Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear Reactors As Art
Hemos recommends the coverage over at Wired of a project to digitize nuclear reactor art. "Not all nuclear reactors are built alike. Power plant designs can vary in their fuels, coolants, and configurations, a fact beautifully illustrated by a series of reactor wall charts originally published in issues of Nuclear Engineering International during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, the charts have been lovingly collected by Ronald Knief, a nuclear engineer at Sandia National Laboratory. Recently, he completed his collection... and began to digitize the drawings. The first eight out of more than 100 have now been permanently archived online... 'This is not a CAD/CAM-type thing,' Knief said. 'This really is art.'"
Oh no, he's helping the terrorists by showing them what a reactor looks like and how it works. The Iranian people can use that to build 100billion teratons of nukes to kill stuff. Hang him.
*blinks* You can't use a nuclear reactor to build a conventional nuclear device -- the best you'll get is a dirty bomb. You can use a breeder reactor to create fissionable material, but breeder reactors are also useful because they can take many different kinds of fuel and produce power from it, whereas conventional reactors can only use fissile uranium and it degrades to useless and highly toxic byproducts relatively quickly. Anyone who studies physics and engineering could build most any reactor design. The math and engineering is well-understood and not technically challenging for a well-funded organization.
It requires exceptionally precise and expensive equipment and a lot of technical know-how to develop several key components to creating a conventional nuclear device. Specifically, the critical function is how to model the compression shock wave in the fissile material that begins the chain reaction. If this is not perfectly timed, it's a dud. There is little danger of a country that uses nuclear reactors suddenly leap-frogging to that technology. As well, there are many ways of detecting such research and the US and its allies are constantly conducting surveillance to identify and confirm those factors. That said, such surveillance resources have diminished since the cold war ended.
The biggest risk is a rogue nation acquiring detailed schematics on how to build a warhead from a country that already possesses the technology. This would allow them to bypass the development and testing stages and move directly to production, which is much more difficult to prevent and many aspects of the production process can be accomplished covertly. Right now, Russia and former USSR member-states are the only plausible sources for this scenario being realized.
Iran and most of the middle-east, for all its bravado and sabre-rattling lacks the infrastructure to make a serious attempt at nuclear weapons research. North Korea and India, on the other hand, are another can of worms entirely. India has the raw resources, but it's unlikely for cultural and economic reasons that they will develop a nuclear weapons program in the immediate future. North Korea, however lacks those inhibitions and there's been a lot of evidence they have an active weapons program -- and ties to Russia.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
two things... Why the Missile Shield only covered the top.
:( to come online... 1972 was the date in "Our Friend, the Atom", a comic book produced to educate the youth like me.
My dad worked in Nuclear Fuel Supply, and I learned how arduous the process can be, and lengthy. But I also waited with bated breath for the Midland plant
And even then, I wondered... Why they don't make them essentially the same... like the Saturn V. I still wonder.
I also wonder how many anti-nuke activists are wishing that they'd kept their mouths shut and given us a fighting chance with carbon emissions. Or how many are driving SUVs.
As much as it gauls me, Plopez is correct, although reactor designs weren't quite that diverse. In the US there were basically 4 NSSS (Nuclear Steam Supply System) suppliers: GE, who made BWR's; and Westinghouse, Babcock & Wilcox, and Combustion Engineering, who all made PWR's. Within each of the suppliers the designs were similar; the problem came in when the utilities specified the units. Some wanted big, some wanted small. Some wanted X, others wanted Y. So the suppliers competed against each other within that specification, but no 2 utilities had the same specs. Then they'd submit each individual design to the NRC, who would do a de novo analysis on each individual design and license it.
Should they have simply licensed 1-2 designs and be done with it? In retrospect, yes, but keep in mind that, at the time, the governmental style in the US and France were quite different. Licensing only 1 design created a de facto monopoly on NSSS's in France, and they were OK with that. In the US in the 50's and 60's, that looked an awful lot like communism.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
But I didn't see any links to a project where I could really look at the digitized images. Am I just missing something? Will these eventually end up on wikipedia or something like that?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire