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> Centrifuge technology uses far less Fun fact: uranium enrichment centrifuges don't play nice with earthquakes. They spin so fast that they have huge inertia.
by credit_guy 3y ago
> Centrifuge technology uses far less
Fun fact: uranium enrichment centrifuges don't play nice with earthquakes. They spin so fast that they have huge inertia. When there's an earthquake, the support of the machine moves with the Earth, and the spinning part stays in place, so the machine is ripped apart. It happened with an early Iranian covert nuclear project.
- Animats 3y agoThat's the plot of a Tom Clancy book. I can't find a reference to it happening in the real world.
- starkrights 3y agoEver heard of STUXNET?
- felipemnoa 3y agoI wonder if it is technically infeasible to isolate the machine against earthquakes?
- mistrial9 3y agoneed some refs on that "secret program" part
- pphysch 3y agoYes, especially given what we now know about STUXNET...
- credit_guy 3y agoI was wrong. It was Pakistan, not Iran. The enrichment program was certainly covert though. In September 1981, a powerful earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale shook Islamabad and the surrounding area. Pakistani scientists at Kahuta were on a lunch break when the earth shook, forcing them to run to work stations only to hear the sounds of explosions. Some four thousand centrifuges operating in the Khan Research Laboratory had crashed. The earthquake had unbalanced the rotors, operating in a vacuum at some 64,000 revolutions per minute (RPMs); they hit their casings and turned to powder, making sounds like hand grenades exploding. [1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Eating_Grass/yGgrNAsKZjEC https://www.google.com/books/edition/Eating_Grass/yGgrNAsKZj...