Month: July 2023

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: A specially illustrated BBC story created by artist/writer Ben Platts-Mills tells the remarkable story of how a dangerous radioactive apparatus in the Manhattan Project killed a scientist in 1946. “Less than a year after the Trinity atomic bomb test,” Platts-Mills writes, “a careless slip with a screwdriver cost Louis Slotin his life. In 1946, Slotin, a nuclear physicist, was poised to leave his job at Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the Manhattan Project). When his successor came to visit his lab, he decided to demonstrate a potentially dangerous apparatus, called the “critical assembly”. During the demo, he used his screwdriver to support a beryllium hemisphere over a plutonium core. It slipped, and the hemisphere dropped over the core, triggering a burst of radiation. He died nine days later.” In an interesting follow-up story, Platts-Mills explains how he pieced together what happened inside the room where ‘The Blue Flash’ occurred (it has been observed that many criticality accidents emit a blue flash of light).

15 years later there were more fatalities at a nuclear power plant after the Atomic Energy Commission opened the National Reactor Testing Station in a desert west of Idaho Falls, according to Wikipedia:

The event occurred at an experimental U.S. Army plant known as the Argonne Low-Power Reactor, which the Army called the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One (SL-1)… Three trained military men had been working inside the reactor room when a mistake was made while reattaching a control rod to its motor assembly. With the central control rod nearly fully extended, the nuclear reactor rated at 3 MW rapidly increased power to 20 GW. This rapidly boiled the water inside the core.

As the steam expanded, a pressure wave of water forcefully struck the top of the reactor vessel, upon which two of the men stood. The explosion was so severe that the reactor vessel was propelled nine feet into the air, striking the ceiling before settling back into its original position. One man was impaled by a shield plug and lodged into the ceiling, where he died instantly. The other men died from their injuries within hours. The three men were buried in lead coffins, and that entire section of the site was buried.

“The core meltdown caused no damage to the area, although some radioactive nuclear fission products were released into the atmosphere.”

This week Idaho Falls became one of the sites re-purposed for possible utility-scale clean energy projects as part of America’s “Cleanup to Clean Energy” initiative.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: A specially illustrated BBC story created by artist/writer Ben Platts-Mills tells the remarkable story of how a dangerous radioactive apparatus in the Manhattan Project killed a scientist in 1946. “Less than a year after the Trinity atomic bomb test,” Platts-Mills writes, “a careless slip with a screwdriver cost Louis Slotin his life. In 1946, Slotin, a nuclear physicist, was poised to leave his job at Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the Manhattan Project). When his successor came to visit his lab, he decided to demonstrate a potentially dangerous apparatus, called the “critical assembly”. During the demo, he used his screwdriver to support a beryllium hemisphere over a plutonium core. It slipped, and the hemisphere dropped over the core, triggering a burst of radiation. He died nine days later.” In an interesting follow-up story, Platts-Mills explains how he pieced together what happened inside the room where ‘The Blue Flash’ occurred (it has been observed that many criticality accidents emit a blue flash of light).

15 years later there were more fatalities at a nuclear power plant after the Atomic Energy Commission opened the National Reactor Testing Station in a desert west of Idaho Falls, according to Wikipedia:

The event occurred at an experimental U.S. Army plant known as the Argonne Low-Power Reactor, which the Army called the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One (SL-1)… Three trained military men had been working inside the reactor room when a mistake was made while reattaching a control rod to its motor assembly. With the central control rod nearly fully extended, the nuclear reactor rated at 3 MW rapidly increased power to 20 GW. This rapidly boiled the water inside the core.

As the steam expanded, a pressure wave of water forcefully struck the top of the reactor vessel, upon which two of the men stood. The explosion was so severe that the reactor vessel was propelled nine feet into the air, striking the ceiling before settling back into its original position. One man was impaled by a shield plug and lodged into the ceiling, where he died instantly. The other men died from their injuries within hours. The three men were buried in lead coffins, and that entire section of the site was buried.

“The core meltdown caused no damage to the area, although some radioactive nuclear fission products were released into the atmosphere.”

This week Idaho Falls became one of the sites re-purposed for possible utility-scale clean energy projects as part of America’s “Cleanup to Clean Energy” initiative.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Slashdot reader AndrewZX quotes Ars Technica: Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they’re dinosaurs, they’re T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot.

It’s estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They’re used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM.

In this explainer, we’ll look at the IBM mainframe computer—what it is, how it works, and why it’s still going strong after over 50 years.

“Todayâ(TM)s mainframe can have up to 240 server-grade CPUs, 40TB of error-correcting RAM, and many petabytes of redundant flash-based secondary storage. Theyâ(TM)re designed to process large amounts of critical data while maintaining a 99.999 percent uptimeâ”thatâ(TM)s a bit over five minutes’ worth of outage per year…”

“RAM, CPUs, and disks are all hot-swappable, so if a component fails, it can be pulled and replaced without requiring the mainframe to be powered down.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader AndrewZX quotes Ars Technica: Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they’re dinosaurs, they’re T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot.

It’s estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They’re used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM.

In this explainer, we’ll look at the IBM mainframe computer—what it is, how it works, and why it’s still going strong after over 50 years.

“Todayâ(TM)s mainframe can have up to 240 server-grade CPUs, 40TB of error-correcting RAM, and many petabytes of redundant flash-based secondary storage. Theyâ(TM)re designed to process large amounts of critical data while maintaining a 99.999 percent uptimeâ”thatâ(TM)s a bit over five minutes’ worth of outage per year…”

“RAM, CPUs, and disks are all hot-swappable, so if a component fails, it can be pulled and replaced without requiring the mainframe to be powered down.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read More