{"id":314,"date":"2011-02-13T20:47:37","date_gmt":"2011-02-13T19:47:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/?p=314"},"modified":"2011-02-13T20:59:41","modified_gmt":"2011-02-13T19:59:41","slug":"a-little-piece-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/?p=314","title":{"rendered":"A Little Piece Of History"},"content":{"rendered":"

I received the item below in the post this week. And it has made me super happy.
\n\"CP-1<\/a><\/p>\n

The reason that the arrival of this unassuming chunk of grey material made me so gleeful is its history. I’m a bit of a nerd about nuclear power which is an obsession that’s currently slightly less acceptable than fox hunting. The history of nuclear reactors (artificial ones at least) started in a sports stadium in Chicago in 1942. A team lead by Enrico Fermi demonstrated that you could control a fission chain-reaction in a safe manner. The reactor they built was called Chicago Pile 1 (CP-1) since it was literally a pile of graphite blocks, some of which also contained pellets of uranium. All modern reactors, including those that provide the UK with a fifth of it’s electricity, are direct descendants of that first reactor in Chicago.<\/p>\n

Recently the CP-1 site was being remediated and a number of original graphite blocks were found. One of these blocks was sliced up into small pieces to be sold for charity. Because I follow a lot of nuclear power folks on the Internet I saw the announcement<\/a> and a few weeks later I now have a piece of the worlds first nuclear reactor sitting on my bookshelf.<\/p>\n

In a pleasing piece of symmetry while most modern nuclear reactor are water-moderated the one closest to me (which probably supplies part of the electricity I use) is Dungeness<\/a> which is graphite-moderated just like CP-1. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I received the item below in the post this week. And it has made me super happy. The reason that the arrival of this unassuming chunk of grey material made me so gleeful is its history. I’m a bit of a nerd about nuclear power which is an obsession that’s currently slightly less acceptable than … Continue reading A Little Piece Of History<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316,"href":"https:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions\/316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hlynes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}