Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory is a

U.S. Government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fede ...

-owned research and development facility in the

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...

suburb of West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, that works exclusively on the design and development of

nuclear power Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced b ...

for the U.S. Navy. It was one of the leaders in creating the nuclear navy. The laboratory is part of the

Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program Naval Reactors (NR), also known as the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, is an umbrella term for the U.S. government office that has comprehensive responsibility for the safe and reliable operation of the United States Navy's nuclear propulsion p ...

, a joint U.S Navy- Department of Energy program responsible for the research, design, construction, operation and maintenance of U.S. nuclear-powered warships. The laboratory was founded in 1949 on the site of the former

Bettis Field Bettis Field was an airstrip in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, established in 1924. It was named for U.S. Army Air Corps Lieutenant Cyrus Bettis following his fatal accident on Jack's Mountain near Bellefonte, Pe ...

, named after Cyrus Bettis. It covers approximately . From the Lab's founding until 1998, it was run by

Westinghouse Electric Corporation The Westinghouse Electric Corporation was an American manufacturing company founded in 1886 by George Westinghouse. It was originally named "Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company" and was renamed "Westinghouse Electric Corporation" in ...

. Bechtel Corporation won the contract to run the laboratory on September 19, 2008 and assumed operation on February 1, 2009, first under its subsidiary Bechtel Bettis, Inc., later under Bechtel Marine Propulsion Corporation. The contract changed hands again when Fluor Corporation, as their subsidiary Fluor Marine Propulsion, LLC won the contract to run the laboratory on July 12, 2018 and assumed operations on October 1, 2018. The laboratory developed Oak Ridge National Laboratory's original design of the

pressurized water reactor A pressurized water reactor (PWR) is a type of light-water reactor, light-water nuclear reactor. PWRs constitute the large majority of the world's nuclear power plants (with notable exceptions being the UK, Japan and Canada). In a PWR, the primary ...

(PWR) for operational naval use. It built the nuclear propulsion plants for the first U.S. nuclear

submarine A submarine (or sub) is a watercraft capable of independent operation underwater. It differs from a submersible, which has more limited underwater capability. The term is also sometimes used historically or colloquially to refer to remotely op ...

s and surface ships including , , , and . Westinghouse's Nuclear Power Division adapted the PWR design for commercial use and built the first commercial nuclear power plant in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, the Shippingport Power Plant in the west hills of Pittsburgh. The laboratory had two

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

s listed on the 26th

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

List (November 2005). Ranked 97 a 1,090 processor Opteron system and ranked 405 a 536 processor

Itanium 2 Itanium ( ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Launched in June 2001, Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computin ...

system. The laboratory is also home to the U.S. Navy's Bettis Reactor Engineering School. The school provides a post-graduate certificate program in

nuclear engineering Nuclear engineering is the branch of engineering concerned with the application of breaking down atomic nuclei ( fission) or of combining atomic nuclei (fusion), or with the application of other sub-atomic processes based on the principles of n ...

with a focus on nuclear reactor design, construction, and operations. It is open only to naval personnel and Bettis engineers. The laboratory had been chosen to develop the

Project Prometheus Project Prometheus (also known as Project Promethian) was established in 2003 by NASA to develop nuclear-powered systems for long-duration space missions. This was NASA's first serious foray into nuclear spacecraft propulsion since the cancellat ...

nuclear power source for the JIMO ( Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter) project, however, funding for this program was cancelled in the fall of 2005.

References

Sources

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External links

U.S. DOE's Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory site

Bechtel Bettis' Bettis Laboratory site
{{Authority control Bechtel Nuclear research institutes United States Department of Energy national laboratories Economy of Pittsburgh Research institutes in Pennsylvania Science parks in the United States