Happy birthday Harold!

[zotz]

There have been a couple of articles in the paper over the last few days about the fact that Harold Pinter is 75 this year and there's little marking it in Britain - but a much bigger fuss in Ireland, for example. And in Stockholm, too - they've just given him a Nobel.

There's also an interesting Scotsman article about the infamous Dounreay waste shaft, and the measures needed to clear up the mess. What it doesn't say is that the explosion which probably spread the hot fragments they keep finding on the beach is thought to have been caused by somebody dropping kilograms of metallic sodium (which they use as reactor coolant) into a waterlogged waste dump.

Comments

Harold

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

Did you notice this is appropriately also your post number 1066? :)

Re: Harold

[zotz]

I hadn't, no - cheers!. Right enough. Of course, 1066 was a little testing for that other Harold - hopefully I won't be jinxing Pinter. He's probably busy enough getting the corners of his mouth out of his ears at the moment.

Re: Harold

[taoist-goth.livejournal.com]

I remember school chemistry lessons involving dropping a tiny bit of sodium into a tank of water and watching it get REALLY ANNOYED. I can imagine what a couple of kilos of it would do on contact with water. POOOOOF!

Re: Harold

[zotz]

"the papers show the shaft's concrete plug, weighing seven tonnes, was blown three to four metres into the air and thrown against a security fence, while a steel plate, nearly 1.5 metres in diameter, was blasted 12 metres."

Dounreay

[grendelis.livejournal.com]

Unreal. Someone got a good chemistry lesson that day!