Hyman Rickover on the nuclear propulsion system for the Sea Wolf submarine. It was later rebuilt and worked for decades before its retirement in the early 1990s.Īt the time, Carter was based in Schenectady, New York, and working closely with Adm. The crucial reactor's core was left unusable. Millions of liters of radioactive water ended up in the reactor building's basement. There was a power surge and as a result some fuel rods melted after rupturing. On December 12, 1952, the NRX research reactor at Chalk River Laboratories suffered a partial meltdown. "There were 23 of us and I was in charge. "I was one of the few people in the world who had clearance to go into a nuclear power plant," he said. "It was a very exciting time for me when the Chalk River plant melted down," he continued in the same interview. It was in the early stages and they didn't know."ĭespite the fears he had to overcome, Carter admits he was animated at the opportunity to put his top-secret training to use in the cleanup of the reactor, located along the Ottawa River northwest of Ottawa. "They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now. "We were fairly well instructed then on what nuclear power was, but for about six months after that I had radioactivity in my urine," President Carter, now 86, told me during an interview for my new book in Plains in 2008. atomic submarine program, Carter was physically lowered into a damaged nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, Canada, and exposed to levels of radiation unthinkable today after an accident. Naval officer working at the dawn of the nuclear age with the U.S. Almost 60 years ago, and then a young U.S. The Georgian's name? James Earl Carter, the 39th president of the United States.
NUCLEAR SUBMARINE REACTOR MELTDOWN FULL
He can be reached at Ontario, Canada (CNN) - Though Georgia is a continent and an ocean away from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, we can be confident that an 86-year-old man in that state knows full well the fears the Japanese cleanup crews are experiencing.
Carter was exposed to high levels of radiation, Milnes saysĮditor's note: Arthur Milnes, an award-winning Canadian journalist, is the Inaugural Fellow in Political History at Queen's University Archives in Kingston, Canada and the editor of " Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: A Canadian Tribute" (2011 McGill-Queen's University Press and the Queen's School of Policy Studies ).He says Carter's experience was similar to that of workers at Fukushima plant in Japan.Arthur Milnes says he was lowered into damaged nuclear reactor in Ontario in 1952.President Jimmy Carter was trained to work in the Navy's atomic energy program.
0 kommentar(er)
