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ReseaRch a n d developmenT In T h e na v y 63
the engines, boilers, steam turbines, drive assemblies, and electrical equipment
that formed the power plants of modern surface ships and submarines.
Through his contacts with engineers and executives at these and other
manufacturing firms during the war, Rickover fashioned an integrated research,
development, and production program that directly linked prior technical
expertise in conventional power-generation technology to the latest advances
in atomic energy. His efforts along this line culminated in the establishment
of the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory near Pittsburgh in 1948. Operated by
Westinghouse under contract to the Navy, scientists and engineers at Bettis
collaborated to design and build the pressurized water reactor installed on
the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine. The early success of
the Nautilus helped establish Westinghouse’s pressurized water reactor (and
subsequent versions of it) as the standard propulsion unit for the nuclear fleet
in the decades that followed. General Electric established a similar, though
less successful, reactor development program during the same period. In
1946, the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (the civilian successor
to the wartime Manhattan Project) had granted a contract to GE to set up
the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory near the company’s primary R&D and
manufacturing operations in Schenectady, New York. Originally established
to develop reactors for civilian electric power production, the laboratory
received a contract from the Navy in 1950 to develop atomic power plants
for submarines. Two years later, the Navy instructed the Knolls laboratory to
design and build a reactor, using a sodium liquid metal cooling system, for the
SSN–575 Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine after the Nautilus to enter
fleet service. 82
Although it did not fill the same central role as industry in the development
and production of atomic reactors, the David Taylor Model Basin still played
an important role in the postwar growth of nuclear power technology for naval
applications. In 1952, a new applied mathematics laboratory was established at the
Carderock complex. Equipped with a UNIVAC computer system, one of the first
mainframe computers, the laboratory focused on theory and analysis, planning and
programming, and engineering and development. A major effort was undertaken to
determine the operating lifetimes of the nuclear reactors installed in the Navy’s first
generation of atomic-powered submarines. Technical staff wrote new computer
programs to generate the first practical mathematical models of reactor-core
behavior. Computation of core geometry and composition, for example, enabled
accurate determination of the diffusion rates of neutrons (which caused uranium
fission), while simulation studies revealed the depletion patterns of uranium fuel and
the accumulation of fission by-products. Taken as a whole, these computer analyses
enabled engineers working at the Bettis and Knolls Atomic Power Laboratories
and other private and public R&D facilities to predict the power-producing
82 For a detailed examination of these events, see Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Nuclear Navy,
1946–1962 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Also on Rickover, see Francis Duncan, Rickover
and the Nuclear Navy: The Discipline of Technology (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1990); Normal
Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Rickover and the Nuclear Navy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).