Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Today in 1942: The Italian Navigator Reaches The New World

No, not THAT Italian navigator! That was 1492.
The acronym SCRAM means to do an emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor. In Fermi's reactor, he had a gravity-fed control rod held up by a rope. In an emergency, an assistant would cut the rope with an axe, hence the expression, "Safety Control Rod Axe Man."

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