b'P ROVING THE P RINCIPLEfor political reasons before it could ended. Only the Expended Core Facility carrying the merest trickle of freshprove its most important principle. 7 remained. Despite a diminished fleet reactor fuel into Idaho. 10complement, the Navy planned to con-Like a spool that had tumbled to the tinue shipping reactor cores to Idaho. 9 H o w eve , DOE still needed to ship rground and unwound its thread, INEL Rocky Flats TRU waste and spent reactorresearch on new reactor concepts rolled Thus the number of reactors actually fuel to INELfor storage. The Idaho gov-to a stop. Many INEL scientists had operating at the INEL went down to e r n o r, on the other hand, did not supportinvested their careers and their patrio- three. The ATR and the ATRC (its low- these missions. In stark contrast to its tol-tism on the proposition that the United power auxiliary) remained operating as erance of INELs earlier nuclear missions,States should become and remain the an essential part of the Navys fuel the governors office now wrestled withworld leader in nuclear technology. It examination and materials testing pro- DOE to keep these forms of uranium andappeared to them that such leadership gram. Indeed, the Navy was the ATRs plutonium from entering the state.was now likely to pass to Japan or biggest customer, although the reactor Although the IDO played a role in thesome other nation. It was a moment of continued to manufacture isotopes of struggles, the decisions about INELm is -profound and, for some, bitter regret. interest to medical and industrial mar- sions in the scheme of things came pri-kets. At Argonne-West, the low-power marily from DOE in Washington, D.C.The Cold War, one of the igniters of NRAD reactor operated from time topatriotism, was a spool that had come time as a tool for neutron radiography, The wrestling match had begun notto the end of its thread as well. a method of taking pictures of radioac- long after Cecil D. Andrus becamePerestroika and Glasnost changed the tive materials by directing a stream of Idaho governor for his third term inUSSR. Lithuania declared itself inde- neutrons at the subject. NRAD hadpendent of the Soviet union. The taken the pictures of the TMI fuel-fail-USSR collapsed. The Berlin Wall came ure simulations. The TREAT reactor Admiral Bruce DeMars (left) and Governor Cecildown. In November 1990 President was in standby at Argonne, but without Andrus discuss naval nuclear propulsion in the S5GGeorge Bush said the Cold War was an assignment. The uranium trail was prototype. over. American defense spendingdeclined, and the U.S. Navy scaledback its nuclear fleet. With this, theNavys training needs diminished andthe Navy started to close some of itstraining facilities. 8At the INEL, the Navy shut down itsreactors and the research and trainingprograms associated with them. It hadshut down the S1W prototype onOctober 17, 1989, before the Cold Wa rhad ended, citing the prototypes ageand the high cost of its continued opera-tion. Its last core had operated for twen-ty-two years, the longest of any nuclearreactor core in the world at that time.The A1prototype ran until JanuaryW1994, and S5G until May 1995. The reg-ular arrival and departure of traineesBoise State University Library ISS 102238'