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.'"
I like "Smilin' Joe Fission" - now that's art!
For you electronics geeks out there who are into this kind of thing and want some cool posters to decorate your thinking space, There's this, this, , and this which are all made by Synthesys Reasearch. They will send you a poster for free if you ask.
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.
Wired copied this story from io9, who originally brought attention to this blog 4 days ago.
http://io9.com/5429963/know-your-nuclear-reactors-with-illustrated-wall-charts/
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
reminds me of her.
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/17343737
Is anyone else a bit frightened that the Guangdong plant picture shows what looks to be simple trusses and corrugated aluminum siding over the turbine section, where others use poured concrete and I-beams?
Did they skimp on anything else, I wonder?
Contrary to popular belief, life is not a bitch. It is far far worse.
I give this a glowing review.
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.
Starglider29a asked why they is a lack of uniformity. In the US at least there was no standard design. Each was basically as "one off" because the company that won the contract changed from reactor to reactor. A low bid contract method. This meant each reactor was a "one off".
My understanding is that in France the government commissioned a standard design which it then licensed out. This had some benefits:
1) The design allowed better project management. Everyone knew what needed to be done. This made estimation of effort easier.
2) Due to point #1, each company had a better idea of it took to build a reactor and bid accordingly.
This also helped the costs to be budgeted.
3) Lessons learned from one reactor can be incorporated into the newer, yet to be built, reactors. It is also easier to retrofit older reactors with lessons learned. In short, incremental improvement.
4) Related to pint 3, it is easier to QA a standard design. You know what to expect and if the expectations are not met something is wrong.
Making every reactor a "one off" is crazy. I googled +ISO +"nuclear reactor design" and came up without a comprehensive spec. Having a standard might be a good idea.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
While nucleate boiling does occur in pressurized water reactors, they are referred to as "Pressurized Water Reactors" or PWRs while reactors that employ lower pressure single coolant loops where steam is generated directly from the bulk-boiling of the coolant are referred to as "Boiling Water Reactors" or BWRs. While this might not seem to be a clear separation, among nuclear engineers it is almost universally understood what one means by BWR as opposed to a PWR. A nuclear engineer, nor most people even remotely associated with nuclear power and reactors, would refer to a PWR as a "boiling water reactor" as that would give the impression that they were talking about a very different reactor design and probably make them look foolish. Still, we tend to do it accidentally from time to time.
Also, departure from nucleate boiling is a term that is mostly referred to with regards to PWRs as opposed to BWRs. In a BWR, normal operation requires you move well past nucleate boiling. If you did not then the you would run into a lot of problems. Since the steam that is meant to pass through the turbines is that which is generated by boiling the water flowing through the reactor, you are going to have difficulty producing sufficient steam volume with only nucleate boiling. You also want to get a much higher exit quality (percent steam) in your center channel than you could through nucleate boiling. These two things are important to produce power efficiently and to protect the steam turbines. While steam dryers and separators can do a great job with 10+% saturated steam, but high velocity flows of "wetter" steam could overwhelm them and allow excessive amounts of water droplets into the turbines. Too many water droplets in the turbines equals multi-million dollar blade replacements much sooner. This is why departure from nucleate boiling is not really mentioned much when discussing BWRs. While the transition through the appropriate boiling regimes must be considered when calculating the thermal profile of a reactor, the phrase just doesn't come up. What it is used for is in the discussion of safety limits and accident conditions for PWRs. The maximum DNBR (departure from nuclear boiling ratio) is one of the key thermal limits one imposes on the operation of PWR. It is not however an item of concern when setting those limits for a BWR.
I can't believe that there's no Chernobyl reactor as art! I think that in its current state it has a very Dali-melted-watch look to it with a bit of Picasso thrown in.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
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
By greased palms do you mean handing $150 over to the cashier at a college book store? If you think it should be more restrictive than that, well then you propose a nation with aging nuclear power plants, a nuclear navy, nuclear powered exploration probes (yes, most of the ones that go farther than you can spit do), a growing issue with nuclear waste, an aging and very large nuclear arsenal but almost no nuclear engineers to maintain, upgrade and replace those things.
We already have a hard enough time convincing people to take hard science and engineering majors; nuclear engineering programs themselves are also somewhat scarce and not offered at all engineering colleges. Make the information required to study for this field any less accessible and you'll cut the number of qualified graduates in half.
It's also worth pointing out that these are basically highly stylized piping diagrams. The important components carry little actual information besides what they are in a general sense. The hard part of designing one of these things is setting up and solving the massive systems of equations required to generate detailed specifications (ie erichment levels, material composition, operating temperatures, flow rates, etc. etc.) This is usually done, in the industry and academia, by writing or purchasing and running very complex computer programs that simulate and help optimize the design. Very little information about these non-trivial specifics can be gleamed from these drawings. I mean even if they contained nearly all of those specifics there would still be manufacturing and other issues. Say that you knew, for instance, that the fuel cladding is supposed to be a tube of near-flawless 0.57 mm thick and about 4 m long zircalloy. Do you know how to manufacture that alloy? How about the tubes? They'll fail extremely early if they're even scratched in the slightest. How about building a 12 m tall, 2.5 m thick, 530 T solid fine-grained low alloy ferritic steel pressure vessel clad internally with a more corrosion resistant austenitc stainless steel alloy? Oh what, there's only 3 or so factories in the world that can build those right now in the first place?
So not only is this information (and far far more) already readily available world wide, it also represents almost none of the actual challenges involved in building any of the designs depicted. There are many smaller systems that are well within the technical and infrastructure capabilities of nations like Iran to build. While much simpler and easier to build, they still represent a large financial and political commitment.
Would increased secrecy about the basics of specific nuclear reactor design make nuclear technology more difficult to obtain? No. Can you use increased secrecy about any or all of the information required to design and build a nuclear device to prevent proliferation? Not really. Nuclear science and engineering textbooks from the 70's that I've picked up at used book stores had more useful information in them than these posters in terms of learning what you needed to make a nuclear device, be it a reactor or bomb. The barrier to proliferation is now, and in the forseable future, be the systems involved create a good ammount of time+money+expertise to build. That does mean that any country with the will to spend the time and money and the educated professionals to provide or cultivate the expertise can become nuclear.