A very brave officer of the United States Navy, Lt. James Earle Carter, Jr., personally led the effort to contain a runaway nuclear reactor in meltdown.
Jimmy Carter and Fukushima
Apr 2nd 2011, 11:42 by K.N.C. | TOKYO
The Economist
EXCERPT...
The fear and danger is beyond comprehension for most people, and in particular the political leaders who must order men in to danger. But interestingly, it is not unfamiliar to former American president Jimmy Carter. Nearly half a century ago, as a young naval officer, he led a 23-man team to dismantle a reactor that, like Fukushima, had partially melted down.
The reactor in Chalk River, Canada, about 180 kilometres (110 miles) from Ottawa, was used to enrich plutonium for America's atomic bombs. On December 12th 1952 it exploded, flooding the reactor building’s basement with millions of litres of radioactive water. Lieutenant Carter, a nuclear specialist on the Seawolf submarine programme, and his men were among the few people with the security clearance to enter a reactor. From Schenectady, New York, they rode the train up and got straight to work.
"The radiation intensity meant that each person could spend only about ninety seconds at the hot core location," wrote Mr Carter in "Why Not the Best?", an autobiography published in 1975 when he was campaigning for the presidency.
The team built an exact replica of the reactor on a nearby tennis court, and had cameras monitor the actual damage in the reactor's core. "When it was our time to work, a team of three of us practised several times on the mock-up, to be sure we had the correct tools and knew exactly how to use them. Finally, outfitted with white protective clothes, we descended into the reactor and worked frantically for our allotted time," he wrote. "Each time our men managed to remove a bolt or fitting from the core, the equivalent piece was removed on the mock-up."
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http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/04/japans_nuclear_clean-up
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