A Heart for Yankee
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- Celebrates the start-up of the Yankee Atomic nuclear power plant, Rowe, Massachusetts, in 1960. The plant is shown under construction and the film then goes into detail how the reactor core is built. A splendid display of early 1960's American industrial technology!
This is our own digital video made directly from a surviving 16mm movie print.
Museum of Our Industrial Heritage
Greenfield, Massachusetts, USA
Interesting how they TIG (or old term "heli-arc") ties straps to maintain spacing but then do not helium retest the tubes after to make sure they have not been compromised in the welding process... I would think a helium leak test just before shipping (after all the welding) would have been a much better test..
Helium is certainly prone to leakage. Good call on your part.
What is the tool at 5:52? I work in electronics, so I’m not familiar with some of these tools. It looks like a micrometer, but with a dial readout, and a spring loaded positioned. I could use something like that in my work. It looks like it would be much faster than a standard micrometer. Great video, by the way. I’ve never seen that much detail on how the fuel is set up. I don’t understand it, but I’m assuming even with all that uranium in a fuel assembly, it’s designed such that it wont’ become critical until placed along side the adjacent assemblies in the reactor. The “Do Not Drop” label is a nice touch. Sounds like good advice to me.
At small dimensions, they are usually referred to as dial thickness gauges.
I don't know name this tool in US, in Russia his call "Passametr"
In the auto industry we called them snap gauges....very fast but need regular calibration. A production tool rather than a machinist’s instrument
So if the fuel rods are used to boil water at huge scales, how is it that those people can get so close without instantly dying? It seems odd how nonchalant they are with working with radioactive substances.
Uranium on it's own isn't very radioactive. It's only once fission starts occurring that the fuel pellets become dangerously radioactive.
May the Schwarz be with you Water shields neutrons which are the primary inducers of fission. I handled these type of fuel rods. Scary. If used fuel rods come out of water it creates a lethal dose for several yards near them. When fuel is new unused fuel is totally harmless. Only after used are they extremely lethal. Scary . I loaded used fuel with crane into special 30 ton lead water container to be reprocessed.
You need enough of those bundles in close proximity to each other in order to start a critical chain reaction. The neutrons from each uranium atom's fission strike other uranium atoms and cause them to fission, and so on. Unless you have enough uranium for the chain reaction to self-sustain, each rod is only somewhat radioactive. It's when you have a bunch of them close together when it gets "hot". What Motorhead1 says is true because all those neutrons flying around eventually make the casings and frames and everything else highly radioactive too. That kind of induced radioactivity usually has a shorter half-life than the uranium so it dies down comparatively quickly: decades instead of geological era.
SovietRefusnik1 Golem seen Candu fuel elements loaded by hand. Nothing more than rubber gloves needed. Everyone thinks that reactors need highly enriched fuels....