the.com/reactor
a controlled apocalypse, throttled into a tidy hum that powers your toaster.
means A vessel or device designed to sustain and control a reaction — most often a nuclear chain reaction, but also a chamber for chemical processes — so its energy can be harnessed rather than unleashed.
from From Latin 're-' (back, again) plus 'agere' (to do, drive, set in motion) — the same root that gives us 'act' and 'agent.' To 'react' is literally to do back, to answer one motion with another. 'Reactor' adds the agent-suffix '-or,' naming the thing that does the reacting. The chemical sense came first; the nuclear 'reactor' arrived with the atomic age in the mid-20th century, when physicists needed a word for the box where atoms answer each other in a chain.
- first one
- Built under a Chicago squash court in 1942
- control rods
- Slide in to drink up runaway neutrons
- natural reactor
- Gabon's uranium went critical 2 billion years ago
- slow neutrons
- Splitting works better when neutrons dawdle
- water duty
- Coolant and neutron moderator in the same liquid
chernobyl nuclear power plant — soviet reactor that exploded in 1986 in ukraine, releasing 400 times more radiation than hiroshima
iter tokamak — international experimental fusion reactor under construction in france since 2010, designed to produce net energy