Phillip Hammond's Rare Career

A Trojan Engineer's lifetime of work in nuclear power resonates in today's global energy crisis

Hammond as a young man

Philip Hammond’s interest in rare earth metals led to a rare career. Now, global shortages of food, water and electric power make his work timelier than ever.
 
“I was a grad student at the University of Chicago and worked with Enrico Fermi on the Manhattan Project,” says Hammond. “I helped grind the uranium for the fi rst atomic pile.”

But before he got to Chicago and the Manhattan Project, Hammond was a Trojan who received his B.S. in chemical engineering in 1938. He worked for Dean Robert E. Vivian, who came to USC as acting dean in 1937, when Hammond was a junior.

“His arrival was like the sun coming up. He outshone them all because he had industry experience,” Hammond said about Vivian, who would become a lifelong friend. Hammond worked for Vivian as a student assistant and stayed in touch with him after he had graduated.

“I needed money to live on and my fi rst job at USC was teaching a laboratory class,” he says, laughing. “I had an old lab coat with acid stains on it from high school. It was a mantle of authority. Some of the students called me ‘Dr. Hammond,’ even though I was a freshman.”

After graduation, he became chief chemist for Lindsay Chemical Company in West Chicago, where he continued to work while studying nights at the University of Chicago. Hammond investigated rare earth metals—a group of 17 elements clustered together in the periodic table that have many common properties—to see if any might exhibit properties similar to uranium. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1947 and went to work at Los Alamos Laboratory.

Hammond at his home in Laguna hills

Initially, he worked on nuclear weapons, specifi cally making lanthanum 140, a highly radioactive isotope formed by radioactive decay of barium 140, doing chemistry by remote control.

“Very remote,” he emphasizes.
 
But Hammond’s interest quickly turned to peaceful uses of nuclear power. His crew built and operated four experimental reactors using different kinds of fuel. They learned by doing since no one had ever built a reactor before.
 
“We were trying to design a nuclear power plant to compete with coal,” he said. “The utilities wanted a 350 megawatt plant, but when I studied the economics of scale I saw that it would have to be larger, 450 megawatts or 500 megawatts.”

Hammond remains a fi rm believer in nuclear power, seeing it as an economical clean source of energy that won’t damage the climate. He believes that efforts to remove all risk from the plants resulted in over-designed and overly expensive plants.

“There’s really not much to it. You have a tank of uranium and a cooling system,” he says. “You can develop a containment shield that will withstand a complete meltdown of the fuel. Spent fuel should be reprocessed, made back into metal rods and used again. The rest of the world is doing that. After two years, a reactor only uses 4 percent of the power available from the uranium, but we consider it nuclear waste.”

In 1960, Hammond went to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he became director of the nuclear desalinization program with 250 engineers working for him. Coupling power production with desalinization is attractive, but also presented new technical challenges. Seawater is corrosive and forms a scale of calcium sulfate and calcium carbonate on metal pipes when it evaporates. Power requires high-temperature steam, while low-temperature steam reduces scaling during desalinization.

“You heat the seawater in a vacuum,” he says. “We also found out that aluminum alloys scaled a lot less.”

Hammond represented the United States at a series of international conferences discussing peaceful uses of nuclear energy. A trip to India convinced him that nuclear plants integrated to produce both power and fresh water could help expand agriculture, provide electricity and new jobs in impoverished arid coastal zones of the world, such as India, Mexico or the Middle East.

After retiring, he led an international team at the Metropolitan Water District to develop a breakthrough effi cient system for distilling fresh water from the sea. The plan was to build a planted power by natural gas but in the end, the district decided to increase water imports.
 
“With our achievements in desalinization, effi cient agriculture and nuclear power, it is now clear that the foodproducing ability of the earth is not limited by technology,” he concludes. “Over a billion people live in hopeless poverty; and without hope, terrorism is an easy choice. Yet small investments by the rich countries in energy supply and clean water will create self-supporting communities with purchasing power. The war on terror is really a war on poverty.”

Hammond, now 92 years old, is the author of more than 100 technical articles and the holder of 42 patents. He lives in Laguna Hills.