NUCLEAR POWER FOR PEACEFUL PURPOSES — SMYTH 195 



This is, of course, a very fascinating idea. It turns out, however, 

 that it may not be so very important whether actually more material 

 is produced than is burned. It is obviously possible to produce some 

 plutonium, since that is what the Hanford reactors are for, and it 

 should be possible to take that plutonium and use it as fuel for power 

 reactors. Whether the amount of plutonium produced is slightly 

 less or slightly greater than the amoimt of uranium 235 burned up is 

 not very important. We do, however, make a distinction in nomen- 

 clature whereby we call a reactor that produces plutonium in smaller 

 quantity than uranimn burned a converter, and one where the quan- 

 tity produced is greater than that of uranium burned a breeder. In 

 either case, it should be possible eventually to convert the fission 

 energy of both isotopes of uranium to useful power. In the case of 

 the converter, there would be some loss; in the case of the breeder, 

 the losses in the reactor would be zero, but in either case there will be 

 losses in chemical processing so that the difference is not very sig- 

 nificant. The difference, however, betw^een using just the uranium 

 235 and eventually using all the uranium in natural uranium is enor- 

 mous and may well make the difference between an ample supply of 

 nuclear fuel for many years to come and a rather scanty one. 



THE FIRST ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION REACTOR PROGRAM 



When the Atomic Energy Commission took over the plant and 

 equipment of the Manhattan District in January 1947, the problems 

 tliat I have been reviewing were already clear. Although the Com- 

 mission's first responsibility was to prosecute the atomic weapons pro- 

 gram with vigor, it soon turned to the possibility of atomic power, 

 both for special military purposes and for ultimate peacetime uses. 

 Early in 1949, Dr. Bacher, my predecessor as the scientific member of 

 the Commission, made a speech in which he outlined the ways in 

 which the Commission was attacking the problems I have reviewed. 

 Essentially, the program consisted of a plan to build four major re- 

 actors. Let me describe three of these that have been finished at our 

 Idaho Test Site and explain why they were built. 



The first of them was the so-called materials-testing reactor, MTK. 

 It was aimed primarily at getting information on the effects of radia- 

 tion on uranium fuel elements or other materials that might be used 

 as tubes for cooling water, or as coolants, or containers for uranium 

 fuel elements. The object of this reactor then was to provide very 

 high intensity radiation in a machine so designed that many experi- 

 mental samples could be placed in it. It has now been running for 

 about 2 years, and it has in fact proved exceedingly useful. Inci- 

 dentally, it also was a novel kind of reactor and therefore was in itself 

 a step toward the development of new types of reactors. 



