Answers to questions you never thought to ask #1

How long would it take to cook a roast inside a nuclear reactor?

Apparently this is a strange question to ask.

Firstly, I guess I need to know how hot it gets inside a nuclear reactor, which is surprisingly difficult to google (am now hoping that I'm not being electronically monitored because I am searching for all things nuclear!). Anyway, apparently in a Generation IV nuclear reactor, which has uranium fuel dissolved in circulating coolant, the coolant temperature is 510-1000oC.

I am now starting to think that our biggest problem in this hypothetical Sunday dinner conundrum is going to be the choice of cooking vessel, but perhaps we can tackle that problem later. I tryto find some sort of calculator or an equation with cooking time as a function of weight and temperature, but apparently cooks don't have a need to know how to cook at this temperature and the charts I find describe cooking times at boringly low temps. Even Jamie Oliver doesn't have an answer for me.

Looks like it's over to finding some sort of graph to extrapolate from but google fails me here too. The USDA states that the internal temperature of a roast of any size should reach 62.8oC... surely I can work something out from this, but no, that would require a knowledge of the heat-exchange of beef and there is no way I can do those calculations. Hmm. Looks like it's time to turn to every PhD student's last resort (we can cite Wikipedia in our theses, right?), an actual scientific paper. Argh! I am confronted by many very scary-looking equations and maths never was my strong point.

After an hour and a half, I have to consider myself beat. Incredibly, it looks like no-one has ever tried to cook a roast inside a nuclear reactor. However, from my research, I can still disclose the following helpful hint: if you really want to get a roast done quickly, perhaps try a brick kiln (900-1000oC)- it would be just as quick and I would guess far less dangerous than using a nuclear reactor, and you probably have less chance of being arrested in the process...

Have resolved never to ask ridiculous hypothetical questions again.
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