Special:Badtitle/NS90:Milestone-Proposal talk:First Industrial Scale Nuclear Reactor/Advocate Review: Difference between revisions

From IEEE Milestones Wiki
(New thread: Advocate Review)
 
 
(No difference)

Latest revision as of 18:54, 27 February 2015

Comments.

I think that the significance section of this proposal needs to be worked on. Here is the current significance section: "First full scale production nuclear reactor that produced the Plutonium 239 for use in the first nuclear bomb test (Trinity) and subsequent military use (Fat Man) in the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan during WWII. Discovery of Xenon poisoning by Enrico Fermi."

http://www.b-reactor.org/ has a more complete description of the significance of this milestone which I have tweaked as follows:

"B Reactor, the world's first industrial-scale nuclear reactor, was built during World War II as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. One of three plutonium production reactors built in total secrecy at Hanford during World War II, B Reactor produced plutonium for the Trinity test at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, and for the atomic bomb exploded on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. B reactor led to the discovery of xenon poisoning."

John Wheeler and Leona Marshall Libby are also credited with the discovery of xenon poisoning. I am not sure what the literature says here as far as crediting Enrico Fermi exclusively, but the oral history of the issue seems that all three should be credited. http://books.google.com/books?id=tgjuoe2W4BoC&lpg=PT177&ots=wH_-K7VDwM&dq=xenon%20poisoning%20discovered%20by%20hanford&pg=PT175#v=onepage&q=xenon%20poisoning%20discovered%20by%20hanford&f=false

You could also just say it was significant because it led to the discovery of xenon poisoning and not credit an individual since the milestone is about the B-reactor.

Also, the significance of this milestone in many ways was more than military. Maybe this should be discussed? This reactor wasn't used exclusively for military purposes and led to other discoveries I am sure.

It also seems that most of this citation has been taken verbatim from: http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/BReactor

I believe it should be edited individually for this milestone by the proposers, especially as it will ultimately end up on the GHN website and we wouldn't want to have direct copying of other material on the site.

Another comment: The owner should be correctly spelled: "U.S. Deprtment of Energy" is wrong.