Wasn't this vessel intended for underground blast containment rather than reactor testing? The portal is typical of instrumentation tunnels for that sort of thing in the period.
... no - I am not familar with any steel chambers built to contain nuclear underground tests. You may be thinking of 'Jumbo'; which was a containment vessel built for the first test at Alamogordo 'Trinity'. In case of a 'dud' and no fission reaction they wished to contain the valuable plutonium which woulf have beed badly scattered by the higexplosive 'lenses' But they did not use it.
Containment vessels were used for detonations that compressed piezoelectric quartz crystals that generated an electrical pulse stored in very large capacitors and used to pump x-ray lasers. Lawrence Livermore played with these while working on Star Wars systems and as a byproduct also created holographic x-ray machines. These had the unfortunate side-effect of vaporizing the target. At any rate, after more research, I found that the vessel in question was used in the development of the sodium-cooled reactors used in the Skate class nuclear submarines.
Hmm...isn't this "Cerebro" from the X-men movies?
ReplyDeleteWasn't this vessel intended for underground blast containment rather than reactor testing? The portal is typical of instrumentation tunnels for that sort of thing in the period.
ReplyDelete... no - I am not familar with any steel chambers built to contain nuclear underground tests. You may be thinking of 'Jumbo'; which was a containment vessel built for the first test at Alamogordo 'Trinity'. In case of a 'dud' and no fission reaction they wished to contain the valuable plutonium which woulf have beed badly scattered by the higexplosive 'lenses' But they did not use it.
ReplyDeleteContainment vessels were used for detonations that compressed piezoelectric quartz crystals that generated an electrical pulse stored in very large capacitors and used to pump x-ray lasers. Lawrence Livermore played with these while working on Star Wars systems and as a byproduct also created holographic x-ray machines. These had the unfortunate side-effect of vaporizing the target. At any rate, after more research, I found that the vessel in question was used in the development of the sodium-cooled reactors used in the Skate class nuclear submarines.
ReplyDelete... good job!
ReplyDelete