Editor’s note: Dick Zeimer was a frequent contributor to “Everybody Has a Story.” This piece arrived in November, but since we had recently published another Zeimer story, this one went to the back of the line. Dick Zeimer died Nov. 24 at age 86.
In the early 1980s, the company I worked for, Energy Systems Group, was tasked with the design, manufacture, and testing of a prototype steam generator for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Program. The reactor was to be built at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and would produce 350 megawatts of electrical power. A unique feature of the reactor was that it would be cooled by liquid sodium instead of water.
The steam generator was built in an old North American Aviation building in El Segundo, Calif. It was the largest wooden building in the country, used for the manufacture of B-25 airplanes during World War II. My job was structural analysis of the generator and analysis of the shipping and handling fixtures used in transporting it to the test site. This latter work got me involved in the “Big Move.”
The challenge was delivering the generator for testing to the Santa Susana test site at the west end of the San Fernando Valley. The generator was 18 feet tall, 20 feet wide and built in the shape of an L. It had to be turned 90 degrees to get the short leg upright. Then it had to be placed in the shipping fixtures and the whole thing loaded onto a special trailer.
With a load like this, you don’t just drive up the freeway to the test site. With tractor and trailer, the load was nearly 96 feet long and weighed 303,268 pounds. There were 58 tires on the rig.
The shipping planners had laid out the route so that the machine would fit through every underpass and under every wire along the way. The trip took us through Chinatown, Pasadena, Eagle Rock, San Fernando, Burbank and the San Fernando Valley. A van full of engineers followed the truck, and an instrumentation engineer rode with the driver, watching a visual display of instruments attached to the steam generator to make sure it did not exceed certain gravity-force limits.
We travelled only at night. The first night, we stopped in the middle of a wide street — big rig, van and escort vehicles — and all went into a Winchell’s for doughnuts and coffee. What a sight for any motorist going by late at night! Later, a house being moved came down the street toward us. We each moved a little to the right and passed without any trouble.
We parked in a large department store lot for the day. We got some rest and started again in the evening. Going along one street, the rig had to stop because of overhanging tree branches. One of the workers got a chain saw, climbed on top of the generator and cut a large notch in the branches so it could get through.
We arrived in the early morning at the bottom of the hill leading up to the test site, and found that the tractor was not powerful enough to pull the trailer up the grade. A large rubber-tired dozer was called in and helped by pushing as the truck pulled. We finally made it to the test area without breaking anything. (In a classic photo taken as the generator passed by the headquarters building, the worker with the chain saw stood on top of the generator and saluted the flag as he went by.)
The generator was installed in the test facility. Then, in 1983, Congress canceled the Clinch River Breeder Reactor program. Countless hours of design and analysis, development of unique manufacturing procedures, all ready for testing — all gone.
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