ATOMIC ENERGY: The Nuclear Salesmen

• Share

While the world's scientists met in Geneva for the first International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy (see SCIENCE), the world's manufacturers of peaceful atomic products were busy on the other side of town at their own nuclear trade fair. In booths at the great Palace of Expositions, they displayed devices ranging from radiation detectors to brain probes. But what most countries were interested in buying was a nuclear power plant.

Out of Geneva last week came word of the first major sale. Westinghouse Electric Corp. became the first company in the world to sell an atomic power plant for export abroad. The buyer was Italy's Fiat company (autos, jet planes, refrigerators), which expects to install its prize at the University of Turin for operation and research, plans to use the electricity at one of its nearby factories.

Up from the Nautilus. Westinghouse arrived at Geneva's trade fair with a big salesman's advantage. It was the only company in the world that could take orders for a well-tested reactor. Though Britain could show off great technological advances—and its businessmen drew most of the preconference attention—it was far from the production stage on any specific model. Westinghouse, as the firm that built the power plant for the atomic submarine Nautilus, could boast of two years of practical experience with working reactors.

The product it put up for sale was a 10,000-kw. package plant (big enough to power a town of about 15,000 population), with parts that could be boxed and flown anywhere in the world for reassembly. It is a "pressurized water'' reactor plant, i.e., ordinary water under high pressure is used both to control the reactor and to produce steam to turn the turbine that generates the electricity, and similar to the 60,000-kw. plant that Westinghouse is building for Duquesne Light Co. at Shippingport, Pa. The price: $4,000,000, if Westinghouse gets as many as ten orders.

Atoms in the Moonlight. Not only was Westinghouse loaded with experience and ready with order blanks, but, under the sure hand of Westinghouse International's Sales Manager Jose de Cubas, it also crashed the Geneva market with a sales technique that staggered European buyers. At the trade fair, Westinghouse had a small booth with a working model of its Shippingport reactor, but it had long since decided not to depend entirely on mechanical exhibits. Instead, the company took over the entire first floor of the fashionable Genevoise restaurant for the duration of the conference, so industrialists, scientists and newsmen could talk things over and enjoy the free drinks, snacks and cigars. One night the supersalesmen chartered a Lake Geneva steamer, took aboard 400 prospective clients and wives, wined, dined and danced them until dawn.

Such good will paid off. Into Hospitality House, to mix with Westinghouse's Vice President for Atomics Charles Weaver and its top-drawer salesmen, swarmed representatives of 26 nations. Every prospect who looked good or even hopeful got a handsomely bound prospectus with pictures and detailed sketches of the reactor. When the time came to close the first sale, Scientist Weaver and Salesman de Cubas met with Fiat President Vittorio Valletta and signed him up.