Reactor, Oklo to Fukushima

[Wlrun3]

The beginning of my new book.

Reactor, Oklo to Fukushima.

  "The flames were so intense that they melted the paint from the wings of the bombers that rained down white phosphorus and napalm onto the ancient wooden city. It sounded as if the atmosphere, on fire, was screaming in agony.
   The core of the bomb came from the arid deserts of the American Northwest where uranium slugs were pushed through the huge graphite blocked wall of the plutonium production reactor.
  Shaped into a sphere, in the New Mexican desert named Jornado del Muerto, the Journey of Death, by the Conquistador Coronado, it was exploded.  
  The explosion was many times larger than any before. Days later the Japanese city of Hiroshima became the first victim of the hideous new bomb.
  In the midst of the fire bombing of Tokyo, immediately preceding the destruction of Hiroshima, Doctor Kuroda had been thinking about the news that the element uranium had been used to create a self sustaining atomic reaction. If it were true physics suggested that this had occurred many times before in the five billion year history of the Earth.
  Inescapable was the idea that this was the source of the Earth's heat...that the earth itself was a gigantic reactor."

Table of Contents
1 Beginning
2 Rise of the West
3 World War
4 Cold War
5 Nuclides
6 Meters
7 Numbers
8 References
9 People
10 Reactors

The book, roughly two hundred pages, is finished.

[Wlrun3]

This is the link to my book, American Nuclear Power Plants, written in 2010.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qh187z2bld1gxiz/American%20Nuclear%20Power%20Plants.pdf

Reactor, Oklo to Fukushima is finished and I will provide it here soon.

Trench 94, Graveyard of the Cold War and Rocky Flats Building 771, The World's Most Dangerous Building are to follow.

The book list in American Nuclear Power Plants provides a foundation for understanding the significance of what happened in the mid twentieth century, given climate change and population growth, its implications for the future, and to the point,  our position in it.

[61nomad]

Bill, you are indeed a Renaissance Man. Hope to see you back at Hanford someday. For your next book I would suggest an instructional manual on how to cover every job possible in a nuke plant. I am serious. It is sad how knowledge of such things has not transfered.

[Wlrun3]

Wonderful to here from you again.

  The topic, as I have found, is dauntingly vast, from the intricacies of the pcm and portal monitors to level B suits in a million DAC plutonium in an inner tent chamber, from hot loop nozzel dam insertion to, as i just saw at Peach Bottom, divers welding at the core spray sparger in the reactor vessel.
  A book like that would need a strong structural foundation or it would rapidly collapse under its own weight.
    Tell me, what would the table of contents look like. I would really like to try doing this. It seems like it's just waiting to be done.


 

[61nomad]

Well, the title could be "outage"

Main chapters would be
PWR
BWR

Sub chapters could be the sequence of events.

I would keep it basic or you will drive yourself crazy.

The reason I suggested the topic is although I have been a HP since 1985 I only have about 12 years commercial experience. There are still a few evolutions I have not seen. I think it would be valuable to new HPs as well as craft people. 

[Wlrun3]

   Yes, I've often thought that a control point by control point description of a refuel outage, in each basic design, from start to finish is the best way to tackle this.
    I'll work on an outline and present the draft here.