Sunday, July 21, 2024

Not Even Not Traveling 52: Idaho I

Idaho I 

In Shelley, our room was small but beautiful.

Beautiful is not the same as practical. The apartment design was open, no doors anywhere in our miniature suite, not even the bathroom. The corridors in the suite were too narrow for more than one person at a time. The tiny fridge was fine. The controls to the hot tub were a mystery in that they didn't quite work according to the instructions. The room's wireless service was decent.

In Shelley, we had taken a room in a motel. As noted above, the results were generally pretty good. However, the situation was unique. For one, the address wasn't advertised as a motel although, viewed from the outside, that's what it looked like to me. Someone on AirBNB said they were renovating old hotel rooms. They offered a special rate during the construction phase. The rooms looked fine in the ad and, surprisingly, they proved to be slightly better when we checked into one. 

I know what I've said about local ownership of motels before. Local properties often doesn't turn out to be well maintained. But this place was nice. The new owners had picked a good spot. They had given a theme to each room as they had renovated it. The themes were interesting. Someone involved had an artistic touch.

I'd rent a room there again. The suites are small, yes, but they were built 1950s originally. It wasn't too bad an era for construction. The dimensions are more cramped than you might find in modern construction but the refurbished results are nice. 

Tuesday, July 2

In the morning, Diane noticed a sign on the way to our next scheduled stop, the Craters of the Moon park. My eyes had vaguely glanced over a yellowish rectangle with red lettering but I didn't read it. Since I was the person steering the vehicle, I didn't much notice it, even. In my defense, reading while driving is generally frowned upon, although I suppose it might be appropriate to read about the Darwin Awards.

"There's an Atomic History Museum," Diane pointed out.

"What, where?" This part of Idaho looked deserted. It didn't even have potatoes, just distant mountains. "Around here?"

"We passed a sign." She put a finger on her chin. "After I thought about it for a second, it seemed like one of those weird places you might like to stop in at."

She was totally right. I started trying to read the signs. Cryptically, the red letters said: EBR-1. Other billboards along our way had details about atomic history although I still couldn't read them. Diane did her best to convey the information.

We pulled into the parking lot of EBR-1 at 9:04. A sign there said they opened at 9:00. Two teenagers outside the building greeted us with looks that said, "Oh no, visitors!" They scooted in through a side door, as if fleeing from our car as we parked it. Our presence seemed to be ruining their nice, quiet morning of doing nothing. (That turned out to not be entirely true, though, because other atomic tourists started arriving ten minutes later.)

Inside the main door, I learned EBR stood for Experimental Breeder Reactor. This building had housed the first nuclear power plant in the world, apparently. What kind of sight-seers would this place get? 

Well, EBR-1 is beautiful and simple. It is pretty much "The Little Nuclear Plant That Could." As one of the teenagers explained to us, the staff in 1951 built a simple heat exchanger that powered a turbine. They chose NAK (a sodium-potassium alloy) for the heat exchanging material because it is technically a liquid metal, very efficient for the job, and NAK stays liquid over a wide range of temperatures. 

I walked around in a state of constant shock over how straightforward everything seemed. Of course, I grew up reading about this stuff, but still. The place reminded me of a pool pump and filtration system. It was not much more complicated than that. If you found the gauges and pipes under a municipal swim center or a boiler room, you wouldn't think anything about it. Well, although the engineering was was easy, the science was still nuclear physics. By 1953, experiments in EBR-1 proved that the reactor was, in fact, producing the plutonium the scientists had hoped to create.

The tourist materials lying around as we toured read like the equivalent of a "Nuclear Power for Dummies" manual. I was vastly entertained by the straightforwardness of it. I kept thinking, "Huh, I should get one of these for my house." At my work, in fact, we're talking about building data centers. Those are always constrained by the limits of our local power company. Again, it gave me the thought, "So let's just have one of these."

Radiation is scary. The usefulness of it never fails to impress, though. I have to agree with XKCD about uranium - it's a suspicious macguffin in our narrative reality. If you were reading a fantasy book and the characters came across a magic metal that could power them to the stars or blow the top off a mountain, you'd think it was pretty farfetched. And yet here it is. We use it to light our homes. 

As an unplanned stop, EBR-1 was pretty great. The nearby town of Arco preserves some of its atomic energy heritage, too. (It was the first town powered solely by nuclear power, albeit as a proof of concept.) Naturally, we took pictures. And we freshened up our coffee.





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