Today I took my wife out to the EBR1 (Experimental Breeder Reactor 1) National Monument in southeastern Idaho. Among other things on display are the nuclear reactors that were going to be used to power the proposed nuclear bomber aircraft. I thought these might be of interest to many of our members, so am posting the photos of the display. The rail car included in the display is the donkey engine that was intended to be used to move the airplane in and out of the hanger. The cylindrical portion of the car was a heavily shielded cab for the engineer, not a flask for nuclear material. The runway and hanger for the airplane were located about 30 miles north of where the reactors are now on display, at the Test Area North (TAN) complex in what is now known as the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. When the test complex was built, the lab was known as the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS). The reactor assemblies were moved on a four-rail train track. The hanger building was actually built, and was HUGE - it would dwarf a 747. The nuclear reactor (less the jet engine for it) was actually flown and operated in a modified B-36 to assess the ability to shield the crew from the reactor. Fortunately, the atomic bomber project was terminated as the ICBM program made its mission obsolete, but a tremendous amount of useful information regarding high temperature materials was obtained from it. After termination of the bomber engine project, the hanger area was used fo house the Loss of Fluid Test (LOFT) test program, which along with the Severe Fuel Damage test series at the Power Burst Facility (PBF), investigated reactor behavior during a massive failure of the reactor cooling system (think Three Mile Island accident). Those tests conclusively proved that the China Syndrome was an impossibility. Even in the most serious reactor damage scenarios, the nuclear fuel will neither melt through the bottom of the reactor vessel nor form an uncontrollable critical mass. I spent a large chunk of my professional life in those programs, having authored the operating procedures for the PBF tests and many of the system design descriptions for the LOFT facility. So, this afternoon was really a tiptoe through the tulips for me, and didn't bore my lovely wife to death. So, before I do the same to you, here are the pics. If there is enough interest, I will expand this thread to include the photos I took inside the EBR1 reactor building.
08-29-2017, 10:15 PM
Linear Mode
