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Stumbled on this interesting photo from 1965- this was the KIWI TNT
(Transient Nuclear Test) test; a KIWI nuclear rocket test reactor was purposely given a runaway nuclear reaction to see what its failure would result in: http://www.wps.com/archives/wxvax7.e...ages/ktntb.gif Note the railway tracks for scale, and the flying sparkling stuff- which given that uranium is pyrophoric, I assume are the uranium pellets from the reactor's fuel elements. Aren't these things supposed to melt down? This looks like an SRB exploding. How would you like to have been sitting on top of that when it malfunctioned? I'll bet this was one fun clean-up job. Bill Higgens located a report on the test: "Here's a writeup on the 1965 "KIWI TNT" test (no actual explosives were harmed in this test) which produced the spectacular photo Pat Flannery pointed out: "Environmental Effects of the Kiwi-TNT Effluent: A Review and Evaluation," by R. V. Fultyn http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/meet6/brief6/tab_l/br6l1k.txt. " Pat |
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