Word: reactor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Communist Dictator Tito, who cannot always be assured these days of being addressed as Comrade in Moscow, last week motored to Vinca, south of Belgrade, to open the Communist world's first atomic reactor outside Russia. The donor: the Soviet Union. Tito was doing his best to show that, allowed to travel his separate road, his goal is still the same as Moscow...
Early nuclear reactors were easy to slap down. If one of them made what physicists euphemistically call an "excursion" -i.e., started to react too fast -it could be slowed down by pushing into it a simple rod of neutron-absorbing material. Control rods are still used, but the operators of big modern reactors dare not depend on them alone. Under some conditions, the fierce nuclear fire in the reactor's core can make a disastrous excursion in a fraction of a second...
...known to have cracks, but no one knew whether they went deep enough to weaken the stone so it would break if lifted. To find out, the ministry called on Britain's atomic research station at Harwell. The scientists put 24 grams of sodium carbonate in a reactor and exposed it to neutrons until it became fiercely radioactive. They took it to Stonehenge by truck, put it in a rabbit-size burrow under the great stone and left it there for 36 hours while its gamma rays felt for cracks. If the cracks were really serious, they would show...
Dials & Smoking. Dr. Dobbins' report noted many oddities. At sea, he said, the danger that radiation from the reactor which drives the sub may damage the crew's health is negligible, so effective is its lead shielding. But in port (where pre-atomic subs represented no hazard) the danger skyrockets: part of the shielding may be removed for nucleonics technicians to work on the power plant. Another oddity: though detectable radiation gets into the air and might conceivably build up to health-hazard proportions, it does not come from the reactor. The heavy villains are the radium-painted...
...matter where the experts may eventually fix the dose of radiation that can be considered safe, Commander Dobbins was sure that atomic sub crews-within a few yards of the reactor for 24 hours a day-so far have been exposed to only a fraction of permissible totals. When industry goes into full-scale production and operation of reactors for civilian power needs, it will have an invaluable body of data collected from the first men to go under the sea in atomic vessels...