b'C H A P T E R 18T H E S H A W E F F E CT . . .INC to ANCAerojet Nuclear night on a back street in Idaho Falls to do good work at the NRTS. BetterCorporation. Phillips, co-inventor of the and then drove to one of their homes. days were ahead for LOFT. w o rl d s only reactor testing station, was, That men nationally recognized inwith little ceremony, gone for good. Its their profession felt they had to do this After the troubled start-up of the AT R ,earlier ambitions regarding nuclear ener- shows how far relations between the the reactor went on to perform superbly,gy had abated; changes in the NRT S AEC and Idaho have deteriorated, he like a theatrical play after a poor dressprograms and the environment in which wrote. But the new Aerojet manager, rehearsal. In August 1969, the operatorsit now operated gave it little further Charles Leeper, supported Shaw. The ran it for the first time at its full powerstake in testing nuclear reactors. 3 1 highly creative days and the permissive level of 250 megawatts. The designerstimes are behind us, he said, and the originally expected to run the ATR twen-In 1972, Sciencemagazine charted the demands now are for a hard bitten ty-one days before having to shut downLOFT-centered erosion of affection reduction to economical practices. 32 and reload new fuel. In practice, theybetween the NRTS and AEC ran in thirty-four day cycles and longer.Headquarters. The author, Robert Although work protocols, management In the next ten years, the ATR regularlyGillette, described with dismay how ph l s ophy, and the burden of paper- set new performance records, running ati o NRTS scientists met him secretly one work had changed, it was still possible 98.2 percent operating efficiency andon-line eighty percent of the year. Thi s was a superior accomplishment becausethe ATR was so complex a machine thatany of four hundred different reactor andexperimental systems could fail and shutdown the reactor. Breaking performancerecords meant that a team was sharp,diligent, and skillful. 3 3The Shaw effect was not limited to thetotal reorientation of the LOFT p rogr am and the imposition of a new style ofmanagement and procurement. It alsoplayed out in the theater of operations atArgonWest. Shaw had a strong com-ne -mitment to the future of the breederr e a c t o r. But it turned out that he did nothave a strong commitment to Argne-onWest. When this became apparent to theeastern Idaho supporters of the NRTS, aboost machine went into high gear.ATR technicians check the fit of a dummy fuelelement in the reactor core (before ATR becameoperational). The curved pipes are for instrumentleads and reactor coolant. The vertical pipes providepaths for experiments into the core area.INEEL 67-51841 8 3'