I've written a short Post editorial on the death of physicist J.A. Wheeler. (A reader has notified me that plutonium does occur naturally in submicroscopic amounts, contradicting the high-school first-approximation-to-actual-knowledge about the transuranics that I failed to double-check, so need to give me hell all over again for that slip-up.* I hate like poison to queer a decent obit by saying something that's going to have the experts pshawing.) Elsewhere, I raise questions about a news item from Germany.
*[UPDATE, 3:16 pm: Mercifully, the piece was held an extra day, so the final edit has been fixed, and the online version has been cleaned up with an annotation in the comment thread.]
Comments (3)
You dodged a bullet!
BTW, Plutonium also appears to be a product of supernovae, but that doesn't really affect your revision meaningfully.
Posted by Ryan Cousineau | April 16, 2008 9:23 PM
Posted on April 16, 2008 21:23
It seems there are several claims as well to being the 'first' commercial reactor. Setting aside the (very non-commercial) Fermi pile in Chicago, I have seen claims from Idaho Falls-Arco, Idaho and Handford, and Santa Susana in California (and the explosion there is still kept secret). I suspect it comes down to the definition of 'commercial'
Posted by imethisguy | April 18, 2008 11:01 PM
Posted on April 18, 2008 23:01
Another reason to like Wheeler:
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN08/wn041808.html
Posted by Jim Whyte | April 22, 2008 7:43 AM
Posted on April 22, 2008 07:43