A radioactive reactor at the Curie’s holiday home.

You are spending a carefree vacation in Paris when it suddenly turns out you have an hour to deactivate the homemade reactor before it explodes, causing death and destruction.

Year 1903. You went on vacation to Paris and stayed at the estate of your friends Marie and Pierre Curie. They must leave their home for a few weeks, because they have just been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the phenomenon of radioactivity. You feel at home 🙂

However, after a week (on Thursday at 11:00), you receive a telegram. The telegram got wet on its way and is not entirely readable: “Important. We did not shut down the reactor, and according to our calculations it is overloaded. It will explode on Thursday at 12:00. The code to shut it down is…”. Okay, but where is this reactor and what does it look like?