CRUD! Lets SCRAM!

Interesting bit of trivia.. do you know where the terms crud and scram come from? Well Dad came home from work and told me about someone he saw who worked on the Manhattan Project, who told him that Crud was a term used for the unidentified deposits they pulled from the Chalk River when searching for uranium. This fascinated me, so I looked it up on the web and here is what I found:

Crud
A colloquial term for corrosion and wear products (rust particles, etc.) that become radioactive (i.e., activated) when exposed to radiation. The term is actually an acronym for Chalk River Unidentified Deposits, the Canadian plant at which the activated deposits were first discovered.

While I was looking that up, I came across

Scram
The term used to mean the sudden shutting down of a nuclear reactor, usually by rapid insertion of control rods, either automatically or manually by the reactor operator. May also be called a reactor trip. It is actually an acronym for "safety control rod axe man," the man assigned to insert the emergency rod on the first reactor (the Chicago pile) in the U.S.