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.'"
"In the US in the 50's and 60's, that looked an awful lot like communism."
@#($*^%ing US.
Just sayin'.
'liberte, egalite, fraternite' ... we took the first, tied it to property and ran with it. Wonderful ethics & values for the progressive project! *rolls eyes*
Because nothing was good enough so each was an incremental improvement.
There's potentially a very good small reactor that will be commerically available in a few years based on submarine reactor techology from Los Alamos. The Chinese have some pebble bed prototypes that are probably running by now. Both of those technologies have the potential to be small units mass produced in large numbers, probably available long before the ten years plus it would take to build a dangerous large unit Westinghouse dinosaur if we started today.
The "anti-nuke activists" didn't kill civilian nuclear power, idiots at Westinghouse et al did it by sitting on their backsides getting money funneled in from the taxpayer instead of improving things to the point where nuclear power could be a commerical proposition. They are still stuck in the 1960s, they've effectively just painted things green and pretended it's a new generation of reactors. The "nuclear now" crap is mostly a reaction to upcoming competition.