PLENTIFUL ENERGY

the pool was a settled issue; it was to be a key feature along with metal fuel and
pyroprocessing.
The ten-year IFR era was a very exciting time indeed at Argonne. Although
there were political challenges from the beginning, on the technical front the new
discoveries and pioneering nature of the development brought an era of high
morale, dedication, and enthusiasm in everyone involved. There was very little
extra funding for a project this ambitious, but we made up for the shoe-string
budgets with effort, imagination, creativity, and drive.
A good example, right at the beginning, was the means for plutonium fuel
fabrication. The EBR-II driver fuel contained no plutonium, and to start irradiation
testing of the new IFR fuel alloy, we had to have a fabrication capability for
plutonium-bearing fuel. There was no such capability by then at the Laboratory, so
the first option we looked at was to rely on the plutonium fabrication facility at Los
Alamos National Laboratory. Their schedule was not ours. Schedule was a very big
concern to us. We needed to get on with it, and quickly. I asked Leon Walters, who
was heading the fuels effort of the IFR Program, to estimate how long it would take
to construct a new plutonium glove box fabrication facility at Argonne-West. He
came back with a three-month schedule estimate. We proceeded with that plan,
rather than pursue the LANL option. At the mid-point of this construction project,
the DOE program manager visited the site to review its progress. He commented
that there was no way we could make the schedule, and I had to agree because the
work site was chaotic. But the project was completed on time, actually with a few
days to spare. Walters told me that everyone was so motivated to complete the
project on schedule that they worked especially effectively, including weekends
throughout. A plutonium fabrication capability, starting with nothing, had been put
in place in three short months.
EBR-II driver fuel at that time was fabricated in a small room in the old Fuel
Cycle Facility building. The DOE safeguards office didn‘t think highly enriched
uranium was secure there and provided funding specifically for construction of a
fully safeguarded fuel manufacturing facility. I wanted to take advantage of the
funding offered in this situation to alter the fabrication equipment design to increase
the batch size from five kg to twenty kg so we could demonstrate the scalability of
the process to higher throughputs. The fabrication people had been accustomed to
the lower throughput and were somewhat reluctant initially, but eventually agreed
to a twenty-kg batch capability with two crucibles of ten kg each, limited by
criticality constraints. This turned out to be invaluable later, when this new Fuel
Manufacturing Facility (FMF) proved able to supply metal fuel not only for EBR-
II, but for FFTF as well. The Semi-Automated Fabrication (SAF) line at Hanford,
originally built to supply MOX fuel for CRBR, wasn‘t complete, and it still
required substantial funding. Supplying metal fuel from FMF required little
funding. DOE made the obvious decision to convert the FFTF core to metal fuel
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