Rockwell, Theodore

              ORAL HISTORY OF THEODORE ROCKWELL
Interviewed by D. Ray Smith
Filmed by Keith McDaniel
April 29, 2011 
Mr. Smith: This is Ray Smith. Today is April the 29th of 2011. I’m here with Ted Rockwell. Ted, tell us how you came to be in Oak Ridge.
Dr. Rockwell: Well, I was at grad school up at Princeton. I had graduated with my B.S. at the age of twenty and was in grad school. Guys came around recruiting, and I thought I’d just check in what was going on. A guy says he’s got a really great job. It’s a defense job. So I say, “Fine, tell me about it.” He says, “I can’t.” I said, “Well, where is it?” He says, “Can’t tell you that.” “What am I going to do?” “Can’t tell you that.” I said, “Well, why in the world would I take a job like that. [laughter] He says, “Well, you’ve got to decide. It’s an important job.” I said, “But you don’t give me any basis to judge that.” “Well, that’s your problem.” So I start poking around and trying to see. There was a lot of classified work of various kinds going on at Oak Ridge, and I was trying to get guys who would tell me, “Maybe you ought to look in this direction or that direction,” or give me some sort of a hint. Nobody would do that, but I was told there was a lot of interesting stuff going on in the chemistry field, and I ought to look at some new developments in the chemistry journals. So I was a chemical engineer, and I cracked out the chemical journals, and one thing led to another. I got this idea that I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but I came across a piece of information that turned out to be completely false that said uranium had been discovered in East Tennessee. I said, “Uranium? Gee, I bet you that’s atomic energy.” So I went scampering back to this guy, burst in on him when he was interviewing other people and said, “I know what you’re doing. It’s atomic energy, isn’t it?” This guy says, “It is the policy of the United States Government neither to confirm nor deny the existence of any classified project.” I said, “Gee, that’s good enough for me. I’ll buy it!” That night some guy came in, and right out of central casting looking like Sam Smart spy, turned up collar on the trench coat and all of that and says, “Keep your damn trap shut, kid.” [laughter] I said, “Okay.” So I felt I was really confirmed on that. Then we came down here into Knoxville, got interviewed, and then that was in December of – let’s see – December of ’43, yeah. It was December 1943, and then came down and went into Knoxville. Practically the last time I was in Knoxville; you don’t do a lot of traveling in those days between Knoxville and Oak Ridge. But we went in and came out to the lab in one of these big Army cattle cars. I mean plywood inside, and when you wanted the guy to stop, you’d pull the chain and it was supposed to ring a bell in the cab of the truck, but it never did. People were pounding on the back and trying to get it to stop. They had kicked the slats out of the bottom of the thing trying to open the door because the guy didn’t unlock the door from the thing. So that was the luxurious accommodations we had coming in. So then I was tentatively hired, and I start the security process. So I went back to school. Now, as I say, it was in December. In about April, I get a call, “Hey, if you’re coming you better get here now.” I said, “Okay.” So I came down, and then I had to go through the clearance thing. So we sat there and saw Felix the Cat cartoons – pre-Mickey Mouse, I want you to know; that’s really getting old – and listened to all kinds of stuff. They had made up this story about what we were doing here. Of course, there were all these wiseacre stories. We were making the front ends of horses to reassemble in Washington with the other half and this kind of stuff. The official, sort of semi-official story was that we were making a catalyst of some sort that was supposed to have great importance in stopping the war. It was not necessary for us to know any more, and if we were smart, we wouldn’t ask a lot of questions. That got to be very interesting. You didn’t talk to other people, and even the simplest kinds of information about Oak Ridge was not something you were supposed to talk to other people about. For example, I heard a story here today – it was the type of stories we used to have about somebody in the hospital in Oak Ridge, and they wrote home about the fact that, gee, this is a busy hospital. There were four or whatever it was, appendix, removed in one day. Boy, these letters were all opened and read. She got told that was a no-no. Gee, why would that be a secret? Well, it gives you a feeling of how big a town it is. People have that kind of statistics, that’s one class of intelligence is getting that kind of statistics and saying, “What can you tell from this?” So this was the sort of situation we had. The mixture of types of people was the most interesting thing because these were people that thought they knew how to relate to people, and now they were with very different types of people. So you’d have these sharp, Jewish kids from New York, and then you’d have the Daisy Mae gals. They were coming head on. Of course, all of these are caricatures. These were real people, but these prototype stereotype things did come out, and it was really very interesting. So I was at the Y-12 part, which was the electromagnetic separating uranium for use in an atomic bomb. The two different places that did this was Y-12 and K-25, and if either of these things had done the whole job, they might have been it; but as happened, neither of them was able to do it until the very last minute of the war. We had stood a real chance that we could have gotten to the end of the war before either of these systems had actually produced enough. It was literally the last days, and I remember as we came to June 27th, I think it was, “End the war in July” was the statement, and we were supposed to ship everything out of the plant. As I remember, it was June 27th. So we couldn’t understand how you could really end the war in a couple of days, but it was very much the attitude. There was a lot of crazy kidding around, college campus sort of an attitude because there were a whole bunch of smartass college kids here. But everybody was very serious about the fact that they knew that they weren’t getting shot at and a lot of their friends were, and they were pretty darn lucky to be where they were. They were taking it very seriously. As we pulled into the plant, one of the last things we saw was one of those big billboard side of the highway billboard signs that had a picture of a guy in the trenches. He’s obviously just been struck by a shell from overhead, and the caption was something like – the thing down below was – well, I guess the way the script went was: “Whose son will die in the last days of the war? Our job is to end the war. Minutes count.” We got that message every morning, and that was a very clear message and we understood. I saw that firsthand created into a real moment when there was a guy that got pinned to the magnet by accidentally getting a big piece of metal plate too near the magnetic field and whammo! There he was pinned to the magnet. Everybody is yelling, “Shut of the magnet! Shut off the magnet!” What I’m about to tell you sounds like it comes right out of Hollywood, but I watched it myself. And remember this was a war attitude and people were taking things that would look very corny in peacetime and they were taking them very seriously. So this guy was pinned to the wall, and people were saying, “Shut down the magnet!” The foreman says, “I’m not going to do it.” He says, “We’ve been told that there are three hundred people an hour being killed in the war. If I shut down a magnet, it might take as long as a week to get it back up and stabilized again and production during a period of instability could be pretty worthless production.” So this guy said, “There could be hundreds of people killed in the war because it’s our job to stop the war. We’ve got to act as if we’re the only people in the world that have that responsibility.” As I say, if I put that in a movie or a play you’d think that was pretty corny, but that was the attitude of people in those days and it should have been. It should have been. So, we have that kind of motivation going on here, and so it was a kind of a crazy city. We were having a lot of fun. Everybody, the technical people in particular, felt that we had a job that we couldn’t have designed a better job. I certainly felt that way. I was working with people that were a lot smarter than I was. Anything we needed in the way of equipment, we had it. We had priority in Washington, anything. And I and I’m sure a lot of other guys were asking their fathers, “Why don’t you see what you can find out about this thing?” because businessmen who were busy in the business world usually had all kinds of sources of information. My father felt he could find out what was going on in a short time. He says, “Got a lot of fascinating bits and pieces, and they don’t add up to anything that makes sense.” He says, “Everybody’s shipping something down here, but the fact that they got the world’s largest shipment of widgets, they don’t know what to do with that.” So the security thing was really quite effective.  
Mr. Smith: And this was the first time it had ever been done, so no one knew how to do it.
Dr. Rockwell: That’s right.
Mr. Smith: Before we leave the thought about the fella getting pushed up against the magnet, tell us how’d you get him off that?
Dr. Rockwell: Yeah, I started to tell that, and I didn’t finish it. What happened was that he didn’t turn off the magnet. So what they did, they got two-by-fours. The foreman said whatever’s happened to this guy physically is already done. So what we ought to do is you guys get some two-by-fours and very carefully pry him out, and we’ll leave the magnet on. And they did that, and it turned out he wasn’t very seriously hurt and everything went, but I mean that was the way they did things. But the whole plant, the whole process of several plants tied together was built on the basis of every guy’s little piece. He says, “I can’t do anything until you give me this kind of thing. What kind of materials can I build it out of, and how much are you going to need, and how big is it going to be, and when do you need it?” and all this stuff. Everybody needed that information from somebody else before he could get started. So what we did – and this was really quite amazing, quite remarkable, what they did. What they did was they had to make assumptions, and then usually these assumptions would turn out to be wrong. Let’s say, for instance, that they had three types of material that they could build things out of normally. One would be stainless steel, and you’d think that would be pretty safe thing and it’ll stand up in nitric acid and all that stuff. But the one thing it can’t take is chloride, so if one of the salts in one of the processes might well turn out to be hydrochloric acid, and now that eats its way into stainless steel like crazy. What you need is Monel® family of things: copper-nickel type of alloys. So tell me if that’s what I need, I’ll use that; otherwise, I’ll use stainless steel. So they finally decide they’re going to do it one of these two ways, and about that time somebody comes in and says, “We’re thinking of using fluoride, and that dissolves everything but glass.” [laughter] They actually had glass piping and glass tubes and all that stuff. So that was quite a remarkable thing in which a whole series of very basic decisions, technical decisions that were made, the information that anybody would want first was something he had to get from the other guy, and the other guy didn’t know until he had finished his job, and he couldn’t do his job until a third guy had come in and done his. So that was quite a remarkable achievement that they were able to accomplish, that they built a whole lot of stuff in parallel, all during the first eighteen months. They got housing done. They got roads built. They got the movie theater up. They got all these things done in eighteen months all in parallel. They went from nothing but hillside and mud, plenty of mud. They even had two different kinds of mud. You could have this red, sticky stuff and people would put a shoe into the mud and come out without the shoe. That shoe was forever a part of Oak Ridge history at that point. The paleontologists will be digging it out of the cliffs for millennia in the future, but we got this thing that women somehow or other seemed to be immune from all these problems. We’d have these dances over at the rec hall and the gals would get these big hip boots, and they’d slide through the mud. They’d come up to the front of the rec hall, and they had a janitor’s closet there with a big bucket and water faucet. You’d come in and hose off your boots, slosh them into the janitor’s closest, leave the boots there, and then they’d slip on the golden sandals and then go tripping into the hall to dance. Somehow or other, the men never got to the way these women could sort of hover above all the earthly mess and come out looking gorgeous all the time. They were very good at this, which was one of the nice things about Oak Ridge. So whatever. Well, I went then – I was working in the experimental facility, XAX and XBX, as they called them, for just a few days. I think less than two weeks. I’m trying to think of his name. The tip of my tongue. I would have told you. Anyway, this is a guy that had an idea that somebody had come in and hadn’t developed yet. It was a thing to cut down some eighty-five percent of the use of liquid nitrogen that was coming in – liquid nitrogen, for Pete’s sake, coming in by tank car lots. A whole long train full of tank cars of liquid nitrogen. It’s a pretty expensive commodity, and it was boiling away like mad. Somebody had come up with an idea to cut that way down, and I was asked to go ahead and finish the thing, build one and test it out and make it go. And I did that. Most of the clever work had already been done; it was just my job to get it built and tested, which I did, and it worked. I felt just great. I had very little supervision on it, but I didn’t need any. They’d set up all the tough part already. So that was really fun. Then a guy from Allis Chalmers in Milwaukie, a middle-aged engineer was setting up a tiger team: Process Improvement Group, I guess, was the official name. I think it was about seven of us that he had gotten right out of college, different types of engineers. I think one of them was a physicist. Our job was to wander all through the plant and find things that could be improved. It was an ideal job. You just couldn’t have designed a better job, and one of the best things about it was that we could go into all kinds of places inside the lab, which most people couldn’t. So we could wander in here and we can see something that looked like we could improve it or we could see something that looked like it was going to be a problem and try to prevent that. So we had task after task that came up, and we were fresh out of engineering school, all of us. We had a chance to try out our skills, and we’d go in not knowing anything about machining stuff. “I want you to build this.” [laughter] The guys in the shop would argue that we always managed to come in with something you couldn’t machine it, you couldn’t cast it, you couldn’t – you know – because we didn’t know anything about that thing. So we were these young bright kids with very little experience, essentially no experience, and these old time shop people that knew all those things that could say, “Let me show you how to do that, kid. You don’t want to try to machine that out of here. You ought to spin it or stamp it or whatever. Or if you do it this way, you can bolt a couple of pieces together. It will make it easy.” So it was a tremendous education for us, and it was almost unsupervised play. We just had a romping time. We could go to all these different buildings in the place and do various things. So I did that through the war. Then at the end of the war, we came right up to the end of the war with neither of the two enrichment plants producing very well. Groves kept ordering two more plants, two more plants to give us more capacity because the capacity was so bad. At the last minute, just really last minute, both of these plants started to work like crazy. So we were piling up the material, but at the end it became clear that if the gaseous diffusion plant worked, it was much more economical and much more straightforward than the electromagnetic process where I had been working in Y-12. So they laid off – right after the peace agreement – they laid off some twenty-two thousand people, which doesn’t do much to improve the morale in the place. That’s when the unions were just big national unionization movement. AFL [American Federation of Labor] and CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] were independent competitors at that time fighting for the same people. K-25, the gaseous diffusion plant was the CIO and the Lab, Oak Ridge National Lab – it was called Clinton Lab in those days – it had the AFL people. Y-12 was non-union, and so both of them were holding in on it. The head of the Y-12 plant at that time was Doug Labors, who was my wife’s brother-in-law. He was a Newfoundlander and Newfoundlanders traditionally don’t ever say anything but “yep” and “nope” and they don’t say that without a twenty second pause first. So the unions were all four down on Doug Labors, and he had laid off twenty-two thousand people. There weren’t very many left. So they were accusing him of all sorts of terrible labor practices. He shouldn’t have laid these guys off and he shouldn’t have laid those guys off. He didn’t say a word. They were building up what a terrible guy he was, and all of the specifics about how he’d laid off the wrong people. The night before the election, he got on the interview on the radio station and said, “All these people are saying that you’re just violating all sorts of traditional good labor practice, and that you’ve set new records of being irresponsible in terms of your labor practices.” So they got the union guy: “Yeah, he laid off ….” So Doug’s answer was very simple. He says, “We’ve laid off twenty-two thousand people and we’ve got” – what was it – five thousand left or some fairly modest number. So he says, “I guess what they’re saying is I should have laid these guys off instead of the ones I did.” [laughter] There was no argument to that in the union. Following, the vote came out overwhelmingly non-union, and that was the end of that one. I guess a couple of quick things I’ll mention. Then it became clear to me that the future was not going to be at Y-12, and of course I didn’t foresee all of the types of things that Y-12 would get into, which had been quite interesting and quite productive, quite important for the science and the economics both, but I wanted to get into reactors. So I went over to X-10, got into reactors, got into shielding and so forth. But I guess I should mention that the reason I’m down here today is that we’re doing a documentary for public television on Admiral Rickover: Father of Atomic Energy. A lot of people would say – as a matter of fact, a lot of people did say, “Gee, you really got that wrong. Everybody knows he started the Nuclear Navy, but how do you claim that he had anything to do with really setting the tone?” A fact is if you look at the information, and I think we’re going to make this clear in the film, that most of the basic things and a good many reactors were built before the very first commercial reactor, which was Dresden for GE [General Electric]. Dresden came in in ’61 if I remember, and before 1961, Rickover’s program, counting each and every full-scale reactor that we did, including the land-based prototypes as a reactor, by 1961 we had produced forty-one full scale reactors going to sea or as prototypes or Rickover was also set up to head up President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace Program. Rickover’s whole attitude about how to do the job changed because the job was totally different. He was a real stickler for classification, classifying things when he was making submarines. He says, “Why do you want to tell your potential adversaries what your weapons are? That’s crazy.” But when it came to the shipping port plant, which was the first commercial plant, he said, “If we’re going to do anything useful, we ought to get all this stuff declassified. We’ve got to be able to separate the good science and the good technology from the bad, and set it up so that it can go through the code committees and all this sort of stuff. So one of the first things he did, he had all his people prepare handbooks on some – I think there were about twelve or thirteen topics. One of them was a shielding handbook, which was the one I did. Other people did ones on zirconium, on liquid metal coolants, on stainless steels, all these different things, physics. So the whole thing, I think, was really done the way Eisenhower wanted it done. He was trying to show the world that to look at the nuclear program as a simple ordnance program was to just miss the whole point of this tremendous new interface in human development. I mean if you see the development of the human race under these particular intervals in which things suddenly jump and it was usually because there was a technological development of some kind and often that technological development had something to do with energy. So here we suddenly had a source of non-polluting, easily available energy of all kinds. Energy is the basic thing. If you look at the definition, the dictionary definition of energy, it’s a capacity to do work, to take action, to make changes, to overcome resistance. That’s the basic definition of energy. What could be more fundamental than that? That’s the basic ability to get things done and we suddenly had developed for humanity this tremendous amount of energy for the future. Well, let’s see, where’s the next best step to go?
Mr. Smith: Well, let’s talk about your movement over to the laboratory, and then how you came in contact with Admiral Rickover?
Dr. Rockwell: Well, I just went over there at the end of the war, as I said, because it looked like Y-12 was the past and reactors were the future. I went over there, and I guess one of the first things I did – I had an interest in radiation shielding, so I decided we’d have a classified symposium. We did that in those days, and we’d get all the customers, Rickover for the nuclear Navy, General Kern for the aircraft propulsion. Yeah, they actually thought they could build a nuclear-powered airplane. That sounds like something out of Disney, but there it was. But get all these guys together, so there were about two hundred and fifty people invited to this conference, and it was all classified, secret in those days, secret restricted data. So he got it set up, and I told everybody to bring two hundred and fifty copies of their report and we’d be able to distribute them among the other people that were there. So they showed up. This was one of the first of these big classified things and we were inventing our own format. I reminded the Carbide people, who were running the lab at that time, I said, “If you look at the Greek word ‘symposium’ and what it means, a group of people discussing a subject, the Greek word actually says ‘come together for discussion and beer.’” I guess it’s ‘discussion and drinking’ is the way it was worded. So I said, “We want to do this in the classical manner, and I think it would be real nice if Carbide would set us up with beer,” which they did, to my surprise. [laughter] But they did. So I was pretty proud. It looked like it was going to go pretty well. I get this call from Rickover up at the guest house. “Come on up. I want to talk to you.” So I go up here and he says, “What are you trying to get out of this clambake, Rockwell?” I said, “Well, it’s pretty straightforward. I’m bringing together the guys that need shields, and I’m bringing together the guys that could provide components of data to build shields. So what do you mean, what do I want to get out of it?” He says, “Yeah, yeah, but what do you want to actually get out of this particular meeting?” I said, “I don’t understand what you’re getting at.” He says, “Could you sit down now and design me a shield?” I said, “No, of course not.” He says, “Why not?” I said, “I’d need a lot of things.” “What sort of things do you need? Who could do it? What is it going to take to do it? How long is it going to take? Who can provide that?” He says, “Hell, if I have to tell you all these things, I don’t need you,” he says. [laughter] So I said, “Well, yeah that sounds pretty interesting.” He says, “Well, I’ll call Al Weinberg and tell him that we’re going to be needing you here, and he’ll understand.” I said, “Now, wait a minute. I haven’t even decided whether I want to live in this town or not.” So he turns to Bill Wilson and says, “Wilson, drive Rockwell around Oak Ridge till he likes it,” he says. So the next thing I knew, I was working for him. That was my Rickover interview. But I mean it really made a lot of sense. At that moment, since I was a lousy organizer, hadn’t had any experience on doing any of this thing, and I had a million things I should be doing, he had me spending most of that night getting all the ducks lined up to be able to come out with minutes that had action plans to really get things done. Rickover had a guy working for him, I guess, in Naval Reserve – I guess is the way it was set up at the time – and that was Everett Blizzard and he was doing radiation shielding measurements in a lid tank where they had a hole in the shield that you could pull out and let the radiation stream out, and then he had a tank on the outside of that slapped over the face of it, and it was a water tank. Then in the water tank you could put various slabs of other materials and stuff. There were people envisioning that you would have in your shield program the whole middle of the periodic table, all those names you can’t even pronounce – dysprosium and europium and praseodymium and all those guys – that gee, we can sit down and we can measure all these things. Nothing was known about these so-called rare earths. You could picture researching the rest of your life on this and wouldn’t that be fun. Rickover called a bunch of us up to his office on a Saturday, and I wasn’t working for him yet. So he wanted us to give a spiel on how we would set up a shielding program. What would we do? So when I came in and I said, “I have an unusual request of you.” And he says, “What?” I said, “Could I come first because if you buy what I’m going to tell you, you don’t have to listen to any of the rest of these guys?” [laughter] That sort of appealed to him I guess. But my point was that you could get into hours and days of discussion of how you were going to analyze all these different elements. My thought was – we had this water tank. Water is an excellent shield for neutrons, and if you put some heavy metal in there – iron, lead, whatever – in water, that would probably be a pretty good shield. If you had to put some exotic material in and you had to can it and you had to cover it with an inert atmosphere and all this kind of stuff, you’d lose whatever you gained by the slightly better characteristics, but this thing is a pretty physical process, this shield absorption business. So if you just put these slabs of iron and lead and put them at different distances apart, I think you can take the data right off of their actual numbers and use those numbers directly without a lot of fancy math or anything else, and make that into the Nautilus shield. After a lot of, “Oh, don’t do that! You’re giving away a lifetime of research here, man!” that’s what we decided to do. So that program was a very important contribution of Oak Ridge directly to the Nautilus design. We had problems like what kind of streaming would you have down cracks? Rickover’s comment was, “Water has no cracks,” which is true, but you still have pipes that have to go through and cabling that has to go through. What do you do about the insulation of the pipe, which isn’t a very good shield, and does radiation come down there? You’d have to put steps in the thing like a Chinese bridge to keep the devil from following you. It was a very similar concept. So all that stuff was very good, and then getting some of the basic nuclear materials, Rickover would assign these guys that he had sent to the MIT Master’s program and they were developing fundamental analysis to get these fundamental numbers. So let me pause for a minute and get some water. [coughing]
[break in recording]
Dr. Rockwell: All right. Well, I can at least sit up straight. Well, let me think a second. Yeah, I think that one of the things I’d like to mention is that much of the atomic program has unfortunately been built around fear and negativity. If you want to get grant money to do some research, you’ve got to convince people that your project is important. Otherwise, why should they do it? What makes it important? Well, if it’s mysterious and if it’s dangerous and so forth – you know. So you end up spending a lot of time telling everybody how dangerous and how scary this stuff is, and the nuclear game has been tied up with that from the very first. I’ve been telling people that the first action, first official action of the new Atomic Energy Commission when it took over from the Army January 1, 1947, the first action on the books was we’ve got to take some action to thwart or discourage or block the – how did they word that? I’m just trying to think – the public’s unwarranted enthusiasm for nuclear power. So here’s the thing; it’s operating up. The whole American public is anxious to get your product, and what do you do? You decide the first thing you’ve got to do is talk them out of it. For some reason or other, we’ve had that attitude about nuclear power right from the very beginning. People are naturally excited about the idea of humanity having a whole new source of energy. Why shouldn’t they be excited about that? And they were. So the Atomic Energy Commission felt it was their job to tell everybody that this wasn’t really going to work that way. We’ve done so much of this through our whole history instead of being proud of what we’re doing and recognize – I’ve gotten samples of things like a ‘sense of congress’ is what they called this resolution that they passed when Richardson was Secretary of Energy. [Editor’s note: A ‘sense of congress’ is a majority opinion that does not become law.] 
“We’re killing people. We’re killing our employees with radiation and all of my predecessors have been covering it up, but I’m going to stand beside you guys, and we’re going to give you – all you have to do is show that your health is bad on something that could possibly have been radiation,” which is almost anything. You can find cases where radiation could be blamed for everything from flat feet to baldness and everything in between. So they set up this program and the Department of Energy sent people out to old people’s homes, retirement communities and asked these guys: aren’t they feeling sort of stiff and achy some days? Don’t they have some pains and stuff? Maybe that was because of the radiation that they got fifty years before. Why in the world would you go and spend money trying to stir up people’s problems? You think you’re happy? Let me explain to you, you’re not happy. I mean, what a way to live. So I think one of the big things that the nuclear game needs is what I would call equivalence, where we say that having one lethal dose of radioactivity is equivalent to one lethal dose of mercury or anthrax or whatever, equal ground. There’s no reason to think that nuclear poisoning is any more evil or painful or prominent or anything. If we could get an equivalence on these things, then we can talk common sense. There’s a tremendous amount of effort going in right now on a study on what they called NORM and T-NORM. NORM is naturally-occurring radioactive material. T-NORM is technologically-enhanced naturally-occurring radioactive material. A theory is that if it’s human created, then we have a moral obligation to stop it. The way they do that is to tell everybody that it’s a hundred times more penalty associated with a dose of radiation that came via man-made paths. So you’re creating this artificial world and trying to figure out how to operate it sensibly, and there is no way to operate it sensibly because it’s not a sensible idea. The body doesn’t tell where this gamma ray comes from. The instruments who measure it don’t tell that this is one of those nasty ones that’s made by people instead of one of those friendly green ones. The fact of the matter is that the world – well, let me put it this way: life was created in a world that was roughly ten times more radioactive than the world today is, and life adapted to that situation. Life optimized around that situation, so we are now getting let’s say ten times less radiation than life was evolved to optimize around. We are under-irradiated. One of the experiments that was done here at Oak Ridge to demonstrate that point was to take these mice – Oak Ridge had a quarter of a million mice in cages here at one time for doing these various radiation damage experiments. If you try to see what would be the effect of no radiation on life, so you put this mouse in a lead-lined cage and he’s getting no cosmic rays and he’s getting no radiation from the earth and all that kind of stuff, but he’s still got natural radioactive materials in his body because some eighty isotopes that we live with are naturally radioactive. One of them is potassium 40. Potassium is a very common element in our food and so forth. So somebody got the idea, they put the mice in a cage, lead-lined cage, cut all the external radiation down as far as they could, but the mouse is still getting radioactive food with potassium in it. So they separated out in the calutrons, separated out that one isotope so that the mouse was getting non-radioactive potassium in his food. The mouse gets sick. The mouse gets sick, and if you keep this up long enough, the mouse will die. You need radiation to be healthy. There were other experiments that were done. A French guy, Pennell, did some experiments with bacteria where it was easier to get it even more so, but this idea that something unnatural, corporate let’s say, associated with radioactivity – it doesn’t make any sense and it isn’t true. So that’s something that I think we should just take in stride. I remember at the meeting in Chicago, the fiftieth anniversary of the – I guess the ‘Fiftieth Anniversary of the Manhattan Project’ is the way they worded it. Greenpeace was picketing the place. Shut down all the reactors and so forth. A woman whose name I can’t think of right this minute – no, yes I can. Rosalyn Yalow, Y-A-L-O-[W]. She was a Nobel laureate in medicine and physics, or was it medicine and – yeah medicine and physics. She went out and talked to the Greenpeace guys. She said, “You really want to shut down all the nuclear reactors?” They said, “Yeah ma’am. That’s what we want to do.” She says, “Well, I’ve got some forms here I’d like you to sign which says that you are willing to forego any hospital treatments that involve radiation because that’s where the radiation comes from for these things made for hospitals and nuclear facilities. You are willing to give up all that so that we can shut down these reactors. Would that be a good deal?” Well, they weren’t sure. She said, “I’ll leave these forms and you guys can think about what you’re doing here,” because she says, “I’ll tell you that if you push your agenda, I’m going to push mine.” I thought that was a really good way to look at it. Then when she came back in and she gave her little spiel and they had all the pioneers there – Alvin Weinberg was on the platform, Walter Zinn, all those guys – and when she came around she said, “Remember the name of this organization is the American Nuclear Society. It’s not the American Nuclear Power Society. It’s not the American Physical Nuclear Weapons Society. It’s all of this stuff, and that includes medicine and isotopes and that’s a very important part for the public good and that’s part of our mission, which I thought was well-noted. She’s also made public statements that the idea that every few years we lower the maximum permissible dose – so that over a fairly short period of time we’ve cut the level that we say is permissible dose down by a factor of thirty-two. Loresten Taylor, who was exposed to a lot of radiation in his day, and I talked to him I guess just after his hundredth birthday. He lived to be a hundred and two, and when I talked to him, he was limping a little bit, and I said, “What happened?” He said, “Well, I was playing touch football with my grandchildren,” and he said, “They like to play it on rollerblades on blacktop.” [laughter] He says, “One of the kids got carried away and tackled me.” His wife was saying, “Lorie, you’re not ninety anymore.” [laughter] So radiation didn’t seem to do much harm to him. And I don’t think it’s done much harm to me. And I guess I should mention Fukushima because everybody should at this point. But the people at Fukushima – and we don’t have all the information we need to make statements about whether they did things right or wrong, and so I don’t mean to imply that what they’ve done is wrong, because I don’t know enough about the specifics. But one thing that they did that reminds us that putting all of your emphasis on one variable, and the variable that we give is the International Radiation Protection people say, “At the end of each day before you go to sleep, you should ask yourself: is there anything I could have done to lower this dose even more, the collective dose?” Well, the first thing I would note is there is no such physical event as collective dose. Collective dose is the same kind of a unit as collective temperature. What is the collective temperature of Oak Ridge and its vicinity? It’s a meaningless number. If you go and tell people that the most important thing is to cut the collective dose, which is the sum of each of the individual doses, sum of doses has no meaning because populations don’t get sick. Individuals do or don’t. If you go in a population where there are thousands and thousands of people who have just less than a dangerous amount of radiation, but none of them end up with a harmful amount, then the answer is nobody got a harmful dose. If nobody gets a harmful dose, nobody was harmed by definition. So the idea that I recognize nobody got a high dose out of this particular situation like Three Mile Island – but the fact that so many people got a slightly higher harmless dose, so therefore, that means somebody dies – I can’t kill you. I can’t harm you by irradiating other people. It isn’t contagious. Radiation isn’t contagious, so the near misses don’t count. You either get harmed or you don’t. So where were we going with that?
Mr. Smith: Back to the pulling those people out of [Fukushima].
Dr. Rockwell: Yeah. What happened there at Fukushima, they had these kids that were operating. They had a pool of about eight hundred people that they were taking the operators out of, and they were on their normal shifts and so forth. When they realized there was some radioactivity getting out, and this is my understanding of what happened. It may not turn out to be right, but let’s see what lesson we can get from if this had actually happened. That is, they felt, gee, we can minimize the collective dose if we cut down to just a bone dry group, the smallest collection of people. We could keep fifty people on the job. Well, one of the questions you should ask is what do you lose by that? It may well be if you actually get the facts and look at where the people were and where they weren’t, it may be that they would have been better off for everybody if they had had more people running pumps and doing that kind of thing regardless of the fact that a lot more people would get a trivial, but slightly higher dose. You don’t get hurt by a harmless dose, by definition, and that’s what they were getting. So that’s the type of thing. Another example of that is that in American utilities – I don’t know if they do it anywhere else in the world – but in American utilities, they are paying people cash and they are giving people better grades on their reactor protection readiness grade, which is worth a lot to a utility, if they are able to reduce their collective dose. The international people say, “Every night before you go to bed, the last thing you should do is say, could I have reduced that dose?” The answer is sure. Here is the plant with all the radioactive material inside this shielding. That’s where the whole primary coolant system is. That’s the most important part of the plant. That’s where the stuff is you ought to be keeping an eye on. Now, if you tell people, “Don’t put all your emphasis on trying to keep your eye on this equipment and making sure it’s all right. It’s more important to keep your dose down.” So you keep this mythical figure, collective dose, down. Nobody has gained anything from that, and yet maybe boric acid is eating through a reactor vessel head in there while you’re not looking one more time. Maybe there’s another system where something has been set not right or something is starting to make noise or whatever. Is a pump beginning to grind? I think that to tell people that in the name of safety you want them to look at something other than the plant first just doesn’t make safety sense to me. I guess the point I’m trying to make is the old song, “Everybody talk about heaven ain’t going there,” and everybody that’s talking about safety isn’t making the plant safer. I think that those kind of examples that I give, they’re not making the plant safer. They are making the plant less safe. The third way you could do that is at one point AREVA, the French company that – the French, as everyone knows I think, in 1973 after the Arab Oil Embargo, and the French looked – they don’t have any coal, they don’t have any petroleum, and they said, “We better start developing nuclear power.” I don’t know how many guys it took to make that decision, probably not very many, and then they made it work. If we had done that, we’d have sure been in a different situation. I don’t know when it was, ten years ago maybe, where one of the big broadcast companies in America did a documentary called Nuclear Power: In France it Works. These guys that were over there, people like you, Ray, that were over there interviewing people, and they showed these kids on the way to school and in the background are the cooling towers. They get that in the picture, and they said, “Doesn’t it worry you to have your kid walk right by that plant?” The guy says, “No. Why should it?” He was right. The interviewer kept needling this guy trying to get him to say that he was scared. He said, “We don’t have any reason to be scared. These plants don’t hurt people.” The guys were shaking their head and saying, “That’s not the answers I get in America.” [laughter] They have this stuff – one of the lines they always use when they’re shipping spent fuel casks – a spent fuel cask, whom the antis call “mobile Chernobyl’s” – which is really a phony name. There is no way you can make one of those casks of spent fuel go critical and start to run away. It’s just not physically possible. It has nothing to do with probability. I’d say the probability of that is very low. It is not a physical possibility to make a critical mass out of what you’ve got there. One of the problems in the way we think about safety, I think, is that we tend to look at it as a matter of probability. When I was talking to a lady from my church one time about how these spent fuel casks can’t go critical, she says, “Well, that’s your opinion.” [laughter] There are some things you don’t get to have an opinion on.  
Mr. Smith: That’s right. They’re just fact.
Dr. Rockwell: There are things we know. By always looking at these safety problems as a matter of probability, I think that it’s really very misleading. Now, I said this with a lot more confidence than I say after Fukushima because the kind of things that happened there, I really hadn’t believed was possible that you’d get the spent fuel pools, for instance. I think I and a lot of other people underestimated how much thought we give because it’s so easy to solve that problem. You’ve got two days before you have to do anything, and then you spray a hose on the thing, and it’ll cool it down. What’s the big problem? If one guy doesn’t have a hose, another guy can get it. He’s got hours to do it. How can that be a problem? Well, they’ve demonstrated how it could be a problem, which is certainly nothing that I would have envisioned. On the other hand, after 9/11 – 9/11 hit Americans mentally a lot harder than it hit anybody else, which is not surprising. We just didn’t believe it was possible that some enemy could come over here and hit us across the ocean. The idea that they didn’t have to cross the ocean was a new one. I think that nonetheless, because of 9/11, we started thinking, “What lesson are we supposed to learn out of this?” Of course, we got people to take their shoes off at the airport and a few things like that, but in terms of reactor design, they said, well we better redefine, upgrade our definition of a terrorist attack. Maybe one of the things a terrorist could do would come in with a big enough force that they could keep us from getting a border or getting in electrical supplies or getting access to valves that we’d like to shut, a number of things like that. So they upped the ante on how they defined a terrorist assault. Then they took other things. For instance, in the plant that the Hiroshima guys have, when it needs cooling, it flicks a switch and turns on an electric pump. Sounds reasonable. That’s now called a design flaw because you could do it with natural circulation, which the later ones do. You showed me some of that stuff today where you push control rods in or shut things down with gravity because gravity is pretty much apt to not fail on you.
Mr. Smith: That’s right. [laughter]
Dr. Rockwell: I think if you say, “What are the chances of the Fukushima thing happening here?” I think it is fair to say that we have learned some lessons to make that much less probable, but we have lessons yet to learn. We learned a lot before Three Mile Island. One of the things was when Rickover reviewed the things for Jimmy Carter, and one of the conclusions he came up with, he says, “In Naval plants,” he says, “I’ve got a nuclear-trained officer on site at all times, a guy with authority to shut down the reactor. He can be the only guy in a building that wants to shut down a reactor, and if he ever orders the reactor shut down, they’ll have to shut it down.” That was initiated for all American commercial nuclear plants. You had to have – they have also a Public Health Officer, Public Health Service, a uniform career service like the Coast Guard or the Navy. Rickover put a Public Health Service Officer in each of our plants. So the first time they started up the Mare Island plant outside of San Francisco in the Mare Island Shipyard, the newspaper guys come into the Navy and says, “What about this? We got this question, that question, the other question.” A chin full of guys steppin in there and Rickover says, “You get out of here. You’ve got an axe to grind. Here are people who have no axe to grind for the Navy whose responsibility is to the people. That’s why we got them here. Let them answer the question,” which really made sense. That’s part, again, of the safety thing because if the public health service guy is going to have responsibility to keep it safe and no responsibility to see whether it gets to sea on time, no conflict of interest in other words, the public has more reason to believe this guy. He’s got more incentive to be sure he’s right. So there are a lot of things like that that are lessons that are not necessarily technical lessons, but they are serious real world lessons and serious real world solutions like you can see in the Fukushima movies. When a hurricane comes by, and some of the modern hurricane-proof buildings, big story buildings were swaying in the earthquake and even though they were designed for a seven-level earthquake and these were nine-level, which is about, I don’t know, thirty-five times more energy, but these buildings that were designed to take that were swaying back and forth, but staying intact. We’re hoping to learn the same kind of lessons in terms of these other things.
Mr. Smith: All right. That’s a very good interview. Thank you. I hope we didn’t wear you out, but that was broad-ranging and covered the history as well as some good current philosophy. That’s good.
Dr. Rockwell: Well good.
[end of recording]