Interview with Eugene Astley
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Richland (Wash.)
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An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy.
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Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Eugene Astley on December 5th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Mr. Astley about his experiences working at the Hanford site. And for the record, can you state and spell your name?
Astley: Yeah. Eugene Astley. That’s E-U-G-E-N-E, A-S-T-L-E-Y.
Franklin: Great. So let’s start at the beginning. Tell me how and why you came to the Hanford site.
Astley: I was working in General Electric back in Schenectady in the research labs. Loved my job there, but in 1954—the winter of ’53, really, it was like 30 below, and I decided to walk into work. That wasn’t going to work. Hated the weather. So, when I walked in the building, I walked up to the top, and walked in the boss’s office and said I want to give you a month’s notice. I’m leaving. I cannot stand this weather. Summer’s even worse. [LAUGHTER] So, I was sitting in my office and a couple weeks later, when Dave McGlenagan[?] who’s the recruiter for the laboratory walked into my office and said, are you Eugene Astley? I said, yeah. He said, I understand you’ve given notice to General Electric Company, and there was a notice put out to all subsidiaries and whatnot that they thought this person should be retained in the General Electric Company. We have a project out at Hanford. I said, yeah. I said, you’re not talking about taking me out there in that damn desert, are you? I was raised in Portland, Oregon. I mean, nobody lived in that part of the world. [LAUGHTER] So, he talked me into coming out, and then they explained that they had a group called design, and they were thinking about perhaps adding a new production reactor, which would be the ninth one, I guess. Yeah, the ninth one. And that the physicist who had been in charge of doing—was on this particular design team, which they called a core design, had left. So they wanted me to fill that position. I’d never before worked in any such project or reactor or anything. I told them, I don’t know anything about reactors. And they said, well, you did your master’s degree in studying gaseous diffusion, which is the basis of all the theory we’re using for reactors right now. And you’ll find out, except for terminology, you’re an expert. [LAUGHTER] So I came. And so then I slid into this design group, and then the idea of the production reactor—new one—came along. They asked us to design a concept. We were a group of about eight people. And I was the chief physicist of all the physics on the work. We got going on that. I came on up with the idea that this really ought to be different from the Hanford reactors as we know them, because it ought to be a dual-purpose reactor, one that produced electricity. And I said it’s going to be about 3,000 megawatts thermal, and we can probably produce around 1,000 megawatt electric, which would be a great addition. That’d bring in a lot of income, and it would pay for—more than pay for—the operation of the plant. So you’d be getting your new plutonium free. Of course, GE management thought that was great. So that’s the way it went down. And then about, I think, two years later, when we were well into the design and pretty well doing it, it came to the attention of the Atomic Energy Commission more directly about what exactly would the design look like. As soon as the word dual purpose came out, they said, what do you mean by that? We’re going to produce electricity. Uh-oh! So, it turned out that Bill Johnson and Al Grenager and I were then called back to testify before the DOE—the AEC first and then Congress. Because the democrats were controlling—they thought it was a great idea. Republicans were against any government getting into the power business. They already had too much with TVA and Bonneville. So they were dead set against it. So we testified on what a great thing would be for helping to lower the costs of plutonium. We were still in the Cold War, so we thought it was still needed more. So I came back, and about three weeks later, down came the word that there was a compromise made politically, so that we would be allowed to produce enough power to run the reactor only. But that in view of the fact that things sometimes change, we want you to also design it so that at some later date when they decide producing 1,000 megawatt electrics would be feasible, go ahead and design it as a dual purpose anyway. But design it so that the first operation would be like lower temperature water, 350. Of course, that just blew our mind, because that was absolutely stupid. [LAUGHTER] I mean, because you had to design the thing to operate with 700 or 750-degree water. So that really increased the cost of things and what you could do and what you didn’t have to do. But nobody had ever designed a turbine to run at 350 degrees. Okay? Because the pressure’s so low, you end up with a monster. When you walked—when we finally built that thing, you walked in it, people that had designed turbines would ask, what is that? It had no relationship to anything anybody had ever conceived. You walked in, looked at the turbine, what’s that? [LAUGHTER] And of course at those pressures, the steam you’re producing is very wet, which is also deterrent. And you have to redesign the buckets to collect the water and drain it off. I mean, it was an abortion. And it made it very difficult to design. So it took special precautions, it entered into physics that I had to start designing some new physics and mathematics to handle the damn problem. Because they turned out that—at 700 degrees, if you have a tube burst, then the pressure comes out and wants to blow the stack apart. So, the first thing the engineer said, we got to groove these graphite blocks so there’s a place for the steam to go on out, and then we’ll bleed it out of the reactor and dissipate it in a very large area. But all of the sudden now, from a physics standpoint, now I’ve got neutrons wanting to stream out that way. That had never been handled before, so I had to figure out how to handle that from a physics standpoint. It turned out to be mathematically difficult. We didn’t have—you know, the computer we had was a 650, which was about 1/1000th as much as the computer in your cell phone. [LAUGHTER] I mean, you know? No memory. It was horrible—mechanical-type thing.
Franklin: Right. With tapes—the reels.
Astley: Yeah, punch cards.
Franklin: Punch cards, right.
Astley: So then I’d have to get in and say, okay, I’ve put this thing in bucket number 5A, and where am I now? I’m over here, so I should spin the thing this direction so I’ll have a shorter time to get back to the memory spot. I mean, this is by today’s standards, this is below most computer people’s mind, thinking that’s what you’re doing. Actually had to tell the drum which way to spin?
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Astley: You know?
Franklin: Yeah.
Astley: Anyway, we got that, we finally did design that. It was in dead run for a number of years and produced enough energy to do itself. But of course it got shut down before anything ever came of producing electricity. But that was a good case of where philosophies between the two political parties actually designed a reactor. That’s just—not good? [LAUGHTER] I can understand where—because I was republican also. I can understand where they were coming from, but it still made sense from the standpoint of saving money for the country.
Franklin: Right.
Astley: You know?
Franklin: Yeah.
Astley: So I thought it was a good thing to do. And I didn’t think of it in terms of really putting the government further into it. But they were afraid that it would set a precedence for all further government operations and that type of thing. It would be invasive from that standpoint.
Franklin: So their opposition was more ideological, and you perhaps had a more kind of practical viewpoint—
Astley: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: --on that. How did you solve the problem of the neutrons bleeding out?
Astley: I did it by going to cylindrical. At that time, you really had two choices, spherical or cylindrical. I got to looking at cylindrical geometry, and then I remembered from my graduate work that the engineers used cylindrical—I mean their theorists did. And that instead of, in physics where we’re using spheres, you use Bessel functions, and they were using Hankel functions. And I’d never really used a Hankel function. But they’re just as powerful for cylindrical geometry as Bessel functions were spheres. So I used that kind of a mathematical approach and cobbled up some—and then imposed upon it a radial geometry at the same time to make the math work. So it was kind of interesting, because what you did was increase the albedo and lost a lot of neutrons out, which then was important. You know, what did our shielding have to look like, and how much more does that make it that we have to enrich the fuel to be able to sustain the fission?
Franklin: Oh. Did the reactor ever operate at 700 degrees? Because I know they put the steam generating station—the WHPSS station—
Astley: Well, what they did was they didn’t build the second part of the turbine.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Astley: They just built the turbine to be able to do its job.
Franklin: Right.
Astley: And then later they could come on in with the normal turbine and move the old one back and go with the new turbine.
Franklin: And did that happen?
Astley: No.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Astley: Never happened. It was still politically impossible.
Franklin: Do you kind of connect it with that reactor—do you remember JFK—were you present at JFK’s visit?
Astley: I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.
Franklin: I’m sorry. Connected with the N Reactor, were you present at JFK’s dedication of the steam generating facility—the steam processing facility?
Astley: Yeah, I think so. I barely remember that, you know.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Astley: That was not part of anything that I designed. I told them what the parameters had to be, but it was up to the engineering part. Different group of people.
Franklin: Okay. So, tell me about the Fast Flux Test Facility and how you came to design that.
Astley: Okay. Well, then, I had—in 1960 then, I was promoted out to handle all the maintenance and maintenance engineering for the eight reactor operating—operating reactors. At that time, when they pulled me and said they wanted to do that, I said, you know, I’m a physicist. I’m a theoretical physicist, in fact. I’d done some experimental work, but I really am not a guy who knows much about maintenance. And they said, precisely. That’s your problem. We think you have real management capabilities; you need to learn more about other things. [LAUGHTER] So they said, it’s our opinion that to a certain extent the pressures on the reactor manager are so hard to never shut the reactor down, and when it does shut down to get it back on its feet, that the maintenance tends to be a little bit more crude than we would like. And we’d like to have a little more technology put into it. So that sounded a little more interesting. [LAUGHTER] But I ended up with like 1,000 pipefitters and millwrights and machine shops and stuff like that that I was in charge of. That was my first experience with dealing with the union.
Franklin: Okay.
Astley: Which was a broadening experience, certainly.
Franklin: I bet. Any notable experiences when dealing with the union?
Astley: Not good ones.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Astley: They—one of the problems there again was politics. The unions were very strong with the democrats. So if you were tried to get hardnosed and have a strike, you just—the top management got a call immediately from the president or vice president, that type of stuff, saying, we understand that, you know, what you’re trying to do, shut down our production? You can’t do that; give them what they really want. That was their sort of philosophy. So they ended up with a lot of—which was very difficult for me, because I was also then working with these people. And when you up in the front face when a tube failed—leaked—then you had to pull off some big bolts on the thing that held the tube in. And then you had to pull the tube out, so the union argued that handling the tube was pipefitter work, but handling the big phalange was millwright. So you had to have both kinds of people up there at the same time, taking radiation, when one guy would have been able to do it. Then of course, they say, well, we’re all suited up, so we’ll just wait while the other guy does his thing. So he had 50% work. So those kind of things went on, that it made it difficult from a management standpoint, because we had very strict rules about how much radiation people could take. You had a daily limit and a yearly limit. So one of the problems I had was trying to manipulate the forces so that I didn’t ever overexpose people. The front face had a lower radiation level than the rear face. So the front face would be like ten MR per hour, and the rear face might be 200 or 300. So that was also a logistical problem that was—I don’t know how many people thought about those kind of things, but those are important, you know? We had a three-R limit for everybody, so, the problem was then that when we got to the point that it looked like maybe we’d either have to hire some people, then I went over from another manager running the reprocessing plants, I could borrow some of his people to even out the radiation exposure.
Franklin: Wow.
Astley: So it was those kind of problems at that level that were very difficult, and later on were even more difficult, because it turned out that there was a—they redesigned the tubes, which had little—a round tube with little things on it poking up where the fuel could be centered—not really centered, because you needed more flow on the top than the bottom. But they redesigned those and redesigned them wrong. So they ended up getting them up too close, and the top of the tubes, the temperature of the water was too high so it started to erode all the tubing. At some point in I think it was 1963, we had to re-tube six of the reactors, which was 12,000 tubes. At that time, it took an hour-and-a-half to do one tube.
Franklin: Wow.
Astley: You know?
Franklin: Yeah.
Astley: And they said that we can’t do that. You got to get that down to like 30 minutes. So I ended up inventing a device for them that worked real well. When you have aluminum tube, you put a phalange on it. So you can put a gasket and seal it. To do that, the millwrights would go on up with three tools and put the first one in and bang it with a small sledge, which would do it. Then they’d do the second one a little more and the third one. And the problem was that some of the millwrights were very strong, and so the third one they’d really rap it. Those tended to crack.
Franklin: Oh.
Astley: So they had a lot of time like that. So I invented a—which turned out to be kind of fun, because of the problems involved—but I got the idea that—I’d been studying something, and I read at that time that if you move metal fast enough, it wouldn’t know it’s been moved, so it’d be stress-free. Wouldn’t crack. So there at that time for the weapons program were putting an explosive charge in and blowing a bubble on something. So I thought, hey, why don’t I do that. So I thought, I’ll modify a .45 automatic and have a blank. That gas pressure—which I read up on—was enough then to—if I had a rubber thing back in there, a mole, I could go in and pull the trigger and—shew—you’d have your phalange. 20 seconds, not an hour-and-a-half. So that blew the whole thing apart. We managed to get down to 15 minutes a tube.
Franklin: Wow.
Astley: That thing—that worked. But then, of course, as soon as I started to talk about this, safety people got involved. And then, even worse, the security people. Because, you said, you’re going to talk about bringing a loaded weapon on board with ammunition? We don’t do that. Only guards are allowed to have weapons. [LAUGHTER] So I think it took me two months to finally persuade whoever all’s involved that I could bring this in. And then it turned it out that I had to have a special safe to put the gun and the bullets—even though they were blanks and all that. And then we had to have a guard, that every time we took it out would go on up on the front face to make sure that somebody didn’t use the weapon somehow or other to kill somebody, or—you know, it was, I mean, little things like that that got to me. Kind of difficult for theoretical physicists to deal with. Really wasn’t—[LAUGHTER]—something--my feeling was, what a bunch of bullshit. I mean, trying to get a job done! And we got it done, and then everything was confiscated and done something with.
Franklin: Wait, was there a specific—did you give a specific name to that tool?
Astley: I just called it an explosive installing tool. And the word explosive didn’t get me off to a good start. It was very descriptive, unfortunately.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I could see how—
Astley: And for that I was awarded one share of General Electric stock.
Franklin: One share?
Astley: One share, right.
Franklin: Wow. I assume that’s split into a couple more by now.
Astley: I think so. [LAUGHTER] So anyway, there I was out there running maintenance when I got this call. Of course they knew my background, so—in fact, I was in charge of core design before they pulled me from being a physicist to being the supervisor of the core design group. So I had a lot of experience in that area. So they brought me in and Albaugh told me that he wasn’t sure where we wanted to go, but he said, I’ve got kind of a thinking here. He said, I really think that the way things are going, that the next reactor’s going to be a fast reactor—a breeder reactor. And so it sounds just off the top of my head, he said, that maybe that’s something you really ought to take a hard look at in this study. With only two weeks to do, I went to the library. For some reason, all’s I remember is the microfiche or something they called it, I don’t know. But at any rate, started running my eyeballs out on these things where I’d be looking at things that’d been photographed and trying to read about fast reactors. So I finally came to the conclusion that at that time—I found that Oak Ridge, which was the head of all fast breeder reactor stuff and running the Idaho operations, had EBR-I running as a test reactor. They had proposed to Congress that they wanted to build another one called FARET—F-A-R-E-T. About the only thing different about it and ERB-I is that they copied everything, except they changed the lid so they could get in and refuel easier. I thought, that’s a mistake. As long as you’re going to build a reactor, you ought to try to also make it more facile for doing its job of looking at exposure of fuels and materials. Also, it had such a low flux level that essentially what they had was if they had wanted to take ten years, find out what happened to this material in ten years, it took them ten years. It seemed to me that what you needed to do was get the flux up by at least a factor of ten. And then we could get ten years’ worth of experience in one year, and be real serviceable to the industry. So I then came back into Albaugh—this was after about a week—and I said, here’s what I think. But, I said, to go further any more, I think, so see whether this is possible to make something ten times as fast with the technology we got, I said, I really need to put together a concept. I said, I can’t do that by myself. I need an engineer to help me. There’s a guy on your staff that actually worked at Fermi Reactor, which is a fast breeder reactor built by—out of Chicago. Edison? Edison Electric, maybe. Can’t remember what—anyway, the head of that thing wanted to always lead the parade. They built it and didn’t understand the graphite swells as it—so that was a big fiasco, because after about—you know, I don’t know, six months or a year the whole thing cracked apart and couldn’t be run anymore. So I got a permission to do that. Then Albaugh said, well, go ahead and put together three or four people, whoever you need. And he said, but I can’t pay for it; I don’t have that in my budget. So he said, I want you to just go out wherever they are and talk whoever the manager is into loaning you somebody, and they pay for it. And I said, okay. But, he said, remember this is all secret. You can’t tell them what this is for.
Franklin: Why was it secret?
Astley: Because nobody knew General Electric was going to leave.
Franklin: And what year was this again?
Astley: That would have been ’64.
Franklin: Okay.
Astley: I’m sure—maybe they were thinking about it in ’63, I wasn’t in on it. But by the time I got knowledgeable about it, it was like July ’64.
Franklin: And that was before most of the employees knew, right? It was still pretty secret at that time.
Astley: GE was pulling out, period.
Franklin: Right. Okay.
Astley: So they were—I think there’s like, maybe three or four people of theirs—a couple at DOE, the highest guy running it and the next guy down. So it was a real super-secret project. So it was kind of awkward to go into a guy a couple levels higher than I was and sit down and tell him I needed to use his—like, Les Finch was an example of what I considered to be the best engineer on the planet that I knew, that I needed him. But I couldn’t tell him what for. You know? [LAUGHTER] It was—when I told Albaugh, I said, I don’t—gee, I’m not even sure that’s possible. I can’t tell him something. He said, well, he says, no, you’ve got a reputation for being the best pirate at the Hanford anyway. So you ought to be able to handle it. [LAUGHTER] And I did. I got together a group of four or five people. They then gave me a couple months. So it took me about 60 days of this group and we came up with a concept. I turned the patent in on it, got a patent on it. Then we actually came up with a design. In fact, I have a thing, it’s about this thick—when I left there they gave me a montage that essentially shows the reactor and all the kinds of parts that we devised. It was a beautiful thing by a designer I had on there that was an incredible draftsman. Did everything in ink, never made a mistake.
Franklin: Was that Dennis Brunson?
Astley: Beg your pardon?
Franklin: Dennis Brunson?
Astley: I didn’t get that.
Franklin: Was that Dennis Brunson?
Astley: No, it was Andy Anthony.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Astley: Incredible guy. I mean, he did everything in ink, and he did it once, he did it fast. And he had an incredible ability to visualize three-dimensionally. So he would sit on my meeting, and we’d discuss, and I’d discuss what the core had to look like. Which, I’ve said, okay, we need more room, because that’s the big problem. We’ve got room on the top face of this reactor. And when I was down having lunch one day, I ordered a milkshake, and then I saw her lift up the thing to pull the straws out. What happens then is that the straws fold out. Okay? So you have a matrix of straws, which—I got back thinking about that. That’s a way to get the things apart and still have a dense core. Okay?
Franklin: Ahh.
Astley: So we designed the core that way. We only had to tilt the tubes like about eight degrees. That gave us a lot of room up there by the time you got up to where you wanted to work. So that was part of the design. That didn’t turn out to be—it wasn’t allowed to go through. The reason was that we were left alone. The head of the—I don’t know—well, I’ll tell you, because, I mean, what can they do? [LAUGHTER] We ended up with a big political problem within the AEC. The guy that was heading the AEC was in bed with Argonne, because they were the breeder reactor. So the fact that we came on in saying we wanted to build a reactor at Hanford and replace the FARET was absolutely objectionable to him. So I was called back to talk to him and explain what we were doing, why we were doing it, why the FARET wasn’t any good and whatnot. So he listened to the whole thing, I go back home. Three days later I get a letter—telegram from him saying stop and desist all work on the FFTF, whether it be private funds or public funds.
Franklin: Wow.
Astley: Okay? So I sat down with Fred and he said, well, why don’t I see what I can do. So he called his friend who was this guy’s boss, who had—I can’t—I got a moment where I can’t remember his name. Very famous physicist out of California. But he and Fred had been roommates together getting their Ph.D. And Fred’s wife had married his secretary. [LAUGHTER] So he called him up and he said, well, that’s interesting. So he called the AEC—the head of the commission itself, who are a group of congressmen that ran everything.
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Astley: One of the congressmen happened to be interested in our concept. So he called us back there and he and Fred and I sat for about four hours talking about what we had in mind. So then we told him about—showed him these facts. And he said, well, I’ll take care of that. So what they did was fired him!
Franklin: Wow.
Astley: Okay? [LAUGHTER] Then word came down: continue with your work. And gave us a deadline for getting in a proposal and all that kind of stuff. I was left alone, totally, for a year. No guidance from the AEC. We were totally on our own while they were hunting to replace him. So they finally replaced him with Milt Shaw, who was Admiral—was he an admiral then? No, I think. Yeah, he was an admiral then. Admiral Rickover?
Franklin: Yeah.
Astley: So he came on in then. And then it took him a year, putting a staff together as he thought he needed it, along the Rickover-type thing. It was actually two years into the whole thing where we had finished the preliminary design. I was in the midst of putting out proposals to get the architect engineers in, when I got called back there to meet Milt. Then about two or three weeks later I came back and made a presentation where we were. And he said, no. He said, you don’t understand the problem. And I said, what problem is that? [LAUGHTER] He said, politically it’s very difficult right now to get the money I need to go forward with a prototype breeder reactor. So what I’ve got is this reactor. So I’ve got to make it—we want to make it as close to a prototype breeder as we can. And I said, if we do that, it’s going to sacrifice 90% of its ability to do the kind of work we really want to do for studying materials, which is our proposal. So we won’t be—the flux will be lower, and we’ll be back to looking like a modified or better machine than EBR-I. But I said, that just doesn’t make any sense to me. He said, I understand your technical problems. That hasn’t anything to do with the problem. I can only get so much money. I said, if we do that, we can’t do this reactor for the cost that we’ve pledged to do. I said, I have no idea what it will be costing, but it’s not going to be around $100 million. I said, it could be $200 or $300 million, I think. He said, well, you know, your thinking isn’t important to me; I’ll take care of that problem. So we finally received orders that we couldn’t skew the core. He said, who’s ever heard of a commercial reactor with a skewed core? He said, that doesn’t make any sense to me. You want—I said, it’s only eight degrees. I don’t think that’s going to make a bit of difference. Well, he said, we want the core straight. So, then he said, now, in order to do that, the people who really know how to do that is Westinghouse. You know, the whole background was Westinghouse—his background. So he said, put out a—why don’t you go out for proposals to design the core to at least three different people including Westinghouse. And then he said also take a look at Idaho, which was essentially part of the same group of people. Then said, and throw General Electric in. So I was forced to do that, which meant that we were that back starting at scratch. Two years’ worth of work down the drain. So that went on—I guess that was in late ’67. So by ’68, we had that work done, redoing everything. And then he said, okay, now—the next thing he said is we’re going to have to put all the sodium exchangers and whatnot inside the dome, because that’s what we’ll have to do with the prototypes. And I said, that’s going to make the dome be bigger than any dome anybody’s ever built in the world. I said, we can’t just say we’re going to do that until I get a chance to talk to people, like Chicago Bridge and Iron is probably going to have to do the job, or the Japanese. Don’t want the Japanese, he said! Okay. To find out if they can do this. You’re talking about equipment, and your equipment can only do so big. So I went back and talked to them, and found I was right, that they couldn’t do it. But that they could build a piece of equipment to do it, provided that the AEC wanted to pay for it. So I came back to him, and I said for $50 million they can do it. He said what’s the $50 million for? A machine. You’re handling these huge things, and they got to be cylinders. They don’t have any equipment—cranes and everything. So he said, okay, well, that’s no problem. So that’s the way it went. It kept going that way. In late ’68, I finally hired Bechtel to do a cost estimate for me on where we were. It came out about $455 million. [LAUGHTER] So I wrote a letter to Shaw and told him, the costs on this project are totally out of bounds. I said, every time we turn around, I get instructions from your staff to add this or add that. It just keeps going on and on and on. I don’t know where we’re going, but I said, for my study, we can probably go back to $150 million to $200 maybe, and keep most of the things you want. But, I said, you got to stop your people coming in and asking for anything without having a meeting back there to decide whether this is something we can afford or is really important. I said, you just got to stop everybody coming out there with their gut feelings and druthers. Okay? Well, as you can imagine, that didn’t sit well. I got called back there. He just really dressed me down. [LAUGHTER] Everybody later told me the whole floor evacuated it was so loud, him yelling at me.
Franklin: Wow.
Astley: So I came back and thought it through. Then I came in by Albaugh, who was the director of Battelle and told him—I mean Saul Fawcett, who was the director. And I told him that I really felt at this point, the costs are so far out of control, and I showed him the letter I got, that we needed to withdraw from the project. Now, this is nowhere in anybody’s record, so I don’t know what you want to do with that information. It caused a meeting, and then finally, Fawcett and Albaugh and I went back to the board of trustees and told them why we wanted to do this, and they gave us approval to do it. We then set up a meeting with AEC. Came back there, and in the meantime, Shaw had gotten so irritated at what I’d done that he decided that I wasn’t under proper control. So in the meeting, he said, what I want to do now at this meeting, see, I want to reorganize like I’ve done down at so-and-so. The laboratory will still be responsible for funding—handling the funds, paying the paychecks—but Gene Astley will then report directly to me, running the lab. So Battelle had nothing to do with any of the technology—anything else—just handling—so he said, you’ll still get your fee, et cetera. And Fawcett finally said, I think I can—if you’d let me say a few words here, I think we can get over this problem immediately. So Shaw said, yes, okay. He said, we’re formally asking you to find another contractor to run the project. Shaw said, you can’t do that! And Fawcett said, why can’t I do that? He said, because that’s not what I want. And he said, furthermore, why do you want to withdraw? He said, we have a tax problem. And we felt that—my understanding—I’m not sure whether we did or didn’t. But at that time, we were a not-for-profit. Not a non-profit, but a not-for-profit. There’s a distinction. You can—you’re allowed to pay people bonuses and things of that nature, but—so then he also said that it’s not entirely clear to us that that’s in keeping with the Battelle will. So then Shaw said, okay, fine. He said, that’s it. We’ll find one. But he said, no matter who we find I want to reserve Gene Astley for—if it turns out to be Westinghouse or GE or whoever, that he then be available for those outfits to hire him so he could continue to—so even though he got really pissed at me—[LAUGHTER]—he still wanted me. And Fawcett just stood up and he said, I’m sorry, but Gene Astley—we have other needs for him, and he is not going to be available. So that ended the meeting. So then they found—and he went to his office—Shaw—and immediately called Westinghouse, and didn’t go out for bitter or anything. Just turned the whole project over to Westinghouse. Which is very irregular.
Franklin: Yeah.
Astley: You know? So they sent a crew out there and it was kind of funny, because the guy that took over, he was talking with the paper and he said—they said, isn’t this going to be a problem with a big transfer right in the middle? You resign? He said, never fear. And I won’t name his name, but he says, so-and-so’s here, happened to rhyme—[LAUGHTER]—he got replaced about six months later. So that’s how the FFTF got going. It did turn out to finally be constructed. Its flux level’s very low. I think it might have been just slightly higher than the EBR-II. But it did a lot of work, ran successfully. Never had a problem—safest reactor in the world. They did retain all the safety features. One of them was a very important one. I don’t know whether you care about this, but the fast reactor, you know, if you have—somebody pulls all the rods out in a thermal reactor, the power level goes up pretty fast. But it’s not an explosive thing. It just goes up enough where it melts everything down.
Franklin: Right.
Astley: It doesn’t really explode. But in a fast reactor, that’s not true. When you pull all the rods out of a fast reactor, the power level goes up in seconds.
Franklin: Wow.
Astley: Microsecond. Okay? Dynamite takes to the—so it’s faster than a dynamite, okay? So that is a major problem design. So what that means is, mechanically you can’t do a damn thing. Nothing can respond in that period of time. Just to detect it takes you longer than that. You know?
Franklin: Yeah.
Astley: So the question we had with the FFTF was what do we do about that? It was funny—one winter I came—I went to work and I put up the garage door, and there was water and ice all over the floor. My water heater had been in the corner, put in the garage, and it was so cold, and the door had been open, left a little bit, and it froze the damn thing. So the safety valve went off. And when I got back, I thought, you know, that’s a good concept. So when this thing happens, this huge explosive force—and I had calculations to go on by the Army, who was doing experiments on what it takes to blow up cylinders and spheres and stuff. So I had a lot of data on what kind of explosive force. So I said what we need to do is have a safety valve of some kind, so when that goes off, the first force blows it open. So we’ve destroyed it; the core’s now going to get hot, it’s going to melt down, but we know how to handle that. But the explosive we’ve got to be taking care of. So I said, I don’t know how—how do we do that. Well, this engineer I had came up with a beautiful idea. He said, well, what I can do is design the bolts that hold down the lid so that that force will pass through the elastic limit and they’ll break and the lid will fly off. Perfect safety. And it’s simultaneous, almost. The pressure gets too high, and it blows. Perfect. So then all’s you had to do is design a big concrete container around it with enough volume to take that expansion. And then we had a core catcher down there that we could cool so that we wouldn’t do the China syndrome where it melts down and goes to China, so to speak. So those kind of things were all put into it. We had a couple physics things to go on at those speeds that were esoteric, but that also helped to cut that explosion down.
[VIDEO CUTS]
Eugene Astley: Coefficient.
Camera man: I’m ready.
Robert Franklin: Ready. Can you start that from the beginning?
Astley: Huh?
Franklin: Can you start that story from the beginning? We’re rolling. You were at a meeting with US and Russian reactor designers.
Astley: The Russian was up there explaining the fundamental design of their new reactor group, which included the design of the Chernobyl. He explained what they were doing, and it was obvious to me then, you know, that—in our reactors we under-moderated them because then you get a negative temperature coefficient. So the reactor hopes to—tries to shut itself down. Theirs is going to make it worse. Okay, so, I can’t get up and say anything about this, because if I do, one of the—they say, why are you doing that? Well, I can say, you know, to have a negative temperature coefficient. But I’m not allowed to help them. And furthermore, if you under-moderate, you increase the production of plutonium. And the fact that those physicists didn’t figure that out, it blows my mind, you know? Fermi figured that out. [LAUGHTER] So anyway, in this meeting, then I stood up to ask them a question. And immediately, the guy that’s standing behind him walks up and takes the microphone. Now, this guy gave a speech in really quite good English. And he says, I’m sorry, we’ll let you know that although he can speak English pretty well when he’s practiced it to give the English speech, he really doesn’t understand English very well. So I will interpret for you. So, he answers my question with nonsense. He doesn’t know anything about anything. [LAUGHTER] And so there was no exchange. And then later we had a meeting where you have some drinks and you can mingle around and I hunted this guy down again. And immediately this same guy shows up. So he’s going to conduct the conversation between us.
Franklin: Right.
Astley: Anyway, later on, that was the Chernobyl. And it had the positive temperature coefficient. Of course it went blooey. You know? Our reactors weren’t like that, but very difficult to explain that to public. Gain any believability. So the scatter was still there. Then we whittled down the reactor. But there was no radiation, because even those reactors were—all our commercial reactors were built with negative temperature coefficients. It’s a safety problem. Everybody in the commercial world was either trained here at Hanford or back at Westinghouse at [UNKNOWN]. So that was sort of long ingrained to us to try to make it as safe as you can be. And that you don’t want to melt something down. That’s an economic problem, not a safety problem. But that’s never been—we’ve never been able to convince people that have a gut feeling that it’s an atomic bomb. And those are the people who prevail. Because those words are much more receptive to get attention of the public.
Franklin: Yeah.
Astley: Then I guess, as maybe you’re a historian of a type? Well, here is the thing that I think, if there’s one thing in my life that still peeves me—when I got moved from GE, I had a Super Secret clearance. Not just the Q, but one above it. Because I knew how much plutonium we were making and how many caps we were making, bombs we were making, that kind of stuff. And so I had gone out of the library when I had this N Reactor, and looked for—searched things. And I saw some stuff by Fermi. And so I got two of his workbooks, brought them back and started looking. And he had a couple of ideas—particularly one that helped design the control rods, because a control rod is so black. You know, it absorbs all of its neutrons in about that much. And we didn’t have any diffusion—[UNKNOWN] didn’t work for that. And he had some ideas about how he might approach that and how he did approach it. And then he went on to talk about a bunch of other things. You know, ti was all his own handwriting. And he’d scratch out and say, dumb idea. Now, he’d go on and it was a beautiful thing to read. So, when I went to GE, I tried to check those out and take them into Battelle, to take them. But I had lost my clearances. Said, you can’t have them. But if you get a clearance—so when I went over there, I applied for clearances and got them. Six months later, I go back, but some kind of a thing came out from AEC that a certain date type things were no longer considered classified, so burn them. So they burned.
Franklin: They burned Fermi’s personal notebooks? Wow.
Astley: That irritates me.
Franklin: Yeah, that irritates me, too. Especially because I’m an archivist.
Astley: Yeah!
Franklin: I deal with people’s personal matters and archival material. That’s really a tragedy.
Astley: Yeah. But you know, one of the geniuses of our time. Wouldn’t have probably made it without his help, his guidance. You don’t preserve something like that? It’s pretty irritating.
Franklin: Yes. What year—when exactly did you come off the FFTF? You said that Westinghouse took over FFTF; were you off the project then when Westinghouse came on?
Astley: The which
Franklin: Sorry, when—
Astley: Oh, when they were breaking up?
Franklin: No, you mentioned you were designing FFTF and then Westinghouse—
Astley: Took over.
Franklin: Were you off the project then?
Astley: I asked to get off the project, and—
Franklin: Okay, and what year was that?
Astley: Probably early ’69, I think.
Franklin: Okay.
Astley: And so it just happened that the guy that was running the other department, a big one, decided—he was a statistician of note in the world, and that’s really what he liked, and it was really distracting. He didn’t get enough time to work on his own stuff. So at the time that I became available then, a friend who also knew this was going on, and so there was a spot for me to move on, still reporting to him. So I took over, applied theoretical math, applied theoretical physics, world economics, that type of stuff. It suited me pretty well.
Franklin: And that was at Battelle?
Astley: At Battelle, right.
Franklin: Okay. And what other projects did you work on after FFTF?
Astley: Well, then I left Battelle in ’71 and joined Exxon Nuclear.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Astley: And became vice president of Exxon Nuclear making fuel. Plus a lot of other things. And during that time, then, I started up the Exxon Nuclear centrifuge program, and also the laser enrichment program. I had both of those. And both of them did very well. The centrifuge project got enough so that we actually bid and won a contract with—I can’t remember whether it was still AEC or—I’m a little confused on timing between AEC to DoE. Can’t tell you.
Franklin: Yeah, sure.
Astley: One of those guys asked three different organizations to bid on making 50 centrifuges at a cost, fixed price contract and deliver them to Oak Ridge. So they could determine whether or not somebody other than Oak Ridge could make something or [UNKNOWN]. So we bid on it, fixed price. Built them, delivered them within six months. That was our first large [UNKNOWN] They were then put into Oak Ridge and into their cascades, and they were running—they ran for a whole year when they decided to then implement the next stage, which was to build 5,000 of them. In the meantime, Boeing and Goodyear were still negotiating with AEC. And saying that, hey, these are too developmental. No way can we built at cost. So they came out with a new bid. We bid on it. We were the only ones that had any manufacturing experience on centrifuges. We put on a fixed price bid again for the 5,000. And Goodyear and Boeing finally gave up on bidding the 50 and had the same problems with bidding 5,000. Then they opened up the bids and we were eliminated on the basis that we didn’t have manufacturing experience. That we were Exxon, we were chemical engineers, et cetera, whereas Boeing and Goodyear were hardnosed mechanical people. So we were knocked out of that bidding. So my project was shut down. Which was rather hard to take. Since we were, at that time, still at—our centrifuges we made for them up running well, gave them no problems. They started up, they were never shut down in that year. And we had better statistical data than Oak Ridge did on the ones that they had had made. So that knocked us out of that. At that time, we—and I had already gone to the board of directors of Exxon and sat in their thing and got approval to go forward with a $1.5 billion project. Two phases--$900 for the first phase and the rest for the second phase to build an enormous centrifuge phase, which would then put Exxon into the commercial enrichment business, instead of the government. And our prices were going to be 30% lower than theirs, which I thought was a good thing for the American public. But it wasn’t.
Franklin: Why wasn’t it?
Astley: Because President Carter was in charge. I had a friend of mine who was on—a good friend—who was one of his cabinet. I asked him one day, I told him how we’d got cut out. And I said, I can’t understand that. I mean, what’s wrong? What made that decision? Couldn’t have been [UNKNOWN] And he said, well, don’t tell anybody—and he’s died since, so he’s not in jeopardy—but he said, I sat in the cabinet meeting and it was explained to us by the head of the AEC at that time what the situation was. And they felt that they wanted to work—they were going to award us the contract immediately, but contingent to negotiate with the other people. So then Carter said, who did you say? And they said, Exxon. And he rams his—bam! Exxon’s already controlling the damn energy of the world, I don’t want them meddling in the reactors also [UNKNOWN]. Find some way to disqualify them. That’s what really happened. There’s no record of that.
Franklin: Yeah.
Astley: So it’s not very—I guess you’d call that the height of hearsay. And then about four months later, they shut down the laser plant. And we came in at that point, the boss offered the AEC to continue to operate that, since it was very promising. And it was going to make [UNKNOWN] like 30%. You know, that’s even better than centrifuges. And he offered to operate the plant for a dollar a year, just like DuPont did at the beginning, and continue the thing. And then he said, when the plant first gets on its feet, I’d like to be paid back for the $80 million I’ve invested in this in the operating profits. AEC said, no. We don’t want you involved in this. So they went and said, [UNKNOWN] buy out all your equipment for ten cents on the dollar and we’ll transfer it down to California. Because they’re also experts on lasers. So they shut that down. And a lot of politics involved behind the scenes on this whole nuclear business, which it seemed to me that I had a little black cloud that way. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Yeah, there’s kind of a common thread running through a lot of your stories.
Astley: Yeah! But that was really the—to try to explain how that laser enrichment worked is a little difficult.
Franklin: I’m sure.
Astley: For somebody that isn’t technically trained.
Franklin: That would be me.
Astley: Yeah. That’s all. But that was a beautiful project. But I had already gotten—and then I also had already gotten [UNKNOWN] to go forward with the first step of a fairly large prototype for $50 million. So I had the total board behind me. And in fact, when I went in front of the board of directors at [UNKNOWN], I was supposed to give a thirty minute talk. Because I had to go to the board because I was asking for $1.5 billion. If it had been less than a billion, I could have gone to the management staff instead. That would have been too small for Exxon to worry about at the board level. The only company to do that. In fact, they’re allowed to round their income tax off to the nearest dollar. I think probably things have changed, but—anyway, during that, at the end of an hour and a half, and I’m still talking about this project. Finally, the chairman puts up his hands. Fellows, he said, we’ve kept Mr. Astley here for an hour and a half. He was only supposed to be thirty minutes. I don’t think any more questions we’ll learn any more. And he’s told us everything; we should have enough information at this point whether to go forward with this. And [UNKNOWN] who’d just come back from being Treasurer for whoever was—I don’t remember who it was then—Ford, maybe? Ford, probably. Yeah, I’m sure it was Ford. He’d taken a leave of absence to be Treasurer and came back. He’d just—finally he says, you know, to the chairman, he says, Mr. Chairman, we have enough information to go forward. Let’s show these goddamn AEC people how private industry can do the job. [LAUGHTER] So I got my money. But it didn’t prove to be a giant sinkhole for Exxon. But those kind of things were going on that made my life interesting.
Franklin: Yeah. When did you leave Exxon?
Astley: I left Exxon in ’83. They were going direction—they wanted to get out of the nuclear business. And they didn’t mind continuing the fuels business because we had such a good reputation for—I think we bid on business since at least ten years. Never had a fuel failure. Anybody who ever produced, which nobody else in the world could claim. And we knew how to make fuel. I was heading up the fuel plant here in Richland at that point and the one in Langer, Germany. But I had other projects going which were very successful and they shut those all down to concentrate simply on fuel. So I’d sort of worked that, and about that time I got a call from Sandvik and they, [UNKNOWN] he said, I’m retiring, and I’d like to talk to about taking over for me. And so I did. It sounded like a good [UNKNOWN], you know? I guess my feeling was it was going to be a lot more fun to be a big fish in a little puddle. So I went in ’83 and retired from there in ’91. During that time, here’s the technology that we—you know, at that time, Sandvik was building nuclear fuel tubes from zirconium for three different companies. Babcock, Wilcox Combustion and Exxon. So that was a direct application of nuclear information. Because the design of all that came from having worked for Hanford [unknown]. And so during that time, it became obviously that the world was shrinking and that there was too many people looking for too few fuel tubes. So I put the company into titanium. And I found out that the aircraft people were moving strongly toward titanium tubing for all of their jets. So I started that as a diversification. And I told Sandvik that I thought within five to ten years that we were very likely to have no more work. I said there’s got to be consolidation. And I thought, ten, twelve years, French bought out Exxon—or Germans began it and they bought out the Germans. And now the group was French, running that plant there. And exactly it happened, so Combustion Engineering was bought by Germans, I think. I can’t remember who. So all of our customers were no longer, so we had no zirconium. So all we did was titanium. And while I was there, I was glad that personally the titanium golf shaft, utilizing nuclear energy technology.
Franklin: What is that?
Astley: Golf shafts?
Franklin: Yeah.
Astley: You know, golf.
Franklin: Oh!
Astley: And when I came in, 99% were using steel. And there were people trying to make using fibers which weren’t very successful. So I introduced titanium and got—the guy I made a friend of, the chairman of TaylorMade who had invented the metal clubs—got him interested in taking a look at titanium heads plus then matching them with a titanium shaft. And got his whole staff there to agree that this shaft was better than anything in the market. But it jumped the price of shafts. I had to charge $18 a shaft. They were paying 50 cents. So that was a big change. And I managed to get that settled in. He said, hey, we’re in a big fight. A driver costs somewhere between $90 and $100. And if you try to get over $100, suddenly they start shying away because they’re pretty much the same. They claim different. But at any rate, I said, well, that’s not what you want to do. I said this gives you the chance to have something that’s uniquely different. So instead of just charging for $18, I mean $99, make your clubs sell for $199. Because you have something to sell. And he said, yeah, he said, you should have been my marketing manager. I said, well, I am, I’m trying to sell you titanium. But anyway, I went out to dinner with him and at the end I said, okay, you’re really enthused about this. So I said I need an order from you. And he said what would you like to have your order start with? And I said, I’d like to start with at least 25,000 shafts the first year. And I’ll give you an exclusive for the first year. So he pulled over a napkin from the bar sort of thing, and he writes on it, I agree to buy 50,000 shafts from Sandvik special models at $18 a shaft with exclusive rights for one year, signed his name. So I took that back to—only way you could do this would be private industry. Go back to my [UNKNOWN] and say hey, here’s the order I just got. He’s a Mormon, doesn’t drink. He said, this looks like a stain on a cocktail napkin to me. And I said, yeah, that’s where I got the order. So he photographs it or something and puts it in. But I imagine if I had been trying to do something at the AEC, that might not have flown.
Franklin: Right, yeah.
Astley: [LAUGHTER] They’d have at least 15 regulations [UNKNOWN]
Franklin: And they’d need it in triplicate, too.
Astley: Oh, yeah, right. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: I wonder if you could talk about living in Richland during the Cold War. And working at Hanford during that time. You’ve mentioned some previous experiences with Russian scientists. I was wondering if you could talk about how the Cold War affected you and your work and your family.
Astley: I think it really didn’t affect us a lot. I lived in north Richland and I built a home there. I think the thing that was interesting was that, first of all, of course, by ’54 there was enough of Richland. So what we used to call the termination winds were not so severe anymore, because we had all the trees and the houses. So it was a little bit more protected. So that didn’t—although even then, we had some pretty fair gust storms compared to now—really bad. And at that time, you didn’t have all these fancy windows. They were all sash windows, so they leaked like a sieve. So every time we had a dust storm, the inside of the house was covered everywhere with a little layer of dust. And I would say that perturbed my wife. [LAUGHTER] And all the other wives. Because that meant a lot of work, you know. It wasn’t as if you just go in and dust something. I mean, the whole damn place had to be vacuumed. All the windows, everything that had a surface. And it wasn’t a minor thing. You could write your name in everything.
Fraknlin: Wow.
Astley: So that was something, I think, that certainly most of the females probably had to do the work. The kids didn’t care. I think they were kind of oblivious of everything in terms of the Hanford experiences. So I didn’t see much effect there. But in 1960, then, I guess they were probably DoE by then but I’m still not sure. But they then decided to, with the Corps of Engineers, to sell the town and get out of being
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