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Originally posted by Veteran:
Does the US even know how to build a reactor anymore?

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The Radium Girls saga holds an important place in the history of both the field of health physics and the labor rights movement. The U.S. Radium Corporation hired some 70 women to perform various tasks including the handling of radium, while the owners and their scientists — familiar with the effects of radium — carefully avoided any exposure to it themselves; chemists at the plant used lead screens, masks and tongs.[citation needed] An estimated 4,000 workers were hired by corporations in the U.S. and Canada to paint watch faces with radium.

For fun, the Radium Girls painted their nails, teeth and faces with the deadly paint produced at the factory, sometimes to surprise their boyfriends when the lights went out. They mixed glue, water and radium powder, and then used camel hair brushes to apply the glowing paint onto dial numbers. The going rate, for painting 250 dials a day, was about a penny and a half per dial. The brushes would lose shape after a few strokes, so the U.S. Radium supervisors encouraged their workers to point the brushes with their lips, or use their tongues to keep them sharp.

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Originally posted by Fletch2:
The irony here is that the various civilian agencies charged with developing nuclear power -- especially research labs like Saudia had developed far safer, and more easily disposed of reactor designs that were never actually used. These were designs where for example basic physics prevented a meltdown in the event of a coolant loss and mechanisms for annealing pipes weakened by radiation was built into the design.

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Environmentalists and the regulations we apply to appease them often seem to be pretty irrational.

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