[muthas]

Fascinating stuff:

> ...but at that time we were mostly worried about whether the reactor was still working. That is, was it generating short-lived radioactive isotopes...

> ...the most precise information about the state of the reactor was gathered from the ratio of short-lived and long-lived isotopes of iodium 134 and 131. Then, by making radiochemistry measurements quite quickly we established that no short-lived iodium isotopes were being produced and hence the reactor was not operational and was in sub-critical state.

I wonder where and how they were able to do the radiochemical measurements so quickly - did the facility have that sort of capability on-site, or were samples repeatedly flown to a research institute that had the appropriate gamma spectroscopy equipment to analyze?