Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory is a

U.S. Government The Federal Government of the United States of America (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States. The U.S. federal government is composed of three distinct branches: legislative, executi ...

-owned research and development facility in the

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

suburb of

West Mifflin, Pennsylvania West Mifflin is a borough in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, located southeast of downtown Pittsburgh. The population was 19,589 at the 2020 census. It is named after Thomas Mifflin, 1st Governor of Pennsylvania, signer of the U ...

, 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 by ...

for the

U.S. Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is the world's most powerful navy with the largest displacement, at 4.5 million tons in 2021. It has the world's largest aircraft ...

. It was one of the leaders in creating the

nuclear navy A nuclear navy, or nuclear-powered navy, refers to the portion of a navy consisting of naval ships powered by nuclear marine propulsion. The concept was revolutionary for naval warfare when first proposed. Prior to nuclear power, submarines were ...

. The laboratory is part of the

Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program Naval Reactors (NR), which administers 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 reactors ...

, a joint U.S Navy-

Department of Energy A ministry of energy or department of energy is a government department in some countries that typically oversees the production of fuel and electricity; in the United States, however, it manages nuclear weapons development and conducts energy-rela ...

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, Pen ...

, 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 and headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was originally named "Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company" and was ...

Bechtel Corporation Bechtel Corporation () is an American engineering, procurement, construction, and project management company founded in San Francisco, California in 1898, and headquartered in Reston, Virginia in the Washington metropolitan area. , the ''Enginee ...

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 Fluor Corporation is an American engineering and construction firm, headquartered in Irving, Texas. It is a holding company that provides services through its subsidiaries in three main areas: oil and gas, industrial and infrastructure, government ...

, 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 nuclear reactor. PWRs constitute the large majority of the world's nuclear power plants (with notable exceptions being the UK, Japan, India and Canada). In a PWR, water is used both as ...

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

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

s and

surface ship Surface combatants (or surface ships or surface vessels) are a subset of naval warships which are designed for warfare on the surface of the water, with their own weapons and armed forces. They are generally ships built to fight other ships, subma ...

s 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 (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

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

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of 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 instruc ...

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 Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation Microprocessor, processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''Sl ...

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). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and I ...

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 engineering discipline concerned with designing and applying systems that utilize the energy released by nuclear processes. The most prominent application of nuclear engineering is the generation of electricity. Worldwide ...

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 power, nuclear-powered systems for long-duration space missions. This was NASA's first serious foray into Nuclear propulsion, nuclear spacecr ...

nuclear power source for the JIMO (

Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter The ''Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter'' (JIMO) was a proposed NASA spacecraft designed to explore the icy moons of Jupiter. The main target was Europa, where an ocean of liquid water may harbor alien life. Ganymede and Callisto, which are now tho ...

) 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