Burton Island (AGB 1) - Naval Cruise Book

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At left is Chief John Gannon, standing on an elevator of stainless steel, which is suspended by a l5-ton crane over a pool of brilliant water. He is removing one of the con- trol rod actuators in the heart of the nuclear reactor at McMurdo. The actual fuel elements are contained in the walls of about 740 stainless steel tubes, half an inch in diameter. ln case the power rises tooquickly, the reactor has llperiod protection from an automatic monitoring system, At ll0 percent, an alarm sounds, at ll5 the control rods are inserted at six inches per minute, at T20 the rods are put all the way down, in about 380 milli- seconds. Far below the surface of the water is a dolly that carries a hot or spent core into an adiacent tank where it can be stored until it cools off. These are two of the rare photo- graphs, by an outsider, of the reactor with the cover off. Before he could enter the Primary Building, the photog- rapher had to dress completely in white, put on special shoes, and carry a radiation-counter like a fountain pen. When he came out, he was inspected by a sensitive ma- chine. Rarely does a man go over one-sixth of his allowed quarterly dose, said Chief Jim Robertson, the senior electrician. The core, which is no larger than a single oil drum, replaces millions of gallons of Diesel fuel. lt lasts two years. 3g!' M3dn.... H 7

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:HL-------Q--f ---U K --AQ--manga ---2.:amz--...,5.-.........,:i,,.:i, .,...-E..-.,, ' . W- ' ,Him 'EZi 1L5li'i5.5' ft Stakes all day and steaks at night. Above, Tony Gow, of the U. S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory at Hanover, N.H., cooks a steak at midnight. At this season the sun never sets, and its light pours through the thin, extremely strong cloth of his tent. The tent is a brilliant orange-red that can be spotted easily from the air. Gow, a glaciologist, has been measuring the angular shift between stakes that were driven into a glacier in the Dailey Islands several months before. The angular shift, measured with a surveyor's transit, yields information about glacial flow patterns. This area, across the Sound from McMurdo, receives a tremendous, al- though slow, discharge of the ice from the Koettlitz Gla- cier andthe 500-mile sweep of the Ross Ice Shelf.