooled reactors too finicky to be of practical military
value.

~~~
perl4ever
...but there actually was a liquid sodium reactor sub built in the 50s, from
what I've heard.

~~~
brandmeyer
Only one. She was a contemporary of the Nautilus. It was their experience with
that vessel that killed liquid metal coolant for the navy.

It might help to understand something special about the nuclear navy in those
days - prototypes in the lab don't count. Prototypes on land don't count
either. The only prototypes that counted were ones that actually went to sea.
All the way through the Skipjack generation, they were regularly doing crazy-
eyed one-off experiments.

Nautilus and Seawolf were both prototypes.

~~~
willvarfar
Agree.

One Soviet 'November' class (K27) and all 7 'Alfa' class used liquid metal. It
wasn't developed further or used after.

~~~
DennisP
But Russia does have two sodium cooled reactors on their power grid right now.

------
perl4ever
TIL there was a Seawolf sub long before the Seawolf- _class_. That explains a
lot.

------
factchecker01
PBS had a good documentary on this.

[https://youtu.be/G0p8bWYY7qM](https://youtu.be/G0p8bWYY7qM)

------
watersb
My father-in-law was just getting used to his new posting when Admiral
Rickover came for an inspection. Talk about pressure.

~~~
brandmeyer
That culture of pressure never changed, and they are better for it.

The best analogy I can give you is this: Imagine your CTO just decides to walk
up to your datacenter to throw open a breaker or few to verify that your
failover and redundancy tech works correctly.

The CTO doesn't do this often - just once every few months. Each time the
failure mode is different. Remove a live hard drive, disconnect some network
switches, etc. The only reason she does it to is to emphasize the importance
of these drills upon her VPs and directors.

They run drills of this nature on their teams every few days.

~~~
kstenerud
Simulating a power failure to test and prove the resiliency of the system is
precisely what caused the Chernobyl disaster.

~~~
killjoywashere
Ah, no. The cause of Chernobyl is lost to the dead but probably caused by a
young engineer who didn't quite do the right thing.

You absolutely must drill for rare, high stakes events. Auto-rotations in
helicopters. Mass casualties in hospitals. Reactor scrams. Man overboard on a
ship. All these things are drilled _because_ you don't have time to read the
book when it actually happens, _and_ it rarely happens.

~~~
kstenerud
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster)

The accident started during a safety test on an RBMK-type nuclear reactor,
which was commonly used throughout the Soviet Union. The test was a simulation
of an electrical power outage to aid the development of a safety procedure for
maintaining reactor cooling water circulation until the back-up electrical
generators could provide power. This gap was about one minute and had been
identified as a potential safety problem that could cause the nuclear reactor
core to overheat. It was hoped to prove that the residual rotational energy in
a turbine generator could provide enough power to cover the gap. Three such
tests had been conducted since 1982, but they had failed to provide a
solution. On this fourth attempt, an unexpected 10-hour delay meant that an
unprepared operating shift was on duty. During the planned decrease of reactor
power in preparation for the electrical test, the power unexpectedly dropped
to a near-zero level. The operators were able to only partially restore the
specified test power, which put the reactor in a potentially unstable
condition. This risk was not made evident in the operating instructions, so
the operators proceeded with the electrical test. Upon test completion, the
operators triggered a reactor shutdown, but a combination of unstable
conditions and reactor design flaws caused an uncontrolled nuclear chain
reaction instead.

------
redis_mlc
WW2 Germany had Donitz, and Cold War US had Rickover - both were giants.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz)

Nuclear power is a game-changer, allowing aircraft carriers to sail completely
around the globe at speeds fast enough to barefoot water-ski behind.

~~~
ambicapter
The words "nuclear" don't appear in this wikipedia article. It does state,
however, that Dönitz was closely wedded to Nazi ideology.

~~~
redis_mlc
You're missing the point.

Both were the successful leaders that their era and countries needed.

Donitz almost defeated Britain using his submarine fleet alone (he just didn't
get the number requested.)

Rickover's accomplishment wasn't demonstrating that nuclear power was useful,
it was getting the support and funding to actually roll out the new
technology. To this day, no other country has a nuclear aircraft carrier
besides the US and France.

~~~
valuearb
75% of U-boat crew died in combat, primarily because Donitz never changed
their cryptography and gave them tons of radio traffic to decipher.

"Radio traffic compromised his ciphers by giving the Allies more messages to
work with. Furthermore, replies from the boats enabled the Allies to use
direction finding (HF/DF, called "Huff-Duff") to locate a U-boat using its
radio, track it and attack it.[64][65] The over-centralised command structure
of BdU and its insistence on micro-managing every aspect of U-boat operations
with endless signals provided the Allied navies with enormous intelligence"

~~~
soperj
They did change their cryptography. They changed the settings on the enigma
machine daily, and they also went through various versions through the war.

~~~
valuearb
Changing the settings wasn't enough after the enigma machine was cracked. And
more to the point, Donitz management style made their radio traffic easier to
decipher, and he was extremely slow to react when it was clear crews were
dying because their radio traffic wasn't secure.

