The Society for the Preservation of Canada’s Nuclear Heritage Inc. (SPCNHI) was recently contacted by Gordon Harvey with the offer to donate an artifact, a large drawing on a laminated backing of a fueling machine for an “HPTR” reactor. Jim Ungrin, SPCNHI Artifacts Chair, responded with an invitation to tour the Society’s collection in exchange for the donation; several days later Gordon and his wife, Wanda, who have recently settled in Deep River from Hamilton, were shown around 51 Poplar.
The artifact they brought, 51 cm by 64 cm, showed the details of a fueling machine and indicated it came from an “HPTR” – the drawing is of a reactor with a “CANDU flavour” to it, namely horizontal channels inside a large vessel. Gordon believed it had been drawn by his father, Dennis Harvey, while he was a draftsman during the 1960s at Chalk River.
Jim could not associate either the design of the fueling machine nor the HPTR acronym with any known CANDU-type reactor, and started a search via the internet. Having retired from active research at AECL in the years BG (Before Google), he quickly reached the limits of his abilities. He then reached out to younger, more internet-savvy members of the Society for assistance.
Within a short time Sourena Golesorkhi and Luke Yaraskavitch applied their sleuthing skills to find the English words “Canadian Westinghouse Co. Ltd. Hamilton, Ont.” and “HPTR” buried in pages of Cyrillic script in a Russian translation of AECL-703, a document handed out by Canadian personnel at the 1958 UN Second International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy.
By further searching, Sourena and Luke located a Westinghouse Canada brochure describing a proposed design for a Horizontal Pressure Tube Reactor. This brochure was produced at about the time that the NPD design was altered from a vertical fuel design to the now-standard, horizontal-channel CANDU design.
Two days later Tom Alburger, the Society’s meticulous document and book cataloguer, was able to locate the original Geneva conference document in the Society’s files. Our copy was an earlier version, in English, that had not yet been given the official designation of AECL-703 and so had not been catalogued as such. Included in the document is a photograph of Westinghouse personnel with a model of the HPTR. Dennis Harvey, the draftsman, is the young fellow second from the right.
Although never built, the HPTR design is a part of Canada’s nuclear R&D heritage; the artifact donated by Gordon Harvey will find its place in the SPCNHI holdings.
