I got talking to a fellow mature student over coffee one day. You won’t approve of me when I tell you what I do, he said.
Why not?
Because I am a nuclear engineer.
Of course I don’t disapprove. Why should I? Though I wasn’t particularly surprised that he should expect that kind of response because it was the second time a man in the Manchester area had said it to me. The first was several years earlier in the hotel I was staying at. I found it sad that these men felt they had to apologise, but I suppose that comes from living in a self-declared Nuclear Free city
On Tuesday morning this week I caught an interview with Professor Andrew Sherry on RTE Radio 1’s Pat Kenny show. Professor Sherry gave a remarkably lucid, detailed, helpful & well-informed explanation & description of the sequence of events so far at the Japanese nuclear reactor. RTE Correspondent Paul Cunningham, speaking from Northern Japan, said that any listener would have learned more from just that conversation than they would have been able to pick up from the official reports being given to them in Japan.
Despite the professor’s low key style I had a vivid picture of the installation as he told of how the engineers would have attempted to cope with each new development.
The reactors withstood the earthquake – it was the tsunami which did for them, overwhelming & taking out the diesel to power the back-up pumps. As setback followed setback I was suddenly quite overwhelmed for these brave men struggling to avert the worst – which there was still a good chance that they might
Professor Sherry was even sanguine about the fact that the reactors will never be used again now that they have been exposed to corrosive sea water. The first was commissioned in the 1970s, & so has given over thirty years of service.
These engineers are the true heirs of those who founded the Society for the Prevention of Boiler Explosions, rather than those who just sit there telling us Told you nuclear is nasty.
