It has been revealed that ailing imaging company Kodak had a secret nuclear reactor hidden in a US research facility for more than 30 years.
The reactor, which contained 1.5kg of enriched "weapons-grade" uranium, was a Californium Flux Multiplier (CFX) acquired by the company in 1974 and only decommissioned in 2006.
Scot
Read my science fiction novel The Forest of Life at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01D38AV4K
There were quite a few reactors of this size all over the USA. Many universities had them. The US Navy runs reactors of this size on every sub, aircraft carrier and many other ships.
I worked on a film about the University of Washington's reactor last summer. They had about the same amount of uranium and did some pretty cutting edge stuff.
One of the biggest myths of the cold war was/is that nuclear material was held by the military only. Ford made a working concept car that ran on a nuclear reactor.
It was after learning more about these small reactors and the fact that the 4th most severe earthquake recorded by man could not even melt down a reactor to the point of human caused malfunctions that I learned how we have harnessed this power.
Yeah, it was called (funnily enough) the Ford Nucleon. It was eventually abandoned for several reasons:
1. Biological shielding requirements meant that the size and weight of the vehicle were impractical. To make the designs workable, a typical family would be exposed to significant radiation levels over the lifetime of the car. This opened Ford to liability.
2. Refuelling would happen every three years. The complexity of safely unloading the irradiated fuel and recharging the core (plus the cost of designing systems to automate this) made the concept, again, impractical and extremely hazardous.
3. The risk of individuals accessing the core (and if they survived) processing the nuclear fuel to create their own store of fissile material was an issue.
In short, it was a disaster in the making, and they thankfully thought the better of it. SO the Nucleon was put in the scrapheap of abandoned nuclear ideas, along with diving suits heated with plutonium, nuclear airplanes and ditch-digging with hydrogen bombs.
Those of us of a certain age here in the UK fondly remember the Eagle comic and the centre cut away drawings of all sorts of machines and plant, real and imagined. One of the imagined ones was a steam locomotive of traditional layout with a nuclear reactor in place of the coal fire. I cannot remember if there was an Eagle cut away drawings of 8mm kit but there certainly must have been of cinema equipment.
New web site and this is cine page http://www.picsntech.co.uk/cine.html
