1948 - Water Cooled Power Pile for the Navy (CF 48-2-43)

This short paper was prepared by Nuzio Palladino at Clinton Laboratory in Oak Ridge. Clinton Laboratories would later become Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It provides some sizing and performance studies of a 15,000 shp engine room for a proposed 51,900 KWth water-cooled power pile for the Navy. It assumed that the main turbines would be electrically coupled to the propeller shaft. Included are curves of weight and size vs turbine throttle steam pressure. The plant was assumed to be consistent with the plant described in GE Report No A-4208 (GE) GE KAK-1 dated June 16, 1947 titled "Survey of Atomic Power Plants for Naval Ship Propulsion". That 1947 report was issued to both the Bureau of Ships and the newly-formed Atomic Energy Commission, concluded that it appeared feasible to build a developmental atomic power plant for the propulsion of a destroyer escort-class ship.

The author Nuzio Palladino worked at Oak Ridge and Argonne for 4 years (on loan from Westinghouse). Upon returning to Westinghouse, from 1959-1959, he was in charge of reactor core design for the Submarine Prototype Reactor, Mark I; for the Nautilus Reactor; and for the Shippingport Atomic Power Station. In 1958, he was awarded the Westinghouse Order of Merit for Technical Direction of Reactor Designs of the Nautilus and Shippingport power plants. Later, from 1981-1986, he served as Chairman of the NRC.

This digital copy is courtesy of Theodore Rockwell Papers (MSS Rockwell), Oregon State University Special Collections & Archives Research Center, Corvallis, Oregon - Series 9 File "ORNL CF 48-2-43.pdf". The file was originally classified as SECRET but is marked as being declassified on September 6, 1977 by ORNL under authority of the AEC

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.