Stimulated by the U . S . development of the " Nautilus ", Soviet work on nuclear propulsion reactors began in the early 1950s at the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering, in Obninsk, under Anatoliy P . Alexandrov, later to become head of the Kurchatov Institute.
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The plants, in Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Ky ., which were built by the federal government to process uranium for weapons, naval propulsion reactors and civilian power plants, were sold in an initial public offering this summer, when the Energy Department spun them off as the U . S . Enrichment Corp . The management team that ran the two plants before the spinoff now run the corporation.
