I knew things got bad when nuclear stuff goes wrong. Still holy shit, being impaled by a controll rod is a bad day for anybody. Then the people who had to suffer for a long time after the initial incident.
Makes the theme of the "ghost ship" I worked on seem a lot darker and kind of a little too close to reality.(the "curse" kept the crew undying while still suffering from the effects of massive radiation exposure. According to that backstory, we'd been suffering from supernatural radioactive experiments conducted aboard a ship that went missing 80-ish years prior. Anyways.)
I had never heard of this before! Down here, we were barely told about 3-Mile island, and the only reason I had some knowledge of that was because MAD Magazine made a deal of it!
Is the area around the site still considered contaminated? Did they encase it in concrete like Chernobyl?
Just did not know this had ever occurred. Thank you for the lesson, and with your added knowledge as well.
I'd heard of SL-1, at least what They let us civvies know about it.
But the nuclear foulup that sticks out most in my mind was the Demon Core (though that was for a weapon, not power), because it was involved in not one but two fatal accidents.
One of which involved someone messing around with neutron shielding by using, instead of shims designed and approved for that purpose, a simple screwdriver.
"I'm just going to handle this near-critical ball of plutonium by manipulating the beryllium cover with this 25-cent (1940s money and just guessing there) tool I picked up at the hardware store." And once again we see that someone may be incredibly smart and still be stupid.
Kåre เลียม Enga & ForeverDreamer we were all very young. When I reported to the USS Theodore Roosevelt, I was only 19! Most of the Nuclear Trained personnel were under 30 years old, our Chief Petty Officers were a little over thirty on average. {susderr:enga} I'm also old. There's no way I could do things like this now, though I'd love to.
While underway, I mentioned that the Throttleman was the busiest. I want to clarify that and say he would only be busy when a new bell (or speed) was ordered on the Engine Order Telegraph (the large dial on the upper right side of the slanted portion of the panel). The large dial on the left hand slanted side showed the Shaft RPM. A certain RPM meant a certain speed (Ahead 1/3. Ahead Standard, Ahead Full, etc). Yes, we were very young, but we were a team. A team of 'Nukes' back aft, a team of Submariners on the boat.
This was interesting-it is amazing what we can remember even as young as 3-4. Your life is similar to mine since we are the same age and I was in Michigan until I was 5 and then came to Georgia. When you wrote about the roller skates, I remembered Melanie singing that song about the brand new key. Memory (the brain) is a wonderful thing.
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