Prouty tells this story about how, in late November 1963, he was tasked with being a military escort for a group of VIPs to the US Antarctic base at McMurdo Sound to attend the startup and activation of a new, small nuclear rector that would power and provide heat for the base. This is how he describes it to the ARRB:
"[...] So I called the man, and he said, "yes, we need a project officer- escort officer-" for a group of technicians from several companies who built a small nuclear plant, same as submarine power, a small. thing. And they were going to run Antarctica off that plant, [to] prove that it can be done. And so [there were] about 50 people going down there, and "...we need a military escort, and we'd like to haveve you go." So, on the 10th of November in '63, I got on a C-130 here at Andrews Field, with this party of about... plus or minus 50- I have all their names, they're all businessmen; Caterpillar Tractor, Martin-Marietta, people like that doing this thing. And we flew down to New Zealand, which is the Navy base for the Antarctic project that they run; and then from there we flew to McMurdo.. While we were there, the little, small little thing, [it] would have fit on this table- was down in a hole, 180 feet below ground; and we went down and took a look at it and everything, saw everything else. There was a control room up above, and they said, "We're going to turn the thing on." And some guy pulls a handle, and all the lights in the base went off and the heat stopped, and everything else. And then he pulled another handle, and everything started; and for ten years, that little thing down there ran that whole base. It had a drawing equivalent of a town of 25,000 people. Everything went... I never knew whether they did it thinking there was going to be an energy crisis or something, but all of a sudden, they didn't need any more petroleum in Antarctica. It was really sort of a miracle. But a very interesting thing." I found a history of this reactor here:
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/ with a PDF version of the most important source document here:
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/docs/AJUSvIIn2.pdfIn Prouty's telling, his group was there to witness the initial operation of the reactor. But it's initial operation happened 16 month before, in July, 1962. It went through a testing phase for another 23 months before being declared operational.
I don't think that Prouty is being outright dishonest here, but I do think that his story betrays a poor understanding of what was going on at the time, and why. I would say that it's more likely that he simply misunderstood the nature of the trip, that it was really just a dog and pony show for some Federal Vendor VIPs, and Prouty's mind made it into a more important event than it really was. This seems to be a common problem with him. He takes something he knows a little bit about, and lets his imagination inflate its significance. Sometimes quite a bit.
