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Wildcat. Rickover's working schedule is hard and relentless. He arrives at Tempo 3 in mufti at 8 a.m. and sets to work at top speed. The telephone rings often, but conversations are brief. "Yes," he'll snap. "Send that guy over, but I won't sign on the dotted line." He starts to hang up, then, "No, no. You hear me? No!" and the conversation is suddenly ended. Subordinates come and go in streams. Carbons of every letter are read critically by Rickover and generally scrawled with comments.
About 4 p.m., Rickover usually hurries out of Tempo 3. He is not going home, but to the airport. He flies to Schenectady, Pittsburgh or New York and holds night conferences with government contractors. Then he takes a sleeper for Washington and shows up at Tempo 3 at 8 the next morning. On weekends he sometimes gets as far as California. Somehow, in his tightly packed schedule, he also manages to turn up occasionally for an evening at home with his wife (who holds a doctorate in international law and has written two books on the subject) and his son Robert (who at 13 designs electrical circuits of television sets).
Nautilus. By Rickover's hard-driving methods and the work of his equally hard-working staff, the nuclear submarine (named Nautilus* almost by necessity) made spectacular progress. The hull and the radical propulsion system were designed simultaneously. Most iffy item, of course, was the nuclear reactor itself.
Engineer Rickover freely concedes that the reactor of the Nautilus will not be the best conceivable. "Sure," he says, "the scientists can think up thousands of reactors. But the Navy wanted a nuclear submarine, and it wanted one fast. We picked a simple type of reactor that we knew a lot about already. If we'd waited for the scientists, we'd still be fooling around."
The simple reactor of the Nautilus is not simple by normal standards. Its official name is STR (Submarine Thermal Reactor), because the neutrons that are its "fire" are slowed down to the "thermal" speed of molecules in everyday matter. Basically, it is a "core" containing enriched uranium,† cooled by ordinary water that is kept by high pressure from turning into steam. The water comes out of the reactor hot and radioactive. Tightly shielded against radiation, it goes through a "heat exchanger" (a kind of boiler), where it turns a second batch of water into high-pressure steam. The steam. which is not radioactive, runs a turbine that turns the propellers.
Zirconium. The STR, designed by Argonne National Laboratory and Westinghouse Electric Corp., was a staggering exercise in pioneer engineering. One enormous problem was the material for tubes and other structural parts in the reacting core. It must resist corrosion, and it must not absorb too many neutrons. The answer was the rare metal zirconium, then a laboratory curiosity. Its metallurgy was shockingly difficult, but Rickover pushed it so hard that he called himself "Mr. Zirconium."
Pumps to circulate the high-pressure, radioactive water had to have perfection never demanded before. The shield to enclose the radioactive parts was a formidable problem. So was the control system whose function is to keep the reactor from destroying itself and the submarine.