1946 - High Temperature Power Pile Research Program

This is a report written by Farrington Daniels from Clinton Laboratories of Monsanto Chemical Company (which would later become Oak Ridge National Laboratory). Farrington Daniels led the Daniels Pile effort in Oak Ridge working on power producing reactors. This report issued on October 6, 1946 provides a review of the high temperature power pile research program. A 4000-KWth demonstration plant was to eventually be built. The concept was a high temperature gas reactor supporting Thorium to U-233 conversion. It would use a beryllium moderator and explored pebble pile concepts.

This effort is significant in many respects in that: it focused on using nuclear fission to produce useful electric energy while essentially all other resources at Oak Ridge were dedicated to creating better nuclear weapons. In fact, in 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission would terminate this work to focus all efforts on weapon programs. At Oak Ridge, he and the other naval officers had offices in the same small building with the Daniels Pile group. Rickover and the Navy team did monitoring and provided assistance while studying every aspect of the work at Oak Ridge to determine its potential applicability to naval propulsion. 

While the Pile Group was working on their final report, Rickover unofficially persuaded them to use their experience to do a conceptual design of a gas-cooled ceramics reactor pile for submarine use (Report B-137 File CL-FD-55 dated 12-10-1947 "Adaptation of High Temperature Gas-Cooled Ceramics Pile to Submarine Use") and later a conceptual design for a propulsion plant for a water-cooled reactor (Report B-137 File 48-2-43 dated 2-2-1948 "Proposed Water Cooled Power Pile for the Navy").

This digital copy is courtesy of Theodore Rockwell Papers (MSS Rockwell), Oregon State University Special Collections & Archives Research Center, Corvallis, Oregon - Series 9 File CL-FD-19(small).pdf. The file was originally classified as SECRET but was declassified and made available to Oregon State University.

In an email from Naval Reactors-PAO on October 31, 2024 in response for a request for pre-publication review, that as this document was not obtained from the U.S. Government, posting on the nr-ha.org website should identify the source of the documents (see previous paragraph) to avoid the implication that it was obtained from NR or other federal institutions..