Kodak's secret underground nuclear reactor.

[Hauldren Collider]

Sounds like Rochester is a dump.

It's better than philly.

[regexcellent]

Sounds like Rochester is a dump.

**** you

The truth is there isn't as much here as there used to be, but that's true in the whole region ever since the Erie Canal went out of business. Most of New York outside of New York City is along the old Erie Canal route; Albany, Schenectady, Syracuse, Rocheseter, Buffalo. Rochester hasn't been hit nearly as hard as Buffalo, and there are actually quite a few major companies here, such as Xerox, Gannett, and Wegmans (though I think Gannet moved its HQ to Virginia recently, it still has a lot of operations here). Plus there's loads of optics stuff.

Rochester is in decline but it's doing well considering this is the rust belt.

[DaShi]

Siberia.

[-Jrabbit]

Interesting story.

[N35t0r]

According to the company, no employees were ever in contact with the reactor. Apparently, it was operated by atomic fairies and unicorns.

[Kuciwalker]

Little known fact: unicorns were invented during the Manhattan Project.

[Wiglaf]

Why did the Manhattan Project give EVERYONE the ability to build nukes?

[Felch]

Sloppy security.

[Wiglaf]

Was it really nearly instantaneous like in Civ 2?

[Felch]

Absolutely. Sid Meier would never put anything into his games that wasn't historically accurate. Don't you remember the battle of London in 1862, when English Elephants defeated an American Armor regiment?

[Wiglaf]

That's a category error. I took philosophy in college, and scored an A.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

South Africa made nukes with just 20%. Military reactors for ships and submarines frequently go into the 50%+ range, I think. Ogie's a nuclear engineer, right? Can we have his input?

My expertise is around power plants using light water reactors (BWR or PWR's) where U235 is in the 3-5% range. A number of my collegues come from the Navy and are as one would expect tight lipped about the reactor designs. I do know the naval reactors are quite small (comparatively speaking) and use highly enriched uranium.

Sounds to me from the article that the amount of fissile material was small, I am uncertain from the article itself that the layout of the material and the Californium neutron source that the reactor could even reasonably go critical.

As for the question about what is weapons capable anything greater than 20% is a concern. Typically weapons grade is spoken of as greater than 90% though.

[N35t0r]

Was it really nearly instantaneous like in Civ 2?

By the time I built it, turns were still 20 or 10 years long, so enough time for espionage to go on.

[Dinner]

Hmm, what's left in Rochester now that Kodak's gone? Xerox?



And they had cool stuff like this.

Not exactly Rochester but the finger lakes region has apparently grown to become one of the country's most notable up and coming wine regions.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/feature/20120517-following-the-vines-to-upstate-new-york

They're combining fine wine with local artisan cheese makers and craft brewers to make the region into a real tourist attraction especially with all the fine lake views and abundant local forest lands to hike in.

[Uncle Sparky]

Cornell scientists new about it.