Kodak nuclear reactor in basement!

Tim Gray said:

I think they do actually have highly enriched uranium at the MIT reactor. As in weapons grade. The little info I could find on it stated 93% enriched, which is pretty darn high.

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Research reactors are typically using fuel in the 20-30 percent range. There's no practical reason to use 90+ percent in a reactor--it would be too hard to control. Also, MIT is in the process of converting to LEU.

Kodachrome couplers have a half life longer than most nuclear fuels.

It is not well known but many EK researchers from the WWII era worked on the Manhattan project. They were drafted!

And here, all along, I thought that the basement of Kodak Office was the executive parking lot.

PE

I know MIT is in the process of converting. Still, the info I found stated very clearly 93% enriched uranium. MIT is one of two research reactors in the country that still use highly enriched uranium, if facts on the internet are to be believed.

http://www.rertr.anl.gov/RERTR33/pdfs/S8-P1_Newton.pdf
http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/nrsb/miscellaneous/NewtonNAS-RAS.pdf

I think using HEU in research reactors was more common in the past, along with higher enrichment values.

Photo Engineer said:

And here, all along, I thought that the basement of Kodak Office was the executive parking lot. PE

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He.....so when you used to get home late and you said that you had to help your boss who had a flat tire in the subbasement parking.....we knew where you really were

He kept me after once and I missed my car pool. He drove me home.

True story. But, I worked in a different building, not the office downtown.

PE

It would be very interesting to know what kind of testing this device was used for. I could speculate some speculation but won't.

Moopheus said:

Research reactors are typically using fuel in the 20-30 percent range. There's no practical reason to use 90+ percent in a reactor--it would be too hard to control. Also, MIT is in the process of converting to LEU.

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It's practical for the military (Navy) so they can go without refueling carriers and subs for 15-20 years, and is still very controllable.

richard ide said:

It would be very interesting to know what kind of testing this device was used for. I could speculate some speculation but won't.

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It wasn't a reactor - it had far less than a critical mass - it WAS a source of neutrons for chemical analysis. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation_analysis

Spill your sworn secrets, PE. We know you have them.

It was not in the basement or subbasement of the Kodak Research Labs (B-59). I worked in one extensively and had a key for the other. Nothing nuclear in either one.

Sorry. Maybe in the analytical division? IDK. Never saw one or heard of one.

PE

NO!!! PE... don't spoil our ideals about your doings at EK. We all know you were a mad scientist... a completely and utterly mad scientist!! Bwah... hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah!!!!!!!!!

As facinating as this story is, and I'm enjoying it! The LA Times Article has an interesting line.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-kodak-nuclear-reactor-20120514,0,5639531.story

Kodak. The company that makes cameras and printers.

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What?

Old-N-Feeble said:

NO!!! PE... don't spoil our ideals about your doings at EK. We all know you were a mad scientist... a completely and utterly mad scientist!! Bwah... hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah!!!!!!!!!

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Yeah, what are they going to do, take away his pension?

I better just shut up!

Remember that another poster here in this thread worked with me for years.

PE

i heard that J. Frank Parnell was
involved with the kodak reactor ...

Photo Engineer said:

I better just shut up!

Remember that another poster here in this thread worked with me for years.

PE

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Yes, and shame on you both for your involvement in this scandalous cover-up.

Moopheus said:

Technically, it's in Kendall Sq., so not really "Downtown," to the extent that Cambridge actually has a "downtown". Every now and then, they'll offer a public tour of the reactor, but I have yet to be able to score a ticket--they're very limited, and are all taken within hours of availability. And during lat year's open house, due to my own bad planning, I missed out on a tour of the fusion research lab.

Given that my entire neighborhood is surrounded by biotech research labs, MIT's reactor is not high on my list of worries.

I'd be really surprised if the fuel was really "weapons grade." Technically, I suppose, any "highly-enriched uranium" could be fashioned into a bomb, but I'd guess what they had was way below what is usually used in bombs.

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its always fun to hang out on the outskirts of good ol' central square
next to the old necco candy factory and around the corner
from tootsie industries. 2 of the best reasons to be hanging out
in the candy-reactor nomansland between central and kendall squares !

the breeder reactors can make some dangerous stuff.
material from the reactor at URI killed someone back in the 1960s.

Everybody knew Kodak had something. I'd heard about it when I was a little kid in the early '90s. I fail to see how this is news to anybody from upstate NY, especially a reporter at the D&C.

My college, Oswego State, kind of had one... well, I could see the tower at Nine Mile out my dorm window at least .

—Eugh!— and —Huh!?— :confused:

Most educational. Is this what gives His Eminence, Photo Engineer, supercharged neural powers of persuasion and other-worldly knowledge? More interestingly, he hasn't even told us of the trinkets Kodak has held closely to its bosom for... what... three decades...
So what else is the Special K hiding down in the musty basement? More to the point, will this put a blush on Mr Fuji's face? Is Fuji-san hiding something too?

In the sub basement is a locked freezer containing..... WHAT???? IDK. It is a combination lock. I do know what is in it, and have seen the contents! Muahahahaha. Just do not expose me to Kryptonite.

Seriously, the above sentence is true as far as the Mu.......

PE

Radiation, yes indeed! You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-boxed do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have 'em too. When they canceled the project it almost did me in. One day my mind was literally a-burst. The next day nothing. Swept away... But I'll show them. I had a lobotomy in the end.

You had your end lobotomized? Wow, first one I've ever heard of. Usually it is the head that it is done to.

If you just let things go with radiation, your brain starts to bubble and boil. Lots of ideas percolate to the top.

PE

Okay... "Downtown Cambridge" was hyperbole. I used to live near Kendall Sq. and downwind of the Necco factory. As far as I was concerned that was "downtown."

People I knew who worked at MIT told me "weapons grade." I simply took their word for it. Still, it is my understanding that older reactors like this one needed to use more highly enriched fuel than ones of more recent design. Thus, the "weapons grade" story was an easy buy-in.

My problem with people who are against nuclear power is not because I disagree that it CAN BE dangerous. RattyMouse has a point. The problems with the reactors in Japan were and still are serious. No doubt! My problem is with the idea that many people have which seems to say that nuclear power is so dangerous, in every case and for any use that nobody should ever use it, not even for research to find out if it can be put to better, safer use or how that can be done if it is, indeed, possible.

If, after WW-II, we spent more time figuring out how nuclear energy can be used more efficiently instead of figuring out how to blow each other up, we would surely know much more about it than we do, even now. Using nuclear energy to make bombs and simply to boil water seems like trying to play a violin with a baseball bat, to me. Maybe, if we had spent the last 67 years more constructively, we could be playing concertos on those violins instead of bashing each other over the heads with them.

I like to imagine that, some day, we could all have a refrigerator sized device in our basements, right next to the furnace which supplies all the heat and electricity we could ever need to keep the lights on and warm our houses. I know this is mostly a pipe dream but, I believe it's a worthy goal we should have been working for much sooner than we have been.

Meanwhile, we have people standing on one side of the street protesting the use of nuclear power in any form while we have Presidents standing on the other side of the street proposing that we build more "nuke-you-lar" power plants.

Yeah, I know. High-fallutin' ideas combined with simplistic thinking... But, wouldn't it be really cool if we could all buy cars that never had to be filled up with gas because there was a migma cell reactor under the hood instead of an internal combustion engine? Maybe not in my lifetime, but I am hopeful that we can come close to this goal if we don't totally achieve it.

That's why I said I'm peeved when people get their knickers in a twist. That's why I am happy to see places like MIT and Kodak have nuclear reactors, so we can figure out how they work and how to put them to better use.

They had a neutron flux multiplier... maybe they should have gotten a DeLorean.

Photo Engineer said:

You had your end lobotomized? Wow, first one I've ever heard of. Usually it is the head that it is done to.

If you just let things go with radiation, your brain starts to bubble and boil. Lots of ideas percolate to the top.

PE

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I've been frequently accused of thinking with things other than my head.