|
|
| Fig. 1: Camp Century Construction. (Source: Wikimedia Commons) |
Camp Century is an abandoned Arctic United States military scientific research base located in Greenland. Established during the Cold War, the camp primarily served as a classified facility to deploy ballistic nuclear missiles within the ice sheet. [1] It was home to the PM-2A semi- mobile nuclear reactor which operated from 1960 to 1963 for a total of 33 months. [1] PM-2A was created with the intent of being able to be transported by air and assembled at remote locations as is depicted in Fig. 1.
The primary reason for the construction of PM2A was to test the feasibility of using a portable nuclear reactor in such a remote setting in comparison to solely using diesel fuel. Thus, the success of the reactor can be evaluated by whether it reduced the total logistical burden required to operate Camp Century. Assessing this requires comparing the total amount of energy demanded at the site, the equivalent amount of diesel fuel which would be needed, and the nuclear reactor system burden in terms of mass.
The PM-2A reactor was reported to have produced a record 11,232,400 kWh of electricity for Camp Century. [2] However, the camp only required between 300 and 500 kW of energy compared to the 1,560 kW it was designed to supply. [2] This means the reactor only utilized around one-quarter of its intended capacity. To supply this amount of energy and support the nuclear reactor, there were several components which needed to be shipped to Camp Century. Evaluating the nuclear reactor system burden requires looking at the mass of all these components. This includes fuel mass delivered over the lifetime of the reactor, installed reactor mass, and the maintenance equipment mass. In total, there was around 2.0 × 105 L of diesel fuel used, the installed reactor mass was around 413 tons, and 363 metric tonnes on construction materials were used. [1-3] Evaluating the actual mass of each of these components is found to be a total of 905 metric tons (approximating the density of diesel fuel to be around 0.84 kg per liter).
The amount of energy which would be demanded by an equivalent diesel fuel power plant to the PM-2A would be more than 1.5 million liters per year. [2] Over the course of the 33 months in which the plant was operational, this would have been equivalent to 4.125 million liters of diesel. This translates to around 3465 metric tons (using the density used above for diesel fuel of 0.84 liters per metric ton).
Due to the fact that 3465 metric tons is greater than 905 metric tons, it appears that the PM-2A reactor was a logistically smarter choice than using a diesel fuel power plant. This is due to the fact that each metric ton of material which would be required to be transported to Camp Century required a large amount of planning and money due to the remoteness of the site. Also, the reactor mass calculated here is mostly a one-time delivery whereas the diesel would require continuous, recurring delivery increasing the logistical challenge.
The PM-2A reactor was shut down in 1963 after only about three years of operation. This occurred not because it failed to generate power, but because it failed to justify its complexity. The reactor required frequent maintenance, experienced operational interruptions, and still depended on an auxiliary diesel power plant backup. [4] Once the Army recognized that the logistical advantage over conventional fuel supply was smaller than expected, especially as plans for a large missile network under the ice were abandoned, the benefits no longer outweighed the cost and effort of operating a nuclear plant in such an extreme environment. [2,5] The reactor was therefore removed and Camp Century reverted to conventional power before the base itself was abandoned in 1967. [5]
© Sophia Bonanno. The author warrants that the work is the author's own and that Stanford University provided no input other than typesetting and referencing guidelines. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.
[1] W. Colgan et al., "The Abandoned Ice Sheet Base Camp Century, Greenland, in a Warming Climate," Geophys. Res. Lett. 43, 8091 (2016).
[2] J. M. Hylko, "A Look Back at the Portable Nuclear Reactor that Sat on Top of the World," in ENYGF2023 Book of Proceedings, 2023. p. 120.
[3] W. J. McCool et al., "Startup Testing of the PM-2A Nuclear Power Plant," Alco Products, Inc., March 1962.
[4] E. F. Clark, "Camp Century: Evolution of Concept and History of Design, Construction, and Performance," U.S. Army Materiel Command, Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, Technical Report No. 174, October 1965.
[5] J. D. Colgan, "Climate Change and the Politics of Military Bases," Glob. Environ. Polit. 18, 33 (2018).
