Pioneers in Science and Technology Series: Kenneth (Ken) W. Davis

              

PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES

ORAL HISTORY OF DR. KENNETH DAVIS
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
February 7, ?
Transcribed by Jordan Reed 
MR. LARSON: Now Jane, you’re the official camera man. 
MRS. LARSON: If you could just sit down now.
DR. DAVIS: All right. 
MR. LARSON: See what the lights do.  [Turning lights on and off]  We might get them a little bit more to the side I think, Jane. Make it a little more of a three dimensional effect if we do that.
DR. DAVIS: Close the drapes if you didn’t want…
MR. LARSON: Yeah I think that’s a good idea. 
DR. DAVIS: …get a little better lighting that way.
MR. LARSON: It’s amazing how blue the lights give, where as I have some color compensation. I do have to, it’s quite a job. All right. Is this light bothering you any?
DR. DAVIS: No, it’s quite fine.
MRS. LARSON: That’s about as close as, pretty good. I’ll turn it so you can see it here in just a second. 
DR. DAVIS: It’s critical the focus…
MRS. LARSON: Yeah, it is pretty critical.
MR. LARSON: Now have you zoomed it in for focus yet?
MRS. LARSON: We’re getting better as we go. I’ll do it again.
DR. DAVIS: This chair slides around very easily too. So I may slide out of it.
MRS. LARSON: Well, I’m suppose to stay here and kind of keep you…
DR. DAVIS: Your tripod looks a bit tilted. 
MR. LARSON: Does the camera look tilted?
DR. DAVIS: Yeah.
MR. LARSON: Then there. Yep, it is. 
DR. DAVIS: The tripod is the problem.
MRS. LARSON: That leg is bent.
MR. LARSON: Shall we, let’s get all the legs down then.
MRS. LARSON: All right.
DR. DAVIS: That’s a little straighter.
MRS. LARSON: There. Now we can start over.
DR. DAVIS: That looks like it’s straight up and down. 
MR. LARSON: Now you can start over.  Okay…
MRS. LARSON: …you’re quite observant.
DR. DAVIS: I thought something didn’t look quite right.
MR. LARSON: Incidentally, what I will do is say a few words of introduction, which won’t be actually in the final. What I do for the final copy, after I go through and get all your biographical information, and then I write it out carefully so that I make proper use of the time, not too long, or too short, and put it in the front of the tape.
DR. DAVIS: That part comes later.
MR. LARSON: You don’t have to worry about what I say at the first. Then I will just say, “Please proceed, Dr. Davis.” And then you just start in…
MRS. LARSON: Are you going to sit over there, are you?
MR. LARSON: Yes, I’ll sit, however, I think what I’ll do is probably stand because I would like to have you look at me so that… Fine. Okay.
MRS. LARSON: Now I see it’s on.
MR. LARSON: It’s on Record now because I wanted to get sound, but that’s okay. 
DR. DAVIS: Snip it out.
MR. LARSON: We just erase that. Okay. It looks perfect now, okay. If you’ll pan in and out. She pans greater or less. You all set now, Jane.
DR. DAVIS: I’m as set as I’m going to be. 
MR. LARSON: Well fine. Well actually, everybody has been very informal and I will ask questions from time to time, primarily for clarification and expansion. I have a general idea of all of the things that you have done, refreshed my memory in your biography and so forth. I think I’ll be able to ask questions from time to time in case you might leave out something. 
DR. DAVIS: All right.
MR. LARSON: Very good then, Ken.  Well, today is, let’s see, what is the date today?
MRS. LARSON: Uh…
DR. DAVIS: It’s February…
MRS. LARSON: February 7th
DR. DAVIS: …7th.
MR. LARSON: Today February 7th, we are privileged to be able to interview Dr. Ken Davis, who has had a long and distinguished career in the field of chemical engineering with special applications to energy, particularly nuclear energy. So, Dr. Davis, I would appreciate hearing from you, some of your early background, the decisions that you took to lead you into your chosen field, and the, all of the major contributions which you have made through the years. So with that, please proceed, Dr. Davis.
DR. DAVIS: Well, it’s hard to know where it starts; it’s a pretty large order. As far as my brought up background, I was brought up in Berkeley California, and sort of inevitably went to the University of California. I guess for reasons I can’t even recall anymore besides to get a degree in chemistry. Went two and a half years in the College of Chemistry, another few interesting people like Melvin Calvin and Glenn Seaborg, some of the others were Teaching Assistants in those days, and then decided that I was not too keen on being a chemist, I’d rather be an engineer. 
MR. LARSON: What year was it that you entered the University of California?
DR. DAVIS: Oh, 1936, January.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well those were some of the golden years of chemistry and physics and allied subjects.
DR. DAVIS: That was a very interesting period and of course I became interested in engineering, I did give some thought to chemical engineering. That was not a subject that the University of California offered. G.N. Louis didn’t think you needed to be an engineer. The Engineering Department didn’t have a Chemical Engineering Department. So I ended up going to MIT and getting two degrees in chemical engineering and a B.S. in 1940 and an M.A. in 1942. Then pursuing chemical engineering, why that was a pretty traditional thing. Went to work for the Standard Oil Company of California doing process design and process development…
MR. LARSON: Yes…
DR. DAVIS: …for several years.
MR. LARSON: Standard Oil of California and Shell had very powerful research organizations in both chemistry and chemical engineering at the time. I’ve known many people who have done both in those institutions so to speak.
DR. DAVIS: Well, I worked two summers at Shell, so I did a little time over in that laboratory. This is during the war, of course, and we did finish up the development and did the process design and built some major facilities. One I think Pasadena [Texas] plant, El Segundo [California], and a high octane gasoline plant out in Richland. The thing that sticks in my mind about those particularly, thinking about the present difficulties in getting plants built is in both those cases, we were able, at least the development, design, build the plants and put them into operation in slightly less than twelve months. That seems almost incredible in retrospect, that does I think illustrate what can be done with large, complicated facilities if you really want to do it. I think that’s part of our problem today. We have to decide to do some of these things. 
MR. LARSON: Of course then today we look on some of those projects as taking years and years, where formerly one or two seemed to suffice. Perhaps later on in your talk you might give some of your philosophy as to how to avoid that and so, but that is very interesting. Can you tell us a little more about your work there?
DR. DAVIS: Well, this was primarily process design activities for refineries and petrochemical plants in the United States and I know one thing I did do was a little refinery to be built in Arabia which was the first refinery ever built for the King of Saudi Arabia. 
MR. LARSON: Well that was really good training for some of your future work.
DR. DAVIS: Yes. It turned out to be. Following that I did go out and did work for Ford, Bacon, and Davis and got involved in the design of the Argonne National Laboratory. They were trying to convert the old site to this National Laboratory. This was in 1947, right after the Atomic Energy Commission was formed and they were establishing the new laboratory as a part of the AEC. What I was involved in was essentially a company very much similar to Bechtel which was doing the design and the construction of this new laboratory facilities, but it also allowed me to get acquainted with Wally Zin and did quite a lot of work in connection with the activities there with Wally and got well acquainted with him. But ended up in a year and a half or so going to UCLA for the new engineering department there, was there about a year and a half and at that point the Standard Oil Company had gotten a contract from the Atomic Energy Commission working with the people at the radiation laboratories it was called the Lawrence Laboratories, on the design and construction of a very unique facility which is still largely unheard of in this country which was called the MTA or the Materials Testing Accelerator. 
MR. LARSON: What year was that started?
DR. DAVIS: Well the project itself I think was started probably about 1949 and I got involved in it in late 1950, working up at the Novatron at Berkeley and the basic principal was to build a very large linear accelerator which would use a high current, half an amp [inaudible] current, deuterons to impact a uranium target, produce a large number of neutrons by spallation reactions, spallation fission reactions, and absorb the neutrons in a target and produce mainly plutonium, although other possibilities were considered. This was driven by the concern in those days that the United States did not have any substantial amount of uranium reserves. In fact if I recall correctly, they ordered four or five hundred tons of uranium as a total known resource and we were still importing from overseas, mostly the uranium needed for the weapons production. So the basic scheme was to in fact convert uranium as close to 100 percent as you could and get plutonium using the accelerator as the driver to do that. This was a very large project and when I got involved I was given the responsibility of developing and designing the target machine, which Ernest Lawrence didn’t consider to be much of a problem. He usually described that it as a mechanical problem and what not, at least at the start very much interested in it. The problem with taking a half ampere beam of deuterons at 350 million volts and building a production target that would operate for long periods of time turned out I think to be a fairly difficult task. Although we had it basically solved, the project was abandoned I think finally in 1954 because the AEC had stimulated a great deal of exploration and development for uranium and we were beginning to find rather large quantities of uranium and it was quite obvious at that point that the production reactors would be a much more economical way of producing plutonium than this very large, very expensive linear accelerator.
MR. LARSON: Yes, that work that you did on the target and heat removal and so forth must have had some very important applications later because the heat removal requirements for that must have been fantastic.
DR. DAVIS: They were quite large. One of the interesting things was that we decided we would spray the beam around by something that resembled very much what’s done in television tubes now, using electromagnets to steer the beam around in various patterns. I think on another aspect of it we not only looked at uranium, but we also looked at the possibility of using thorium as a target and it turns out that thorium was not quite good at production as neutrons from the spallation reactions, but still very substantial. In fact you can even use things like bismuth, although they’re not nearly as good. Thorium being considerable more available, we spent quite a lot of attention on thorium and actually entered into contracts with Oak Ridge to do work on the metallurgy of thorium, which is somewhat simpler than that of uranium and on the reprocessing of thorium to recover U-233. Even to this day that work that was done by Oak Ridge as a part of that project is still a bulk of the expertise and knowledge that is excellent in the world really in the metallurgy and on the chemical reprocessing of thorium.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well, occasionally we still hear today possibilities of resurrecting the thorium U-233 cycle and perhaps one of these days that metallurgy of thorium may come back to be of real use to us. 
DR. DAVIS: Well the Canadians have been quite interested in it, or the advanced versions of the Candor reactor. That has come up periodically.
MR. LARSON: I believe that perhaps some versions of the High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor would also be of use in thorium. Well that’s a very interesting part. Incidentally, who was in charge of the overall in charge, was it Cal Research was the organization that you were with at that time? 
DR. DAVIS: Well, the California Research and Development Company was a subsidiary of Cal Research, which eventually became known as Chevron Research, so it was Standard Oil Company and their subsidiary and then a subsidiary of that. The Rad Lab was the basic scientific source for a lot of the work. And then as a matter of fact, California Research and Development had a contract and I ended up working for them on detail engineering design with David Bechtel. 
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. DAVIS: That was really my first association with Bechtel. 
MR. LARSON: Yes, well that has continued for a long time then. Then after the, essentially it was discovered that we had enough uranium so that the ordinary reactors would supply the necessary byproducts for defense purposes, then of course that resulted, I believe, in the reactors at Savannah River. And then also we, you then turned your attention to other aspects of the atomic energy business.
DR. DAVIS: Yes, that came about, I might just comment. I started working at Berkeley at the Rad Lab. We had moved out to Livermore and in fact established a department; I established the first laboratories at Livermore. As time went on we got drawn by the AEC to work on fusion, one avenue, the Fast Breeder Reactor. Eventually when the MTA project was abandoned by Livermore and it was taken over by the University of California, was essentially the start of what it is today, the Livermore Laboratory. But not too long before the, things were changing with respect to the requirements, why, I was asked to go back to Washington to work for Larry Halfsted, who was the director of Reactor Development at that time, as assistant director of the Reactor Development Division. I guess it was in March or April of 1954, I went back to Washington for one year to serve as assistant to Larry Halfsted.
MR. LARSON: That was a very important year for decisions in Washington on the reactor project. I was wondering if you could go into a little detail as to your experiences there.
DR. DAVIS: Well, it’s hard to remember all the things that happened, at least in the right order. There had been, of course the Reactor Development Division in those days, just to make clear, had been largely formed to support the work of the Navy Reactors branch, led by our friend Captain Rickover in those days. It had some responsibilities outside of the naval program, but not very many, and in fact much of the resources of the Reactor Development Division were in Engineering Division, which I don’t think anyone has heard of since, but it was really two divisions that ran parallel and Larry Halfsted was the director of both of them. There had been some studies done by I think four groups at industrial companies on a highly classified basis, including Civic Gas and Electric, and trying to remember what the groupings were. I looked at the possibility of using atomic energy to produce electric power and these industrial studies had come out quite optimistically. I should remark that they were looking at very large reactors in those days, 150 megawatt reactors. The PG&E study in particular looked at the Fast Breeder as a possible commercial reactor and Bechtel was involved. One of the groups was Bechtel and PG&E in those days. This had led to the decision the previous year that they would build several small demonstration reactors and one large one. The Navy people had proposed building a reactor for aircraft carriers, the CVR reactor. This went through a lot of politics which there have been books written about, but any case, they ended up being a civilian reactor rather than a prototype aircraft carrier reactor, and indeed became what we call shipping [inaudible] really the first, medium size power reactor. Well anyway, when I got back there, all of this was going on and changes were being proposed and the Atomic Energy Act, which became, I don’t know, the Act of 1954, and these small programs, like the Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor at Oak Ridge, and the Sodium Graphite Reactor at Stanford in California were all five, 10 megawatt demonstration reactors, plus a very large reactor, 60 megawatts being built by the Naval Reactors Branch. So we had a, quite a collection of things going on in the Reactor Development Division. The Navy program was by far the biggest program. There was an embryonic aircraft nuclear propulsion program, which is something that has gone away, but was a very large operation in those days, an Army reactor program, which was intended to develop small reactors for use at remote bases and things of this sort, and actually did develop several reactors, one at Port Belmar and one that ran for years in Antarctica. So there were a variety of programs, as well as the so called Civilian Reactor Program. One of the things that sort of sticks in my mind is the head of the civilian power reactor branch in those days, a fella named Russ Stapler, who’s now dead, but Russ came in one day and complained that he only had four people to carry out the civilian power reactor program and he was sure if he had eight or nine he could take care of it forever more. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Yes. I think now we speak in terms of one or two orders of magnitude greater staff than those days.
DR. DAVIS: Yes we do. It also, we have to recall we were worried about the safety and the, worried about the safety and we had an advisory committee on reactor safeguard which Edward Teller was the chair of at that point, but there was no licensing system set up. You decided what you were going to do, get advice from the advisory committee on reactor safeguards and built the reactors and have a small staff and it was quite a different world in those days. If you had to do international things, we did those ourselves; there was no department to worry about international relations. It was a real do-it-yourself operation in those days. Can’t imagine we can do the things today, how we manage to do them. One other important thing that occurred in those days was the, as I remarked, the studies had been made and the work that was being done was all on a classified basis and indeed almost everything relating to atomic energy was classified. There was also a recognition of the fact, or I should say a growing recognition which was reflected in the Atomic Energy Act, as it was rewritten in 1954, that it would be very difficult to have any kind of a civilian power program and deal with it on a classified basis. So there were many steps taken to try to see what could be done to declassify some of that information and at about the same time a plan emerged at an international conference on nuclear energy which was held in Geneva in 1955. It was the first of the international conferences on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, and was sponsored by the United Nations. But in preparation for that there was an arduous amount of work done on revising the classification guides and establishing a basis on which a very, very large amount of the previously classified information was the subject of many papers and presentations at Geneva in September 1955, both by the United States and Canada, UK, and indeed by the Russians. There was a very great transition but, almost forgotten today. 
MR. LARSON: Yes, I remember attending that because I was in charge of getting that demonstration reactor over to Geneva and we did that in less than six months from the time the “go ahead” was given, including shipping it over. I can’t imagine anything being done in six months from the start of conception, no matter how small it is. 
DR. DAVIS: All the red tape that would be involved today would make it impossible. We then started actually thinking about how to stimulate the industry to build some larger reactors and came up with the so-called demonstration reactor program which led, which was essentially an invitation in this country to propose building power reactors where the government, the Atomic Energy Commission would provide research and development support to make them fairly attractive, arrangements with respect to lending the fuel required and although the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 had a lot of the private ownership of power reactors, some types of facilities, it still kept them and the ownership of all nuclear fuel in the hands of the government. This basically was an advantage in those days because we could make arrangements for taking fuel and putting it back which made it a fairly economic thing for the industry to do. So as a result of those several solicitations, I won’t go into detail, reactor plants, such as the Yankee Atomic Plant in New England, and Dresden Nuclear Power Plant near Chicago, [inaudible] was under construction, and was followed by a plant in Connecticut called the Connecticut Yankee, sort of the tail end of it led to various plants such as Santa [inaudible] in Southern California. 
MR. LARSON: I believe there is also one in Minnesota.
DR. DAVIS: Well there is a smaller one in Minnesota, Pathfinder Plant, I guess it was completed, but it was never run successfully. There were some smaller ones that became a part of the program and those by-and-large didn’t get too far. They were too small really to be economic but the end result of this was that, actually around 1960, we had [inaudible] went into operation….

MR. LARSON: Yankee went into operation shortly after that. 
DR. DAVIS: Yeah, Dresden was next. 
MR. LARSON: Dresden…
DR. DAVIS: [inaudible], Dresden, Yankee, Connecticut Yankee, [inaudible] and Humble Bay was a small one…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. DAVIS: … built by PG&E which was a 60 megawatt water reactor. The total schedule for Humble Bay from the start of design to operation was 39 months. 
MR. LARSON: We’d be proud to have that sort of record today. 
DR. DAVIS: It would be very nice if we could do that today. So as a result of the activities, I would say, the reactor development in those days, a basis was established for the nuclear power reactor industry and some years before it went beyond that, the principal activity. I should say I went back there for a year when Larry Halfsted left. I agreed to stay another year and become director and ended up staying about four years and eight months.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Well it was a very active time with all these reactors coming online. 
DR. DAVIS: There was a lot going on there. There was a great deal going on in such areas as the aircraft nuclear propulsion program, a very large program and in many ways was quite successful. It was difficult in a practical point of view. The Navy program of course expanded greatly during that time. It built Nautilus and Seawalt and then that whole series of reactors was started including finally an aircraft propulsion plant. The Army program went on very successfully and built reactors, [inaudible] working on the one in Antarctica and a couple of other places. A great deal of work was done on the basic development and research including on the breeder. We had decided that we would not seek to go to larger scale breeders at that time, and the conviction that we needed to get the first generation of reactors going which became the light water reactors, so we needed to get those going before there was really going to be a need for a breeder. If you didn’t do that then you were never going to get the breeder. So the main emphasis was on the development of the thermal reactors, finally focused on the volume of the water reactor and small ones of those were built with Argonne and GE in [inaudible], but quite a bit of work on the breeder including the design and construction of the EBR-2 which has been operated almost continuously since in Idaho. It gets very little publicity or attention.
MR. LARSON: Yes, that is an amazing that most people realize that the experimental breeder reactor was the first one to produce sizeable quantities of electricity I guess. 
DR. DAVIS: Well the EBR-1, the little one did produce the first electricity. 
MR. LARSON: And of course EBR-2 has been the work horse through the years.
DR. DAVIS: It’s run for many, many years. It also, and most people have forgotten this, demonstrated the first closed fuel cycle…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. DAVIS: …with the breeder, with the pyro-metallurgical processing of the fuel and prefabrication of the fuel right at the reactor site.
MR. LARSON: I think that is a major contribution which was almost been forgotten because it was a tremendous contribution, most people think that we haven’t done very much on reprocessing, and perhaps we haven’t. 
DR. DAVIS: That demonstrating the pyro-metallurgical process was a major accomplishment.  I think it will be important in the future sometime. Trying to think what else we did. 
MR. LARSON: Well that’s quite a, that was a tremendous program and a tremendous number of reactors that was designed and finished during your term there, really laid the foundation.
DR. DAVIS: We started a lot of them. We stimulated through various programs a lot of research at the universities and other instillations throughout the world; put a lot of emphasis on training people. We started the Argonne Reactor School, a follow on from the old Oak Ridge Reactor School, and the Argonne School focused a great deal on training people from overseas. 
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. DAVIS: It’s amazing if you go around the world and talk to them about computer programs in other countries, you’ll find that they all went to the Argonne Reactor School at one time or another.
MR. LARSON: A tremendous amount of training there. Incidentally about that time also was the Detroit-Edison Breeder Reactor started.
DR. DAVIS: The Fermi Reactor was started. Again one of the demonstration reactors as a result of demonstration reactor program because it was not a part of it, nor was Dresden. Dresden was put together by the facility in response by request from the Atomic Energy Commission, but I recall I went out to Chicago to receive the proposal that was suppose to be made by the Commonwealth of Edison who was suppose to build the Dresden plant. When I got out there, they said, well we appreciate you coming out very much, but we decided we don’t need any assistance from the U.S. government so we’ll buy you lunch and tell you what we’re going to do, but we’re not going to give you a proposal. This was basically the same thing with the Fermi Reactor, which is known as a Fast Breeder which had one incident where they had a meltdown of a part of the fuel element because of a blockage in the fuel channel, rebuilt, and was eventually run at full design power of 100 megawatts and again very little attention was ever…
MR. LARSON: Yes. There was a book written on the…
DR. DAVIS: On the hazard, but practically nothing has been written on the technical…
MR. LARSON: Yeah.
DR. DAVIS: …performance of the reactor. 
MR. LARSON: As a matter of fact I talked to some of the French and they, for a moment at a cocktail party and they will give full credit to some of the training they received at Detroit-Edison for their successful breeder program.
DR. DAVIS: They had, many of the Japanese came over and worked on that program and Walker Sussler was very much interested in having that serve as a training ground on demonstration breeder technology. 
MR. LARSON: Well, let’s see, you mentioned you stayed for such a short period of time, only about five years, was it?
DR. DAVIS: Seemed like a long time.
MR. LARSON: But it was a tremendous amount accomplished during that period. After you left the commission then, what responsibilities did you take on?
DR. DAVIS: Well, at that time I did come to work for Bechtel and did work for Bechtel from 1958 until 1981. But I came out to San Francisco which of course was basically my home, and the first nine years I guess I was with Bechtel we spent building up a development program and the primary concern was nuclear power, the origin of some of the first nuclear power projects that Bechtel was involved in. And was involved in some of the overseas power activities, and sort of had a variety of various kinds assignments almost all related to power though.
MR. LARSON: What were some of the early power reactors that Bechtel built or designed?
DR. DAVIS: Well the first one, well Bechtel actually did the construction that was the EBR-1 in Idaho. There was also the Buffalo Chemical Processing Plant up there so they were in it at the very beginning, before I was with Bechtel. They were the engineers and constructors of Dresden, which was the first and largest water reactor, while I was working on the GE water reactor, pleasantly, [inaudible] actually. When I came out I got involved in two main projects, at the very beginning they had also basically finished the Humble Bay Plant at that point. And also were involved in the Sodium Graphite Reactor [inaudible] another of the intermediate size reactors, but it was never put into operation. I got involved in what became San Onofre-1, which we looked at several sites and arrangements and got involved in the Big Rock Plant involving a water reactor in Michigan. I became quite involved in the High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor and the initiation called Peach Bottom-1, a relatively small demonstration of the High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor, I guess I was really the project manager for that at some time. 
MR. LARSON: That reactor did operate successfully for quite some period of time. 
DR. DAVIS: Oh, it ran for quite a number of years, very successfully, back when they had the big black out, I forgot what year it was when the Peach Bottom Plant, was one of the only power plants in operation in the eastern part of the United States. (Laughter) It sat there and made a little bit of power while everything else was shut down. It was a very successful reactor. And let’s see, what else did we do? We did get involve in some fairly substantial nuclear programs in Spain which was one of the things I was involved in. Later on Bechtel became involved in other programs in South Korea and Taiwan, [inaudible] today.
MR. LARSON: Yes. Were most of those boiling water reactors [BWR] or pressurized water reactors [PWR], or was it a mixture?
DR. DAVIS: Well, I’m sure it was some of both. I think Bechtel had a mix of reactors that they worked on. It was about the same as the industry average, probably one third PWR and two thirds BWR. We worked on both. Oh, it’s hard to remember all the plants we were involved in.
MR. LARSON: Well, let’s see, I was also wondering did Bechtel become involved in the chemical reprocessing? 
DR. DAVIS: Yes, that was one… I’m glad you mentioned that because it’s one of my favorite subjects. We were in our, this was a part of the development department that I headed, became involved in the idea of trying to build a commercial reprocessing plant and actually did the design of the nuclear fuel services plant in West [inaudible] and then went on and designed the plant that was built in [inaudible] it wasn’t built by Bechtel, but it was designed by Bechtel. And also the design of the plant that was proposed by Exxon in Oak Ridge, but they were in the process of getting that licensed in 1977. So, we had been I guess associated basically with Bechtel on all of the reprocessing plants except for the ones by GE out in Illinois. 
MR. LARSON: So that was never put into operation. 
DR. DAVIS: No, it never operated. [inaudible] never operated either, although it was run by coal for several years, but I would say that I think it’s to our conviction that we process things, nuclear fuel is bound to come about sooner or later, but the freeze that was put on that by President Carter in 1977 along with the other things that have happened, just killed that as a viable commercial prospect for the future.
MR. LARSON: I made some rough calculations a while back and it seemed to me that we’re approaching almost at $10 billion in fissionable materials in fuel elements that have been taken out of the reactors which that $10 billion is just sitting there. So ultimately there is no question about it that it has to be reprocessed.
DR. DAVIS: Well you can’t afford to throw away that much resources basically, nor if you get to thinking about the breeder, they have to process that fuel to reduce the heat material in the breeder, but that’s not urgent and at the present time, economics in terms of the, there is a lot of argument about whether it’s cheaper to reprocess fuels and store the waste or store the fuel. And the great penalty but its close enough that some feel particularly driven to have to get into the reprocessing and with the prospects uncertain as to what’s going to happen in the future. I think it’s understandable that industries are not real anxious to get back into that business, particularly one that’s been demonstrated to have a lot of political risks associated with it. 
MR. LARSON: Yes, well of course right now the time is not right for doing anything like that, but ultimately we’re going to have $20 billion and $30 billion in stored valuable fuel and at some point along the time, that’s going to be an overwhelming factor.
DR. DAVIS: Well in addition to which I think it’s, I’m just convinced that it’s going to be a lot simpler and safer and more reliable to store and waste, solidified waste after reprocessing that they try to store fuel elements which after all have spent several years in a reactor, a very unfriendly environment, would stand up pretty well. It’s a bulkier problem; it just isn’t very neat, quite aside from recovering the useful material. 
MR. LARSON: Would you care to venture an opinion as to ultimately on the breeder reactor reprocessing, whether the aqueous reprocessing or the pyro-metallurgical reprocessing may win out, for the breeder reactors?
DR. DAVIS: You know, I’m not sure that in, particularly in terms of the breeder reactor, that the reprocessing has been largely ignored in this country as a part of the breeder reactor I certainly, along with other people like your former associate Floyd Culler have been beating the drum for many years that the breeder reactor is, has to be looked at as a system which includes the reprocessing and refabricating because all you can afford with the light water reactor is to let the fuel sit for a long time until you decide really what to do with it with the less economic penalty. There is no possibility of operating the breeder reactor unless you recover the material and recycle it back into the reactor in the shortest possible time, so that a breeder system consists of a reactor and the associated reprocessing, there is no escaping that for the economics of it. It won’t tolerate it. So, whether in where you do the reprocessing is still an unsolved problem, one that not many people worry much about. And it’s a question of scale and if you’re going to try to have the reprocessing and refabricating in existence at the time you put the reactor in operation, it’s very difficult to conceive this being very practical if you have a reprocessing plant hundreds or thousands of miles away. So my think has been that you’d try to end up with a cluster of breeder reactors and a relatively small reprocessing and refabricating plant located more or less on the site which would at least handle the core material, although the blanket material is a little more like the material from one of the reactors, but it would be convenient to do both. Now this puts different kinds of requirements on reprocessing and refabricating plant and whether it would be a pyro-metallurgical plant or an aqueous plant would probably depend considerably on what type of fuel they would use. If it uses metallic fuel, which I think most people would say they would like to achieve for a variety of reasons, then the pyro-metallurgy I would guess would be the practice. If we continue on the line of the oxide fuels, then maybe either sort of a small hot cell aqueous chemical reprocessing plant, or some located more remotely might do it, but it’s going to have to be there and in operation. This part of the whole breeder system really has not been examined as a part of the strategy as to how you get the breeder to end the operation. 
MR. LARSON: How about our friends in foreign countries? They have given due consideration to that problem, that you must have a reprocessing in order to make it a viable system.
DR. DAVIS: I’ve never really discussed this subject with Russians; I don’t know what they are doing, although as you may know they have a 600 megawatt breeder reactor in operation, have had in operation for two years. I’m sure they have reprocessing. I’m positive they have reprocessing, but I really don’t know. The French have carried on a parallel development of reprocessing and, I think, recognize the problem, although they haven’t quite come to grips with how you’re going to implement it in a practical sense when they start building breeders. The British have probably done more than anybody else. They have built a small plant to reprocess the fuel from the old PFR, completely rebuilt that plant to process the fuel from the prototype Fast Reactor and rather interesting, they tore out the old plant and built a new one right where the old one had been, which struck me when I heard about it as being almost an impossibility. They just went in and took the old one out and built the new one in the same place, and saved a lot of money, but they recognize I’d say quite fully that you do have to have reprocessing adjunct to the breeder itself. No one has yet engaged in a real plan to deploy breeders, although the French have discussed it. The Russians may or may not be doing it. I’m not sure, but that problem is going to have to be considered very carefully when we to get to that point and it’s also important to economics because the conventional wisdom has been well a breeder may cost a lot, but the fuel’s going to cost almost nothing.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. DAVIS: That just is not true. The reprocessing and refabricating is an expensive part of the overall process, but I think we are looking at enough numbers of years ahead so that those problems can be solved if we focus our attention on them in the meantime. Still seems to be a problem, but I think the attention focused on the reprocessing side and one might note that in the recent cancellation of the Clinch River and the shuffling of the budget on the breeder, that the part that got completely axed out of the budget was all anything associated with reprocessing. There was a substantial amount left in for the development, but not for the reprocessing side.
MR. LARSON: Certainly, reprocessing is equally as important as the development and should go hand in hand if we’re going to come out at the same place.
DR. DAVIS: Absolutely.
MR. LARSON: Fine. Well that’s, I think now I would like to, do you have any comments, in fact you joined the administration in Washington, I believe it was, what was it, about two years, two and a half years ago?
DR. DAVIS: Early 1981.
MR. LARSON: Yes. And there, I was wondering if you cared to comment on the many issues that have come before you there and what we have to look forward to on these. 
DR. DAVIS: Well. That’s a large subject by itself. Well, there were of course a great number of issues that were related to a variety of things. Oil, gas, coal, a whole host of things dealing with energy. On the other hand, I think a fair amount of my attention anyway was focused on various things related to nuclear power and weapons. One of the things of course most of the people in Washington had forgotten when the new administration came in was the Department of Energy was about half of the activities and half of the budget was associated with the weapons program. One of the facets of that of course has been that while there had been a continued program for the development of weapons, there had been very little done with any of the new weapons in the stock pile. So that we became engaged in a substantial program to upgrade the weapons stockpile which involved additional production activities and it’s turned out to be a fairly major program.
MR. LARSON: As a matter of fact there has been no production reactors built in almost 25 or 30 years ago.
DR. DAVIS: Yeah, since Savannah River. Well the end reactors, Hanford was I guess the last one, close to the last one.
MR. LARSON: Yes, that’s right.  But that’s a very small…
DR. DAVIS: But that’s been run as a power producing reactor for 15 or 20 years, not as a production reactor. So, the number of reactors in operation is quite small and…
MR. LARSON: And they’re getting older.
DR. DAVIS: They are certainly getting a lot older, although it’s amazing how the ones at Savannah River, for example, they run well, capabilities upgraded and they run quite lively, but the whole weapons production and complex had to be pretty well overhauled and put back into some semblance of operation. It’s been a major effort in the Department of Energy and was one of the only areas that I got involved in to a major extent. We of course were trying very hard to keep the breeder program going, not only Clinch River, but to try to broaden out the activities to bring in industry to a larger extent to try to find ways to stimulate some real international cooperation and I think I learned something out of that which to me seemed important. Now we talked a long time about international cooperation, but the thing that became clear after a while is there is several kinds of international cooperation. One of which is very general which is the exchange of information which is good. There is a lot of it. Everybody has agreements with everyone else to exchange information, but if you really want to try to save money on new facilities, they cost a tremendous amount of money. This is true about breeders or fusion or whatever, but those two are probably the biggest items in so far as budgets are concerned. You’ve got to talk about not the exchange of information, but about the joint programs, or real collaboration. This turns out to be very, very much harder to do. 
MR. LARSON: And is the fault on our side or the other side, or both?
DR. DAVIS: It’s probably both but it is interesting because if you want to have a joint program by which I would generally mean that you are going to have a program which you do this and we’ll do this kind of a things where you’re really splitting up the job, what you discover in this is characteristic of the Japanese, but it’s not just them alone. They don’t want to have any of the vital parts of the program done somewhere so they don’t have the direct experience. They are willing to cooperate to a certain extent, but they don’t want to give up doing important parts of the overall development themselves so that they have the experience. It’s an understandable position, but it makes it very difficult to try to develop a joint program where you might divide up the tasks to be done. This is true in trying to develop cooperative programs in other countries or even to have a sort of joint cooperative programs, or you may sort of pay for and manage a facility. We’ve gotten quite involved in, for example, in trying to find a way to get cooperative program put together to fund the fusion materials test facility at Hanford, which is about a $240 million facility. Basically the Office of Management and Budget said, “Well, that’s a great idea, but since it’s going to benefit everybody, why, we think it ought to be an international program and those who were interested in the development of fusion, ought to pay part of the cost, perhaps share in the management.”  So instead of trying to persuade other countries that they should do this, they discovered that this was a difficult tool, it’s a great idea in principle. They are quite receptive to the idea, but then you get down to the question of who’s going to run the facility and who’s experiments are you going to have and how is the management going to be conducted. Those who were contributing money want to have a say in what’s done and a share in the time and you get into a micromanagement problem basically and a facility which is basically owned and operated by an agency in the U.S. government and you’ve got all kinds of bureaucratic problems that arise.
MR. LARSON: Not to mention Congress.
DR. DAVIS: Well, not to mention Congress. Congress is basically receptive to the idea. We could save some money, but then they’ll worry about the Japanese getting some information, beating us out somehow. So I guess it’s another way of saying I spent a lot of my time in the Department of Energy worrying about international aspects of our operation and found it very interesting, but quite frustrating because in theory these things seem like an easy thing to do, but in practice you find that even with the best of intentions that there, you encounter many, many difficulties. The [inaudible] we tried to focus some attention on the need to somehow find a way to improve the situation with respect to nuclear power. I think the first aspect of that really goes down to the financial problem with the electric utilities. We did try a variety of mechanisms to focus the attention and try to see if it could be done with respect to the overall financial problem which simply they didn’t have enough money to build the plants that they were trying to build or trying to build new ones, or keep their operations going, which in turn comes about because of the actions of the state regulatory commissions in all 50 states, why the rates of the electric utilities, at least the investors are allowed to charge what is set by the state regulatory commissions and with a great inflation, an increase in the prices. They’ve allowed the rates to be increased so that almost universally the utilities are having great difficulty and a financial situation. Then if you get to talking about whether they are going to build new power plants or not, when, there’s a question of low growth and I think our feeling is that the next two or three years we’re going to have to start thinking about what they were trying to build if they are going to provide adequate service into the early 1990’s. The question then becomes one of if they are going to build something then what are they going to build. The choices are rather limited, being a factory, a coal plant, or nuclear, most substantial capacity going to be built in terms of wind, solar, or a bit here and there, and there really isn’t any hydro left that can be developed except in very, very few places. So the utilities are going to be faced with a choice. They look at coal at first. They’ve got problems with cost and various problems with acid rain; they’ve got a lot of problems too. Some of which are increasing. They look at nuclear; they’ve got a public attitude which seems to be unfavorable, although perhaps not as bad as some, but they’ve got a licensing problem, which makes it basically impossible for them to take that risk. You see the number of plants who have been, even when they get a license, they have to make a great variety of changes even as they build the plant. The changes demanded by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission see the plants that have been finished and then not allowed to operate. You’ve got plants like [inaudible] Canyon which we think are going into operation, but don’t. It’s been a long time since it’s been finished. Zimmer which is basically finished will probably never be really finished. These represent multibillion dollar investments that utilities are simply not willing to take that risk unless the whole licensing process can somehow be sorted out and a greater degree of certainty entered into it. To that end why in the Department of Energy we did introduce some suggestions to the Congress in the form of a draft legislation which they will never pass, even though we put it in. it had the key ideas in it which we thought would lead to a simplification in the licensing process, putting in some checkpoints so they would be going to get an answer in some relatively certain time, even if the answer is negative, at least they would get an answer. Once having gotten an answer, it would be valid for essentially for, they could then go ahead with confidence they could build the plant and put it into operation. These kinds of changes are certainly what are required at least. In my opinion, they would lead to a much safer situation if you’d be worried about safety. There is a great tendency to confuse all these piles of paper and documentation on safety. That is not safety.
MR. LARSON: In fact I think the goal is to go a little farther, some of the things that have been put in in the name of safety, I have a lingering suspicion that they may actually detract from…
DR. DAVIS: I’m convinced that all of the gadgetry and all of the things that have been put into the reactors over the years in the name of safety are actually detrimental to safety. You’ve built such a complex system that hardly anybody really knows how it works. You get into an emergency, you get into something like Three Mile Island which incidentally as far as I’m concerned demonstrated the safety of a nuclear plant, but it got so complicated. As a matter of fact if you go and stand in that control room and look at all the indicator lights and all the things around there and visualize all of those going off at once, which is literally what happened, and then figure what’s an operator going to do. You got the thing so complicated and all the alarms are going off simultaneously, it’s very, very easy to get confused. 
MR. LARSON: And some of them are a little bit on the trivial side.
DR. DAVIS: A lot of them aren’t important. Which ones are the important ones when they all go off? I think this is what is necessary and I do believe that the licensing would be, in the first place something has to be done to improve the financial situation of the companies, which means more revenues. That’s basically their problem. Then I think you need an improved licensing situation and then I think some of the utilities or nuclear plants, some of them are coal fired power plants and then you’ll see nuclear power I think will be back on track, although at a much lower rate than some people predicted as of two years ago and then a seven percent per year growth rate is now about half of that. 
MR. LARSON: Well that, as I say, you’ve really outlined the problems which really face us today on this. I was wondering if I could get some of your views on, you might say the future in several, there have been of course some predictions as to when fusion might actually turn out electric power. Do you care to comment, is there any…
DR. DAVIS: On fusion, I believe that the machines being built now and I’ve seen the ones all over this country, the one in Japan, Jet-60 I believe they call it, and the Jet Column I believe they call it in England. All of these big machines as well as the mirror machine that is now finished in [inaudible], I think they all have the capability that you can demonstrate and establish the conditions which are necessary for a practical fusion reaction, where they will show where you can create and maintain for an appropriate period of time the temperatures, the pressures, and densities and so on that are required that carry out fusion. I think they will also demonstrate you can do it under circumstances so it’s a stable kind of reaction. Only one of the machines, the one at Princeton, will actually do this with a tritium-deuterium mixture so that you can be producing a fusion reaction of the sort that you can contemplate and none of them will have to do this on any kind of a continuous basis or any kind of engineering basis. So it’s almost completely a physics type of experiment, a very large, very complex, and there are inherently demonstrations with physics involved in fusion reactions. To go from there to a practical commercial power-producing machine that will run hour after hour for thousands of hours is one of the greatest engineering challenges I think I have ever visualized and not totally ignored but very little attention has been focused on it and almost no work has been done on it. This is why we were so anxious to get the FMIT [Fusion Materials Irradiation Test Facility] at Hanford actually going and I think that almost exemplifies the basic problem because what you’re trying to do is to build a facility which will test materials of the sort you are going to use in a fusion reactor under the conditions of irradiation, temperatures and pressures which would approximate the actual materials in real time, in other words, a one year test in the FMIT is equal to one year operation of a fusion reactor. If the machine is built it will be the only one in the world which will do this and it would cost roughly $240 million, would provide you with the capability to do this kind of materials test in a test volume of 10 cubic centimeters. 
MR. LARSON: So that’s the type of thing that has to be done in order to make any kinds of predictions…
DR. DAVIS: It’s just a bare start on the problem and another way to illuminate the problem in another way is to say that all of the designs basically that people come up with they always have a problem with what they call the first wall, the wall that separates the fusion reaction from the, whatever else is behind it. And to operate at essentially practical conditions you find that over the course of the life of this wall, that every atom in it will be hit about 200 times by a neutron, by a high energy neutron. Not very many materials that are around that would be likely to take that kind of punishment.
MR. LARSON: Radiation damage is likely to be catastrophic.
DR. DAVIS: There are some very serious I think ultimately solvable problems, but the answer to when one will have fusion power is, whether it’s, you can’t really speculate whether it’s 40 years, 50 years. It’s not tomorrow. It’s not 10 years from now. There is no one that even knows how to build a machine to make it happen 10 years from now. Whereas I would just like to point out and go back to the breeder, that if we had the design and could build fast breeder reactors we could design them now and they would work, be safe, be reliable, we know how to do it, we have the technology and we know how to do the reprocessing. It costs too much is where it stands. 
MR. LARSON: So it’s a matter of economics until the price of uranium, or the scarcity of it gets to the point where the lines will cross.
DR. DAVIS: Or the time that is available which is, you’re never going to need the breeder if you don’t have a power reactor. Until the power reactor business picks up, the time in which we need breeders is further off in the distance. I think most of us are convinced that if we continue to do development work for the breeder we can find ways of reducing the costs and the cost margin for the breeder, the breeder you could actually go out and build today would probably produce power at twice the cost of a light water reactor, or a coal fire power plant. So it’s a big margin because trying to get back to equal costs is pretty hard and that is true if uranium prices make part of the difference. But if you had to do it and were willing to pay that cost, then there is no question what you could actually do. It’s an infinite source at least for electric energy that you know how to do today if you have to do it.
MR. LARSON: I don’t think it’s an infinite source. It’s only good for about 1000 years.
DR. DAVIS: Well, it’s almost.
MR. LARSON: Fine. Well I was wondering if you might comment also on these other systems. People keep talking about thorium-223, the possibilities, do you see any serious work in the field in that with any interest? 
DR. DAVIS: Again, the thorium cycle is sort of an alternative cycle to the uranium-plutonium cycle. I don’t know that it has got any great advantages, except one of adding more resources. The economics in most cases don’t seem quite as good.
MR. LARSON: How about the potential safety? Are they about the same? 
DR. DAVIS: I’ve never really seen any credible argument that there has been any significant difference. The Canadians were interested in thorium for their reactor because it fits in that cycle relatively well. The Canadians incidentally going back to the MTA are now working on an MTA project which has some interest. They are building a laboratory to develop essentially an accelerator breeder as they call it. That idea is still being pursued. There are other kinds of reactors that people are very much interested in.  I think they all share somewhat the same characteristics as the breeder which is that there is not going to be an opportunity to develop any of them unless the light water reactor is revived because there isn’t anyone who is going to really put large amounts of money into developing new types of reactors unless you’ve got an industry established to help pay for that. Certainly the U.S. government is not going to put billions of dollars into developing new reactors, so I think the whole thing rather hinges on the breeder and the high temperature gas cooled reactors and other types, really all hinges on the conditions being established on how the utilities in this country to start ordering light water reactors when they have the need to do so which should be in a relatively short time period now and if they have money to do so, which is going to take some fixing, if that happens, then I think we will see an emergence over the years of different kinds of reactors and eventually the breeder. One question you may say is well if the U.S. doesn’t go ahead and the other countries are too, I find it rather disturbing because I have gone to other places, I have many times, including the last few months, but I find is in the minds of the Japanese, the French, and in many other countries is a really great concern in feeling that if the reactor program is not continued to be a viable one in this country that they are going to have to think pretty hard about what they do.  That includes the French despite the fact that they have charged ahead with a large reactor program doing very well, still have not built anywhere near the number of reactors that we have in this country by a long, long ways, and have depended on this country for most of the technology and still depend on this country for the technology. Even though the theory is the reactor business is dead in this country, it’s really not dead. A lot of plants are being built and there is still an enormous amount of technology being developed and every other country that is in the reactor business, including the Russians, to a very large extent continues to develop. The reactor technology, fuel technology, things of that sort in the United States, if that should stop, in the United States, it would have a profound effect on the reactor programs in almost everywhere else in the world.
MR. LARSON: Yes. And of course certainly within the next 10 years it’s going to become very apparent that we have to do something with the acid rain and all, the shortage of oil, there is almost no other place to go except that some people say that if only we could make the reactors safer and there has been a lot of talk about a Swedish design and I believe the high temperature gas cooled reactor. Are these anything substantially, have advantages as far as safety is concerned? 
DR. DAVIS: Well, I’ve looked at most of them and I must say that I can see no compelling arguments for any of them. whether they’re safer than light water reactors, I don’t think the evidence is there, plus the fact that that argument implies something which I strongly object to which is the light water reactors are not adequately safe. 
MR. LARSON: I have somewhat the feeling that the light water reactors are 99.99 percent safe where these others might be 99.999, but you’re looking at the fourth and fifth decimal points which you can’t really…
DR. DAVIS: Are far more than what you need or you can’t tell a difference. Well actually if one sat down and tried to construct an experiment to see whether or not the pressurized water reactor was safe regardless of what was done, you would have great difficulty inventing a better experiment than the TMI-2 [Three Mile Island-2]. You simply could not invent a better experiment than the TMI-2. Leaving aside the enormous financial consequences, but in terms of the scientific and engineering experiment to try to do everything to provoke the reactor to become a hazard, TMI certainly, they didn’t leave very much out of the scenario when they did it.
MR. LARSON: I was just going to say if you tried to write a scenario today, you probably couldn’t do much better than Three Mile Island. 
DR. DAVIS: The fact is that Three Mile Island did not release any significant quantities of radioactive materials, did not injure any of the people working at the plant, did not injure, and put at hazard at any time to people living outside the plant. It demonstrated as completely almost as anything can the validity of the basic principles that have been developed and put into the reactor system from the very beginning, emergency cooling, containment, and so on. It in fact demonstrated with, that it was actually getting to a point which I don’t think anybody ever visualized having the core sitting there without any water sitting on it for several hours, that regardless of all that, the damage was less than what would have been predicted and the consequences to either those working in the plant or outside of it were essentially zero. Wall Street, the consequences were catastrophic, but the objective of the program was to have a safe reactor. I would comment that history will show that TMI-2 which was an important demonstration for the safety of the light water reactors. And how you can argue you need a safer reactor when that was adequately demonstrated there is simply beyond belief as far as I’m concerned, but that’s certainly the popular opinion. 
MR. LARSON: Well what I would be afraid of is the great effort one of these other directions, which would then turn up other safety things which would be just as, perhaps end up not being safe. 
DR. DAVIS: And who is going to put up the money and who is going to sell these reactors? How are you going to do it?
MR. LARSON: And I think it’s so neat that we have a lot of other things whereby we can use our financial resources in a lot better ways, such as reprocessing. 
DR. DAVIS: And the reactors if there were things to learn at TMI, probably simple little things like having vent lines so you can vent off gas from the top of the reactor. I mean it would have been nice to have that. It didn’t have one there. There are some things of that sort that really would have improved the situation, but the attention ought to be focused on improving where necessary the reactor should [inaudible] are no good, go out and do something different. There never will be a nuclear program if you do that. 
MR. LARSON: Well, that’s, Dr. Davis you certainly have given us a very comprehensive picture of the past, present and perhaps future of nuclear energy and I certainly want to thank you for taking the time to give your thoughts in this field and I’m sure that your video tape here will add considerable to a record to future scholars and educators. Thank you very much again.
DR. DAVIS: Thank you, Clarence. As you can tell I enjoyed talking about the subject.
MR. LARSON: Fine. Well, very good. 
[End of Interview]