Fascinating video - Camp Century: City Under the Ice

I came across a video in my not so well organized library while I was searching for something else. It is one of those 1960s era documentaries produced by the US Army and the quality is, quite frankly, pretty poor. The story, however, is fascinating.

In 1960, a group of soldiers and scientists built a "City Under the Ice" at a place called Camp Century, Greenland. It took them less than nine months to build a research station under a sheet of ice complete with a 1500 Kilowatt nuclear heat and electrical power generator.

If you download the video you can watch how a crew loaded up the reactor with fuel and achieved its initial criticality in a single day after the pre-fab plant had been put together.

You can find the movie in two different versions, one a full length, 97 MB Quicktime movie file and then the same movie with the same settings split into two separate files, one of which focuses on the actual reactor construction portion of the story. Go to http://www.atomicinsights.com and scroll down to see the links to the movies.

The full movie is about 30 minutes long, so after the download it will not require a huge time investment. I will look for a better copy of the movie, but this will have to do for now.

My copyright assumption is that a US government movie produced in 1960 is in the public domain. Please feel free to notify me if I am not correct.

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Update: (May 30, 2009) For a limited time, I have decided to make the links to the video's more readily available. If the bandwidth bills get too high, I will seek another hosting solution.

Camp Century Construction, Part 1 (38.6 MB Quicktime Movie)

Camp Century Construction, Part 2 (assembling the atomic power plant) - (51.8 MB Quicktime Movie)

Camp Century Construction - Single File Version (90.5 MB Quicktime Movie)