Atomic Awakenings
Aug. 16th, 2009 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beige_alertI've very much enjoyed reading Atomic Awakenings by James Mahaffey. A lot of it is retellings of more-or-less familiar stories from the early days of nuclear physics, the World War II weapons program, and the early days of nuclear power. What he describes as the "Age of Wild Experimentation." Some of the stories are more obscure, and he makes what looks like an effort to track down the truth about some of the stories. The writing style is entertaining, a bit humorous.
Something I didn't know about is the Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory, which is now the Dawson Forest Wildlife Area, north of Atlanta. Back in the 50s and 60s, it seemed like a more remote area. There, a totally unshielded 10 megawatt nuclear reactor was used to irradiate objects under test. A nuclear aircraft would have to have minimal radiation shielding, so the effects of the intense irradiation an aircraft components was of interest. This was done out in the open air. They had to keep track of wind direction to keep the dose to the public from argon-41 activated from the argon-40 in the air down to what at the time was considered acceptable. Plus they had a tower with a microphone on it to listen for approaching aircraft, so they could scram the reactor before irradiating the pilot. At a radius of 3600 feet the "Lethal Fence" was built to control access.
Not only did it kill small animals, it killed the bacteria in and on them, leaving the bodies preserved.
Apparently, the operator, Lockheed, later decided to try to get into the cobalt-60 business, unsuccessfully, but they managed to contaminate the whole facility with cobalt-60. There have been several cleanups, and it's been a bunch of half-lives now (half-life is jut 5.27 years), but it's supposedly easily detected around, along with the europium-152 made from the tiny traces of europium naturally in the soil.
Anyway, if you live near Atlanta and want to see something unusual, bring your Geiger counter and scare the normal people who are just riding their horses around the pretty natural area. The hot cell facility is still there, too thick-walled to easily dismantle. Here's a photoset on flickr of the park. The coordinates given in the book were accidentally transposed, it should be 34° 21' 04.03" N 84° 08' 38.75" W [fixed! Sigh, hard to get the jumble of numbers and symbols right!], the location of the big hot cell building. The remnant of the Lethal Fence is just faintly visible on the Google Earth image if you can find the right spot. I think the clearing with the shadow-shield described in the book is at 34° 21' 56.66" N 84° 10' 5.02" W, and you can see a circle around it, most easily to the west, at about 1km radius.
More local to me, one of these days I need to visit the Palos Hills Forest Preserve in Cook County, Illinois (near Chicago, and near but outside the present-day Argonne Lab site). There you can visit one of rather few combination picnic areas / nuclear waste dumps. Material from the very first (man-made) reactor, Fermi's famous pile originally built at the University of Chicago, and a second, slightly later reactor, is buried there. Back in those days, it seemed like a more remote area....
Something I didn't know about is the Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory, which is now the Dawson Forest Wildlife Area, north of Atlanta. Back in the 50s and 60s, it seemed like a more remote area. There, a totally unshielded 10 megawatt nuclear reactor was used to irradiate objects under test. A nuclear aircraft would have to have minimal radiation shielding, so the effects of the intense irradiation an aircraft components was of interest. This was done out in the open air. They had to keep track of wind direction to keep the dose to the public from argon-41 activated from the argon-40 in the air down to what at the time was considered acceptable. Plus they had a tower with a microphone on it to listen for approaching aircraft, so they could scram the reactor before irradiating the pilot. At a radius of 3600 feet the "Lethal Fence" was built to control access.
On command from a control center far underground, the reactor would come up from out of the pit to a point 10 feet in the air and assert itself on anything that dared be inside the Lethal Fence, and sometimes even beyond that. In full form it could kill anything. It even killed things that were not alive, such as landing-gear assemblies and aircraft radio transmitters.
Not only did it kill small animals, it killed the bacteria in and on them, leaving the bodies preserved.
Apparently, the operator, Lockheed, later decided to try to get into the cobalt-60 business, unsuccessfully, but they managed to contaminate the whole facility with cobalt-60. There have been several cleanups, and it's been a bunch of half-lives now (half-life is jut 5.27 years), but it's supposedly easily detected around, along with the europium-152 made from the tiny traces of europium naturally in the soil.
Anyway, if you live near Atlanta and want to see something unusual, bring your Geiger counter and scare the normal people who are just riding their horses around the pretty natural area. The hot cell facility is still there, too thick-walled to easily dismantle. Here's a photoset on flickr of the park. The coordinates given in the book were accidentally transposed, it should be 34° 21' 04.03" N 84° 08' 38.75" W [fixed! Sigh, hard to get the jumble of numbers and symbols right!], the location of the big hot cell building. The remnant of the Lethal Fence is just faintly visible on the Google Earth image if you can find the right spot. I think the clearing with the shadow-shield described in the book is at 34° 21' 56.66" N 84° 10' 5.02" W, and you can see a circle around it, most easily to the west, at about 1km radius.
More local to me, one of these days I need to visit the Palos Hills Forest Preserve in Cook County, Illinois (near Chicago, and near but outside the present-day Argonne Lab site). There you can visit one of rather few combination picnic areas / nuclear waste dumps. Material from the very first (man-made) reactor, Fermi's famous pile originally built at the University of Chicago, and a second, slightly later reactor, is buried there. Back in those days, it seemed like a more remote area....
