General Discussion

...him about the TRIGA reactor which is generally attributed to him. It is said that Strangelove Teller asked him to design a reactor so safe that an incompetent graduate student couldn't make it fail. (It meets this criteria, hundreds of them operate in research institutions around the world.)

When I raised the point Dyson told me that he really didn't want to take credit for it, that the real star in the matter was Massoud Simnad, an Iranian born chemist who was a professor at UCSD. Dr. Simnad developed the uranium hydride fuel that expands in such a way as to remove reactivity from the core causing the reactor to shut down if the fuel gets too hot.

There is some irony in that I think, under the circumstances, that the world's most robust nuclear reactor owes its existence to an Iranian born scientist over a half of century ago.

OT: When I was a kid, I did most of my NMR work at UCSD, generally in the evenings. It was nothing fancy, straight up 1D proton stuff.