Cutaway drawings of nuclear reactors around the world | Hacker News Reader

Cutaway drawings of nuclear reactors around the world

econtent.unm.edu

54 pointsscrlk9 comments

My dad was a draughtsman and worked on the piping layouts for some of these reactors. We used to spend hours talking about them and he would often sketch out portions of the design from memory. He passed away on my 50th birthday (quite some time ago) and seeing these brought back such a flood of wonderful memories.

Thank you OP.

Tell us more stories about that. Whatever leaps to mind.

He would get so excited by the challenge of fitting the miles and miles of pipes efficiently into a small 3D space and it was of course long before the advent of computers so he had to figure it out in his head. I remember having an Atari 400 and trying to come up with a "solution" for him, having no idea what I was doing of course.

He once explained that by using lots of concrete and steel, the reactor was built to withstand a jumbo jet crashing into it and my young brain couldn't fathom why that might ever be a thing.

He was a phenomenal artist - the kind neighbors from afar would often come to for help with anything artistic - so his quick sketches of say, part of them steam pipe layout looked like they were done in Autocad 20-30 years early. I wish I still had some.

Good memories - thanks for suggesting..

As much as we like to make fun of the French- they are the world's visionary for solving energy production. Which in turn, is the world's best chance to sustain humankind.

The French were the only Western European country to realize that the US did not have their best interests in mind when it comes to energy security in Europe.

History has done nothing but show that pursuing nuclear as a vital national resource was the right call.

I'm of the opinion that in 500 years, we will look back upon the 1900s as holding four major innovations:

- antibiotics

- the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer / its precursors

- the science of nuclear fission and the engineering of the nuclear chain reaction

- the birth of computerized information processing and transfer

Antibiotics solved so many otherwise-deadly or chronic diseases and opened the door to us doing pretty much any kind of intensive surgery.

The Haber process is literally the source of 50% of the nitrogen in human tissue on Earth right now. Hunger is now "solved" in terms of the production side, and is a distribution problem. (It's somewhat amusing to me that people consider Malthus to have been an overconcerned worrywort - his concerns were prior to the invention of the Haber process and without it I think we would be having at least some problems, somewhere, with having enough fertilizer / sufficiently productive farmland.

Long-term, there's no way nuclear fission and solar don't work together to be how humanity obtains its electricity. The economics are just too good. The sun is literally an enormous fusion reactor that costs nothing to operate, and between the amount of uranium we have and the ability of breeder reactors to convert non-fissile uranium into fissile uranium, coal can barely compete on the scale of hundreds of years.

And of course the internet has put all of humanity on hyper-drive. Imagine if all of the the alchemists and natural philosophers of antiquity could just all text whenever they wanted to.

I guess https://econtent.unm.edu/digital/collection/nuceng/id/36/rec... (which, unlike the others in this collection, is not stationary) was a predecessor to today's "50 Years of Victory" icebreaker?

Indeed. This was the first nuclear powered icebreaker. Admiral Rickover toured it at one point.

https://econtent.unm.edu/digital/collection/nuceng/id/30/rec...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah

NS Savannah is not stationary either.

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