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1950's ... giant steel chamber for testing USN reactors!


... damn- that is big! If anyone has anymore info on this please leave it in comments.

https://atomic-annhilation.blogspot.com/2018/02/1953-very-big-and-round.html 

5 comments:

  1. Hmm...isn't this "Cerebro" from the X-men movies?

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  2. 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.

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  3. ... 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.

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  4. 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.

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