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the building was fully air tight and could withstand an over- pressure of 1/7 atmospheric pressure. Kouts insisted on this need in Grenoble due to the proximity of households. Dautray was in complete agreement. This air-tightness is achieved with a double containment: an inner volume with 40 cm thick walls of reinforced concrete, and an exterior shell in 11 mm steel resting on a sunken base again in concrete. This type of double containment is now proposed for electricity producing reactors.
4.1.3 Various Problems
It should be appreciated that the Grenoble RHF is the result of
a series of technical innovations. The average specific power is 1.15 MW/litre rising to hotspots up to 3.3 MW/litre, values far higher than in reactors for electricity production. The design of the core was of prime importance. The concept of the core of the Oak Ridge HFIR has been re-used. In this American reactor, which was aimed as an irradiation facility with the highest flux possible, the core is cylindrical with radial vanes and a central cylindrical cavity for the irradiations. In the Grenoble case this cavity serves to accommodate the control rod (as in the patent for a swimming- pool reactor of Horowitz and Raievski in 1960). The technical specification of the reactor will be given later when I write about its construction.
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Chapter 4 - The negotiations