Hours of Daylight – 15:12
We went a-traveling for Memorial Day weekend. Ever since a horrible camping experience over Memorial Day years ago in New York Annette and i have taken to staying home for the big weekend. But we took a chance and drove to Craters of the Moon National Monument. It was a spectacular weekend. Of course we awoke to freezing temps and more than a little snow. In Idaho it’s not the season that matters, it’s the elevation.
http://homepage.mac.com/jspeer_mn/craters/
Alas the reactor is stone cold, but EBR-1 is one of those places everybody should visit. I mean, the space program (and test pilots) got “The Right Stuff,” but the physicists and engineers who built and ran that reactor were just as important to the beginning of history. I mean they literally took Fermi’s calculations from his work on the Manhattan Project and built a contraption the world had not yet seen. “Well, according to this it should work…” was the mantra.
And what’s even more impressive is they couldn’t order the parts out of a catalog. They had to build nearly everything themselves. The only parts that arrived intact by truck (from Iowa) were the steam turbine and the generator. And then they had to deal with all the “trappings” of running a nuclear power plant, i.e. they had to deal with breakdowns, refueling, upgrades and storage of hot material. Visitors can use remote manipulators to try and stack blocks. It’s difficult to say the least. The manipulators outside the actual “hot room” are all broken, but the three-foot thick plate glass “viewports” are still there. What i like to picture is the guy cutting the placards. I picture a sort of hapless guy who has the unceremonious job of running a router that cuts away bakelite plastic to make the little white on black placards you see all over the control room. Did he wonder what some of the words were?
The unimaginably toxic and highly flammable reactor “coolant” still in use today was invented by these guys. It’s an alloy of Sodium (Na) and Potassium (K) simply called “Nack.” Nack is intensely corrosive and has the nasty habit of exploding on contact with air or water. Just the kind of stuff you want circulating around a radioactive core. Perhaps one of the best engineering feats was in developing a pump that could reliably move material that would dissolve all known pumps. They invented an electromagnetic pump that had no moving parts. Slick.
The other thing that’s very impressive is the actual size of the Mark IV core. The actual “heating zone” is only about 12 inches from top to bottom. Nack was injected into the core from the bottom through precisely sized nozzles, flowed through honeycomb tubes containing bundles of fuel rods, then emptied through holes cut into the honeycomb tubes and exited the reactor and headed for the primary heat exchanger. What’s my point? The reactor core was TINY but generated a spectacular amount of heat energy. It’s then one remembers the famous formula E=mc2 and recalls the amount of energy contained in matter is HUGE. You don’t need much mass to yield scads of energy. Here was a working example of the equivalency of matter and energy.
It’s worth the drive :-)