Nuclear History/Trivia

[Marlin]

Nuclear History/Trivia is for the trivia buffs, neophyte historians, and Navy (or ExNavy) oolie artists. Questions like which Nuclear facility is a nesting ground for the American crocodile, where is the site of a now dormant natural reactor, or which submarine first circumnavigated the world submerged are good questions. Any question that may compromise security of a facility is not. Pose a question or just demonstrate your vast arcane knowledge.

[RDTroja]

The natural reactor was in Gabon. I will leave the other questions for others to answer.

Who coined the term 'Health Physicist', why and when?

[halflifer]

Salt water Crocs nest at Turkey Point. I don't know who came up with the term 'Health Physicist' but the story put out at the DA RSO course I attended was that it came from Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. They had to come up with something that didn't use radiation-related items in the interest of security.

[Marlin]

The natural reactor was in Gabon. I will leave the other questions for others to answer.

Who coined the term 'Health Physicist', why and when?

Correct, the short story on these reactors is that they occured 2 billion years ago when the enrichment of U-235 was much higher. U235 has a shorter halflife than U238 dropping the natural enrichment of U235 over the years. The ground in this area had a high U concentration and low in nuerton absorbers. The reactors "operated" for about a million years self controlling in a manner simular to a boiling water reactor, as the ground water was heated by fission it would boil away lowering the raectivity of the reactor. The link below gives a much better explanation and history.


http://www.curtin.edu.au/curtin/centre/waisrc/OKLO/index.shtml

[Rennhack]

You might enjoy this quiz/Trivia area:

http://www.nukeworker.com/quiz/

Curently we have:

Region I Trivia
Region II Trivia
Navy Nuke Trivia

As soon as you guys fill this new forum, we'll add those too.

[Rennhack]

BTW,

STP also has a lot of aligators, its's even their mascot, "Al E. Gator".

[thenuttyneutron]

Natural reactors might be more common than we think.  Jupiter spits out more heat than it absorbs from the sun.  I have seen theories that state that many of the planets have large natural fission reactors at the center.  This includes the earth.  Samples taken from lava flows of He-3 match up very well with predicted values for scientist that think there is a big natural breeder reactor at the core of the earth.

It is an interesting theory,  I want to see more experiments performed on this subject.  I think eventually we will design better neutrino detectors that can discriminate neutrinos born from fusion vs fission.  When that occurs I think we will have a good idea of what is going on.

Sort of weird to think about it, the biggest reactor on the planet may not be man-made.


Here is my trivia question:

Who was the scientist that developed the models for pulseing reactors and was later discovered to be a spy who turned over vast amounts of material to the soviets?

[Melrose]

How 'bout the name of the goliath airplane that made it's voyage in the 50s, sporting an operating reactor?

[Marlin]

Who coined the term 'Health Physicist', why and when?

There are a number of answers to this here are two;

1)Robert Stone or Arthur Compton defined the the field in which physical methods are used to determine the existence of hazards to the health.

2)Raymond Finkle denoted it as the physics section of the health division.

Here is my trivia question:

Who was the scientist that developed the models for pulseing reactors and was later discovered to be a spy who turned over vast amounts of material to the soviets?

I believe Klaus Fuchs but would not put money on it.

How 'bout the name of the goliath airplane that made it's voyage in the 50s, sporting an operating reactor?

The Crusader carried an operational reactor but the plane was powered by conventional means. the project was scrapped before it reached that stage.

[shayne]

I was just wondering why this topic is locked?

Warning: this topic is currently locked!
Only admins and moderators can reply.

[Marlin]

This thread was intended for an intro. A ten page thread is difficult to navigate between question and answer and if you follow other long threads the original topic is frequantly lost. Long threads seem to work well for current event threads like SloGlo's news but I believe that a reference style topic needs more structure.

"That's just my opinion I could be wrong".......Dennis Miller

[Melrose]

  Correct..... the Crusader carried a 1000 kilowatt reactor weighing 35000 pounds.  The propulsion design contract was given to GE.  Convair was in charge of the flight project.
The crew was housed inside a lead and rubber cockpit.  Separating the crew from the reactor was a 4 ton lead disc.  Observation of the reactor was via video.
The XB-36H Crusader made her maiden voyage on 09/17/55, before the Air Force pulled the plug, 47 flights were completed.  All with the reactor operating.
Initial tests were to monitor the affects of radiation on instruments, frame structure etc.