When Jimmy Carter saved Canada from a nuclear disaster
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, was an unfortunate president, arrived in the wrong place at the wrong time, but personally you have some very special characteristics. Born in 1924, he is now approaching 98 years old, and in his life, in addition to politics, he really did everything: cultivated peanuts, saw UFOs, and won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was crippled by the economy hit by the oil crisis and, above all, by the Iranian revolution with the well-known story of the taking of the US embassy in Tehran and the subsequent story of the hostages.
Among the extraordinary things he did is also saving Canada, with other colleagues, from a nuclear disaster. Carter served in the US Navy as an officer under the "Father of the US Nuclear Fleet" admiration Hyman Rickover. Rickover was an almost manic perfectionist, a defect that becomes a quality when prototypes of nuclear submarines are made, and after the Nautilus Carter he worked on the Seawolf, the second American atomic-powered submarine. Thus, when the Canadian Chalk River Experimental Nuclear Reactor. He risked an uncontrolled nuclear meltdown due to an unexpected power surge, Canada turned to US Navy experts, and Carter was one of the technicians sent.
The moments were still those of experimentation and unconscious heroes: it was 1952, not even eight years after the first Fermi reactor. Navy technicians built an exact copy of the Chalk River reactor in a nearby gymnasium with no fissile material, and then trained on how to maneuver the rods to manually defuse the threat. Then the 22 people of the team were divided into 3 groups that psd each had to operate for no more than 90 seconds, in order not to absorb too much radiation, while maneuvering the bars by hand. The reactor was deactivated, but the amount of radiation absorbed by Carter, and by the others was very high and dangerous, to the point that the urine of the future president was radioactive for the next six months !!
The operation was particularly dangerous for Carter who had a history of cancers in his family. In 2015, cancer cells were found in his brain and in Carter's liver, but early treatment worked and Carter is still with us.
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The article When Jimmy Carter saved Canada from a nuclear disaster comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/quando-jimmy-carter-salvo-il-canada-da-un-disastro-nucleare/ on Mon, 17 Jan 2022 15:33:57 +0000.