Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "MIT OpenCourseWare" channel.

  1. I'm reminded of a US Army reactor with a similar positive void coefficient design error, the SL-1. One could walk on top of that a well, didn't end out well for the operator who manually lifted the primary control rod a couple of feet too far, leaving him pinned to the containment ceiling by a control rod plug. Then, there was Windscale, where ill understood Wigner energy release during annealing the moderator and insufficient instrumentation lead to an initially unrecognized fire and a veritable comedy of errors in putting the fire out. Oh well, no sense in crying over spilled into the North Sea milk... (Ungh that was bad) One acquires a certain type of humor, when one began one's military career in nuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles and currently lives in an area I used to orient myself by viewing TMI's remaining unit's coolant tower plume (shuttered in 2019 and I was in high school for the TMI meltdown around 90 minutes of driving away). Oh, the footage shown from the helicopter was an initial airborne survey of the accident. The fire was long out when drops into the reactor building began. Nobody worries about further collapse of the sarcophagus, as it's contained by the New Safe Confinement structure. I imagine that'll eventually get a newer, safer confinement structure... The "elephant's foot" corium is now decayed down enough that one could safely, if briefly, sit on it. I'd not recommend it, as decontamination would be a true Russian bear. Small trivia, got a full body count a few times over the decades, both due to an incident and later, for medical purposes for my background rate for imaging. I'm a touch more "hot" than your students, but I was born a week after Tsar Bomba was detonated and things were decidedly warm (some silly little fallout thingie) globally due to stupidity.
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