The variety of nuclear-energy memorabilia is enormous and sometimes wacky. We can’t remember seeing anything more unexpected than this light-bulb-shaped bottle of slivovitz (a sort of moonshine made from plums), apparently a souvenir of the Bohunice nuclear station in Slovakia.
Bohunice is one of two nuclear stations in the country, the other being Mochovche. It has two operating reactors of the pressurized-water type, Soviet VVER-440 units ; two more VVER-440s of an earlier design, now shut down ; and a prototype gas-cooled heavy-water reactor, also shut down. The heavy-water unit has the unenviable distinction of probably the worst safety record for a civil nuclear plant outside the USSR, with two separate accidents involving the reactor itself in only five years of operation, one of which killed a worker.
The gas-cooled heavy-water type has certain attractive points, and has been tried repeatedly. EL-4 in France operated with reasonable success for more than 15 years, but the other example of the type, Lucens in Switzerland, operated only briefly before suffering a severe accident and being shut down.
