Many operators at petrochemical refineries are on the job for 12 hour shifts, 7 days on, 7 days off. It's not like they are being forced to cram in as much work as they can all shift long until they go stir crazy; at a refinery, that would be dangerous. Most of the time, they're on watch just keeping an eye on things, and doing little else more than watching TV, playing cards, surfing the net, etc. When I was doing that sort of work, although we were on the clock for twelve hours at a stretch, we usually split up into 3 hours "in", 3 hours "out" groups and took turns; i.e. half of us would be in the plant, working the controls and basically keeping an eye on things, while the rest would be in the lunch room watching TV, cat-napping, etc. But when a unit breaks down and shit hits the fan, everybody has to bust ass to get it working again, because every day offline is millions of dollars of lost profits. The best part is 7 days off in a row afterwards; who wouldn't want a job where you pull in a six figure income and you're off 26 weeks out of the year.
There is another interoperable radio network called Project 25 (www.project25.org) which sprung up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina because none of the agencies involved in rescue operations could communicate with each other, mainly because the vendors that sold equipment to the agencies had competing technologies, different frequency bands and encryption algorithms (or lack thereof), etc. AFIK, Project 25 is alive and kicking, all modern two-way radios sold these days that adhere to the standards set forth by Prohect 25 can communicate with each other, share the same bands, use the same encryption, etc.
the "health food" industry will sell you fructose telling people that it is a "more natural and healthy" sweetener.
Very true. Ever see Agave Nectar in health food stores? It can be up to 90% fructose. Which can't possibly be good for people with
fructose malabsorption syndrome .
When HFCS is produced, enzymes are used to break down starch into glucose and fructose. After the process, the enzymes are removed. Problem is, they don't get out all the enzymes. Therefore, when you suck down that giant sized cola at your local chain franchise joint on hamburger row, not only does the HFCS go straight into your bloodstream without needing to be broken down by your body's natural sucrose enzymes, the leftover enzymes combine with the extra large order of fries you just wolfed down, combining with your own natural enzymes to break the potato starch down quicker, therefore even more glucose and fructose goes into your bloodstream very quickly, causing one hell of a blood sugar spike, to where your pancreas can't put out enough insulin to get rid of the overload of glucose (and your liver is totally occupied with the overload of fructose so it can't process the cholesterol from the burger) and blammo, type II diabetes.
My sentiments exactly... Vinyl records are to modern digital formats what a wood burning fireplace is to central gas/oil/electric heat. A wood fire has to be tended to; you have to chop, haul and stack wood, rake coals, empty ashes, etc., whereas central heat is easy, clean, convenient, and automatic. Yet wood fireplaces are still around. (There's nothing like sitting by a fire while listening to a record and reading a book, but when I want heat and want it NOW, I'm flipping the thermostat to my (noisy) two stage heat pump.) And yes, they do make high efficiency wood stoves that can compete with central heat, of course they are mighty expensive (think of an automatic catalytic pellet stove as being like a turntable with a laser stylus).
Finally, I got an answer: those pools get near the boiling point of water, but no further, and you're not going to get enough energy for the generators to pay for themselves unless they're running on super heated steam. Yes, there's a fair amount of energy there, but it's not concentrated enough to use. Sigh!
When "spent" fuel is removed from the reactor, the fission reaction has stopped, but the residual heat from the decaying by-products would cause the fuel bundles to melt. (This is what happened at TMI- The reactor was shut down and no fission reaction was underway, but the water level got low enough to uncover the fuel bundles, and without water to carry away the residual heat of decay, they started melting.) The water in the spent fuel pool would indeed get near the boiling point of water if it were not for the constant cooling of the pool, but letting the pool get that hot wouldn't be a good idea, though, since the spent fuel pool at your average nuclear power plant is about the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and many activities take place in the same building (which is separate from the reactor containment building), such as the preparation of new fuel rods (they are stored in the same pool, but shielded from the spent rods), storage and preparation of the dry storage casks that the oldest spent fuel goes into, and temporary warehousing of low level radwaste, things like contaminated water filters, protective suits, decontamination materials, etc. Steam from that much hot water would hamper activities and be detrimental to everything inside of the spent fuel storage building.
After a number of years, the short lived by-products have decayed enough that the oldest spent fuel bundles can be stored in shielded casks for dry storage. Sure, they are still warm (thermally speaking), but not enough to melt or otherwise cause damage to the container in which they are stored (as the fuel rods are still smokin' hot radioactively speaking).
I think some people have actually proposed ideas to harvest the excessive heat using waste heat recovery technologies like thermocouples, low pressure turbines (running on ammonia), stirling engines, preheating the feedwater going back into the steam generators, etc.
Many gas pipeline companies bury communications links right alongside their pipelines that communicate with flow meters and pressure gauges, send instructions to compressor stations along the pipeline to throttle up or down, or shut and open valves remotely to keep up with demand. They wouldn't run the cable inside the pipelines, though, because they occasionally send devices called "pigs" through the pipes to check for corrosion on the inside of the pipeline. The pigs would simply shred any cables inside the pipeline.
Now it's conceivable that a secret agency could slip in their communications link alongside the pipeline company's link as it's being built; of course they would lie and tell the pipeline constructors that they're such-and-such communications company looking for a protected right-of-way for their cable. Then when someone dials the call-before-you-dig hotline, they're told there's two communications links and a 36 inch gas pipeline buried there. Guaranteed the contractor will be more concerned about hitting the pipeline than any cables buried right next to it, and stay far away from it.
Actually, the U.S. military has switched to burning JP-8, which is somewhere between diesel fuel and kerosene in everything that rolls or flies, from tanks, bulldozers, generators, humvees, and transport trucks to helicopters, cargo aircraft, bombers and jet fighters. Previously, the military used JP-4 in aircraft and no. 2 fuel oil for ground use. JP-4 is a wider "cut" than kerosene, and is similar to naptha or lighter fluid in its consistency and flammability, and can't be used in some diesel engines. One demonstration I remembered seeing when I was in the Army was when a match was thrown in a pan containing JP-4, Whoom! The fuel burst into flame as if it was gasoline, but when a match was thrown in a pan of JP-8, it went out. The reason for the switch was not just for safety, but to simplify logistics- everything drinks from the same tap. JP-8 was the compromise that would burn in any engine, turbine or diesel. JP-8 can also used in heaters. (BTW, most diesel engines will burn civilian Jet-A jet fuel without modification, and with no ill effects.)
Well, I, for one, can drink an entire case of beer over the course of a day. 24 cans x 12 oz/can = 288 ounces, or just over 8.5 liters. But then again, alcohol acts as a diuretic, causing more frequent urination, but more urination also causes depletion of electrolytes, which, along with metabolites of alcohol, causes a really nasty hangover...
Now, who in their right mind would even attempt to drink an entire case of sodas, sweetened, diet or otherwise?
It's called bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS), a.k.a. Popcorn Worker's Lung, and the chemical in the artificial butter responsible for it is diacetyl.
I've had many of my solar powered lawn lights turn into ant farms simply because they make great shelter. Ants love warmth. Here's an experiment: Get an empty paint can, drill a small hole on the side near the bottom and set it outside preferably in an out of the way yet sunny part of the yard; e.g. by a fence. Watch how fast that sucker fills up with ants. With the sun beating down on telephone and cable hookup boxes, in my neighborhood about half of them have ant mounds around them. And yard transformers are warm all year round, the little buggers get inside and pile up moist dirt until they reach the conductors and bzzzt! What amazes me is how high they'll climb to build a nest- At a previous neighborhood where the utilities were strung up on poles, I called the phone company complaining of line noise one day, so they came out and found an ant nest inside the rubber boot on the pole 25 feet in the air.
But where I live, ants aren't so much a problem in window AC units as brown paper wasps are...
Some industries have a tendancy to hang on to old tech because of regulatory compliance and how difficult it is to get new systems approved. Case in point: Nuclear power plants. They have control systems that still rely on old tech, even though much has been improved over the ages, simply because they rely on fail-safes and redundancies that are governed by processes and procedures that were developed and put into place many moons ago, which they had to go through great lengths to get approved by regulatory bodies like the nuclear regulatory commission. In order to upgrade a system even in a small sector of a nuclear plant means thorough scrutiny and a whole lot of red tape to get through before approval, which is very costly and time consuming.
Which is why nuclear power plants still rely on mainframe computers, analog control systems and those big bulky institutional green control panels in the control room with lots of blinking lights, dials, knobs and buttons that look like mid 50's science fiction movies. (Nobody wants to stare at that all day- they'll go stir-crazy.)
Contrast that to one coal burning behemoth I visited that had a fiber networked distributed control system running on a modern server system, with a number of large flat screen panels in a modern operations center that looked more like a TV news studio, displaying the status of all the systems; and changes can be initiated with a couple keystrokes or even through a GUI.
The problem with the old systems at nuclear power plants is that many of the people who know them are of retirement age. As one guy who was tasked with maintaining the control systems in one nuke plant's repair shop told me, "Everyone in here is a grandfather". The younger people fresh out of engineering school who are taking their place were schooled on the modern systems like what's at the coal burning plant. There is a crisis going on because a lot of the old-timers are being forced into early retirement (taking their body of knowledge with them) faster than their replacements can learn from them.
So called "white" LEDs are actually blue or violet LEDs that have a dab of phosphor on the chip. The phosphor eventually gets dimmer and dimmer, just like the pixels on a plasma TV screen, or the burn-in on a CRT screen. Even compact fluorescents exhibit this burn-in dimming over time, I had a number of the old U-shaped compact fluorescents with magnetic ballasts at one time, and they still worked but just weren't as bright as when new, so I changed them out for newer corkscrew fluorescents.
I have some white LEDs in a few projects I built when they first came out, and some are already turning bluish-pink as the phosphors fade.
but leaves you with Montezumas revenge 10x worse than Taco Hell ever thought about doing
Also known as Kimchi Squat. Combined with the fact that Koreans don't use western style sit-down toilets but rather a "bomb sight device" that you straddle, Kimchi Squat takes on a whole new meaning.
They already have a system like this in place in south Louisiana, some electricity co-ops use load management terminals, which look like a separate electric meter connected to the air conditioner. On hot summer days, they'll shut off the A/C for up to half an hour, to prevent overload to the grid and save money. They don't shut everybody's A/C off at once, they "roll" the shutoffs through the neighborhoods. It can be a bit of an inconvenience because of the temperature rise in your house, but if your house is well insulated, you won't notice it that much. The system is totally voluntary, and you even get a minor rebate on your electric bill.
If a power-plant turbine had useful exhaust steam, they would already be using it to turn another turbine I expect.
They are, with what's called a "bottoming cycle" that uses the steam that exits the low pressure turbine to heat a mixture of ammonia and water that boils below the boiling point of water alone, thus raising the working pressure enough to turn an additional turbine. This bottoming cycle is also known as the Kalina cycle, and is in use at combined cycle gas turbine plants (where the hot exhaust from a gas turbine is used to make steam to run another turbine).
Another source of radioactive contamination in nuke plants is the radioactive isotope cobalt-60. Cobalt-60 is not a fission by-product, but rather an activated corrosion product. All the valves in all the plumbing of nuclear power plants have a metal alloy called Stellite, which contains non-radioactive cobalt-59. As the valves open and shut during normal operation, and also due to corrosion, some of the metal ends up in the water stream. As the metal shavings and ions pass by the core, the cobalt-59 gets activated to cobalt-60. Cobalt-60 has a half-life of approximately 7 years, and it accumulates as the plant is running.
There is filtration in place that removes the cobalt ions (and other metallic ions), it is the same type of ion exchange resin that is used in water filtration plants for demineralization. No filtration is perfect, some ions do pass through the filter, especially as the ion exchange resin becomes saturated. The resin doesn't neutralize the radiation or otherise shield it, it just "fixes" the ions in one location for easy removal. As the resin traps the radioactive ions, it becomes more and more radioactive, and when a certain level of radiation determined by plant operating procedures is reached, the resin tanks are flushed into large shielded casks for transport to a radwaste processing facility.
The nuke plant I worked at used a synthetic bead resin that looked like tiny plastic spheres, but there are naturally occurring minerals that have ion exchange properties; bentonite and zeolite are two that come to mind.
Perhaps it is a more efficient naturally occurring ion exchange resin that the Russians have discovered.
My dad once made a 55 gallon drum barbecue pit, but not in the traditional "saw it in half lengthwise and mount it horizontally on legs with wheels" method, but rather he did it standing vertically by cutting around the top about 4" from the rim and then straight across the top about 2/3 of the way back, installed hinges, cut vent holes in the bottom, drilled holes and inserted steel rebar near the bottom, middle and top, and used expanded steel "diamond grill" for the grilling surface and a large perforated drain cover to hold the coals. It only took an hour or so to build and required no welding, he needed only a drill and jigsaw.
This barbecue pit got blast furnace hot, it was essentially a giant charcoal chimney. It made the best steaks ever. And cleaning it was easy, too: the next day after the fire was out, he simply removed the grills and rebar and emptied it like a trash can and hosed it out.
But I LIKE the taste that petroleum coke, lignite coal, wooden pallets, limestone, starch, and triple distilled jet fuel gives to food! MMMMmmmm... Brisket... droooooool...
What I don't like is whenever people try to cook TOO MANY burgers at once on the coals, for instance, at a company picnic. All the grease dripping from the burgers leads to a raging grease fire, which lends a sooty taste reminiscent of burnt plastic to the burgers. Attempts at putting out the grease fire with a squirt bottle usually causes it to rage even more and kicks up ash which further gives a bad taste to the burgers.
My favorite way to grill burgers and steaks over charcoal is on a hibachi. Do they even make those anymore?
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Many operators at petrochemical refineries are on the job for 12 hour shifts, 7 days on, 7 days off. It's not like they are being forced to cram in as much work as they can all shift long until they go stir crazy; at a refinery, that would be dangerous. Most of the time, they're on watch just keeping an eye on things, and doing little else more than watching TV, playing cards, surfing the net, etc. When I was doing that sort of work, although we were on the clock for twelve hours at a stretch, we usually split up into 3 hours "in", 3 hours "out" groups and took turns; i.e. half of us would be in the plant, working the controls and basically keeping an eye on things, while the rest would be in the lunch room watching TV, cat-napping, etc. But when a unit breaks down and shit hits the fan, everybody has to bust ass to get it working again, because every day offline is millions of dollars of lost profits. The best part is 7 days off in a row afterwards; who wouldn't want a job where you pull in a six figure income and you're off 26 weeks out of the year.
There is another interoperable radio network called Project 25 (www.project25.org) which sprung up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina because none of the agencies involved in rescue operations could communicate with each other, mainly because the vendors that sold equipment to the agencies had competing technologies, different frequency bands and encryption algorithms (or lack thereof), etc. AFIK, Project 25 is alive and kicking, all modern two-way radios sold these days that adhere to the standards set forth by Prohect 25 can communicate with each other, share the same bands, use the same encryption, etc.
Actually, older than that... The Plato IV terminal had a touch screen in 1964... https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Plato_computer#Innovation
the "health food" industry will sell you fructose telling people that it is a "more natural and healthy" sweetener.
Very true. Ever see Agave Nectar in health food stores? It can be up to 90% fructose. Which can't possibly be good for people with fructose malabsorption syndrome .
When HFCS is produced, enzymes are used to break down starch into glucose and fructose. After the process, the enzymes are removed. Problem is, they don't get out all the enzymes. Therefore, when you suck down that giant sized cola at your local chain franchise joint on hamburger row, not only does the HFCS go straight into your bloodstream without needing to be broken down by your body's natural sucrose enzymes, the leftover enzymes combine with the extra large order of fries you just wolfed down, combining with your own natural enzymes to break the potato starch down quicker, therefore even more glucose and fructose goes into your bloodstream very quickly, causing one hell of a blood sugar spike, to where your pancreas can't put out enough insulin to get rid of the overload of glucose (and your liver is totally occupied with the overload of fructose so it can't process the cholesterol from the burger) and blammo, type II diabetes.
My sentiments exactly... Vinyl records are to modern digital formats what a wood burning fireplace is to central gas/oil/electric heat. A wood fire has to be tended to; you have to chop, haul and stack wood, rake coals, empty ashes, etc., whereas central heat is easy, clean, convenient, and automatic. Yet wood fireplaces are still around. (There's nothing like sitting by a fire while listening to a record and reading a book, but when I want heat and want it NOW, I'm flipping the thermostat to my (noisy) two stage heat pump.) And yes, they do make high efficiency wood stoves that can compete with central heat, of course they are mighty expensive (think of an automatic catalytic pellet stove as being like a turntable with a laser stylus).
Radio Active Waste System Handler Intensive Treatment
R.A.W.S.H.I.T... ROFL...
Finally, I got an answer: those pools get near the boiling point of water, but no further, and you're not going to get enough energy for the generators to pay for themselves unless they're running on super heated steam. Yes, there's a fair amount of energy there, but it's not concentrated enough to use. Sigh!
When "spent" fuel is removed from the reactor, the fission reaction has stopped, but the residual heat from the decaying by-products would cause the fuel bundles to melt. (This is what happened at TMI- The reactor was shut down and no fission reaction was underway, but the water level got low enough to uncover the fuel bundles, and without water to carry away the residual heat of decay, they started melting.) The water in the spent fuel pool would indeed get near the boiling point of water if it were not for the constant cooling of the pool, but letting the pool get that hot wouldn't be a good idea, though, since the spent fuel pool at your average nuclear power plant is about the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and many activities take place in the same building (which is separate from the reactor containment building), such as the preparation of new fuel rods (they are stored in the same pool, but shielded from the spent rods), storage and preparation of the dry storage casks that the oldest spent fuel goes into, and temporary warehousing of low level radwaste, things like contaminated water filters, protective suits, decontamination materials, etc. Steam from that much hot water would hamper activities and be detrimental to everything inside of the spent fuel storage building.
After a number of years, the short lived by-products have decayed enough that the oldest spent fuel bundles can be stored in shielded casks for dry storage. Sure, they are still warm (thermally speaking), but not enough to melt or otherwise cause damage to the container in which they are stored (as the fuel rods are still smokin' hot radioactively speaking).
I think some people have actually proposed ideas to harvest the excessive heat using waste heat recovery technologies like thermocouples, low pressure turbines (running on ammonia), stirling engines, preheating the feedwater going back into the steam generators, etc.
Voodoo priest sprinkles dust on Beetle Juice's head, and it starts shrinking. "Whoa. WHOA. WHOOOOOOOA! Hey, it's a new look for me."
I'd be willing to bet that's been done before.
Many gas pipeline companies bury communications links right alongside their pipelines that communicate with flow meters and pressure gauges, send instructions to compressor stations along the pipeline to throttle up or down, or shut and open valves remotely to keep up with demand. They wouldn't run the cable inside the pipelines, though, because they occasionally send devices called "pigs" through the pipes to check for corrosion on the inside of the pipeline. The pigs would simply shred any cables inside the pipeline.
Now it's conceivable that a secret agency could slip in their communications link alongside the pipeline company's link as it's being built; of course they would lie and tell the pipeline constructors that they're such-and-such communications company looking for a protected right-of-way for their cable. Then when someone dials the call-before-you-dig hotline, they're told there's two communications links and a 36 inch gas pipeline buried there. Guaranteed the contractor will be more concerned about hitting the pipeline than any cables buried right next to it, and stay far away from it.
Actually, the U.S. military has switched to burning JP-8, which is somewhere between diesel fuel and kerosene in everything that rolls or flies, from tanks, bulldozers, generators, humvees, and transport trucks to helicopters, cargo aircraft, bombers and jet fighters. Previously, the military used JP-4 in aircraft and no. 2 fuel oil for ground use. JP-4 is a wider "cut" than kerosene, and is similar to naptha or lighter fluid in its consistency and flammability, and can't be used in some diesel engines. One demonstration I remembered seeing when I was in the Army was when a match was thrown in a pan containing JP-4, Whoom! The fuel burst into flame as if it was gasoline, but when a match was thrown in a pan of JP-8, it went out. The reason for the switch was not just for safety, but to simplify logistics- everything drinks from the same tap. JP-8 was the compromise that would burn in any engine, turbine or diesel. JP-8 can also used in heaters. (BTW, most diesel engines will burn civilian Jet-A jet fuel without modification, and with no ill effects.)
Now, who in their right mind would even attempt to drink an entire case of sodas, sweetened, diet or otherwise?
It's called bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS), a.k.a. Popcorn Worker's Lung, and the chemical in the artificial butter responsible for it is diacetyl.
I've had many of my solar powered lawn lights turn into ant farms simply because they make great shelter. Ants love warmth. Here's an experiment: Get an empty paint can, drill a small hole on the side near the bottom and set it outside preferably in an out of the way yet sunny part of the yard; e.g. by a fence. Watch how fast that sucker fills up with ants. With the sun beating down on telephone and cable hookup boxes, in my neighborhood about half of them have ant mounds around them. And yard transformers are warm all year round, the little buggers get inside and pile up moist dirt until they reach the conductors and bzzzt! What amazes me is how high they'll climb to build a nest- At a previous neighborhood where the utilities were strung up on poles, I called the phone company complaining of line noise one day, so they came out and found an ant nest inside the rubber boot on the pole 25 feet in the air.
But where I live, ants aren't so much a problem in window AC units as brown paper wasps are...
Somebody actually did a double blind study of Monster Cable versus coat hanger wire.
Yeah, when that rubber dry-rots, then what are you going to do?
Some industries have a tendancy to hang on to old tech because of regulatory compliance and how difficult it is to get new systems approved. Case in point: Nuclear power plants. They have control systems that still rely on old tech, even though much has been improved over the ages, simply because they rely on fail-safes and redundancies that are governed by processes and procedures that were developed and put into place many moons ago, which they had to go through great lengths to get approved by regulatory bodies like the nuclear regulatory commission. In order to upgrade a system even in a small sector of a nuclear plant means thorough scrutiny and a whole lot of red tape to get through before approval, which is very costly and time consuming.
Which is why nuclear power plants still rely on mainframe computers, analog control systems and those big bulky institutional green control panels in the control room with lots of blinking lights, dials, knobs and buttons that look like mid 50's science fiction movies. (Nobody wants to stare at that all day- they'll go stir-crazy.)
Contrast that to one coal burning behemoth I visited that had a fiber networked distributed control system running on a modern server system, with a number of large flat screen panels in a modern operations center that looked more like a TV news studio, displaying the status of all the systems; and changes can be initiated with a couple keystrokes or even through a GUI.
The problem with the old systems at nuclear power plants is that many of the people who know them are of retirement age. As one guy who was tasked with maintaining the control systems in one nuke plant's repair shop told me, "Everyone in here is a grandfather". The younger people fresh out of engineering school who are taking their place were schooled on the modern systems like what's at the coal burning plant. There is a crisis going on because a lot of the old-timers are being forced into early retirement (taking their body of knowledge with them) faster than their replacements can learn from them.
So called "white" LEDs are actually blue or violet LEDs that have a dab of phosphor on the chip. The phosphor eventually gets dimmer and dimmer, just like the pixels on a plasma TV screen, or the burn-in on a CRT screen. Even compact fluorescents exhibit this burn-in dimming over time, I had a number of the old U-shaped compact fluorescents with magnetic ballasts at one time, and they still worked but just weren't as bright as when new, so I changed them out for newer corkscrew fluorescents.
I have some white LEDs in a few projects I built when they first came out, and some are already turning bluish-pink as the phosphors fade.
"SCRAM", which stood for something control rod axe man
Yeah, that would be the Safety Control Rod Axe Man.
but leaves you with Montezumas revenge 10x worse than Taco Hell ever thought about doing
Also known as Kimchi Squat. Combined with the fact that Koreans don't use western style sit-down toilets but rather a "bomb sight device" that you straddle, Kimchi Squat takes on a whole new meaning.
They already have a system like this in place in south Louisiana, some electricity co-ops use load management terminals, which look like a separate electric meter connected to the air conditioner. On hot summer days, they'll shut off the A/C for up to half an hour, to prevent overload to the grid and save money. They don't shut everybody's A/C off at once, they "roll" the shutoffs through the neighborhoods. It can be a bit of an inconvenience because of the temperature rise in your house, but if your house is well insulated, you won't notice it that much. The system is totally voluntary, and you even get a minor rebate on your electric bill.
If a power-plant turbine had useful exhaust steam, they would already be using it to turn another turbine I expect.
They are, with what's called a "bottoming cycle" that uses the steam that exits the low pressure turbine to heat a mixture of ammonia and water that boils below the boiling point of water alone, thus raising the working pressure enough to turn an additional turbine. This bottoming cycle is also known as the Kalina cycle, and is in use at combined cycle gas turbine plants (where the hot exhaust from a gas turbine is used to make steam to run another turbine).
Another source of radioactive contamination in nuke plants is the radioactive isotope cobalt-60. Cobalt-60 is not a fission by-product, but rather an activated corrosion product. All the valves in all the plumbing of nuclear power plants have a metal alloy called Stellite, which contains non-radioactive cobalt-59. As the valves open and shut during normal operation, and also due to corrosion, some of the metal ends up in the water stream. As the metal shavings and ions pass by the core, the cobalt-59 gets activated to cobalt-60. Cobalt-60 has a half-life of approximately 7 years, and it accumulates as the plant is running.
There is filtration in place that removes the cobalt ions (and other metallic ions), it is the same type of ion exchange resin that is used in water filtration plants for demineralization. No filtration is perfect, some ions do pass through the filter, especially as the ion exchange resin becomes saturated. The resin doesn't neutralize the radiation or otherise shield it, it just "fixes" the ions in one location for easy removal. As the resin traps the radioactive ions, it becomes more and more radioactive, and when a certain level of radiation determined by plant operating procedures is reached, the resin tanks are flushed into large shielded casks for transport to a radwaste processing facility.
The nuke plant I worked at used a synthetic bead resin that looked like tiny plastic spheres, but there are naturally occurring minerals that have ion exchange properties; bentonite and zeolite are two that come to mind.
Perhaps it is a more efficient naturally occurring ion exchange resin that the Russians have discovered.
My dad once made a 55 gallon drum barbecue pit, but not in the traditional "saw it in half lengthwise and mount it horizontally on legs with wheels" method, but rather he did it standing vertically by cutting around the top about 4" from the rim and then straight across the top about 2/3 of the way back, installed hinges, cut vent holes in the bottom, drilled holes and inserted steel rebar near the bottom, middle and top, and used expanded steel "diamond grill" for the grilling surface and a large perforated drain cover to hold the coals. It only took an hour or so to build and required no welding, he needed only a drill and jigsaw.
This barbecue pit got blast furnace hot, it was essentially a giant charcoal chimney. It made the best steaks ever. And cleaning it was easy, too: the next day after the fire was out, he simply removed the grills and rebar and emptied it like a trash can and hosed it out.
But I LIKE the taste that petroleum coke, lignite coal, wooden pallets, limestone, starch, and triple distilled jet fuel gives to food! MMMMmmmm... Brisket... droooooool...
What I don't like is whenever people try to cook TOO MANY burgers at once on the coals, for instance, at a company picnic. All the grease dripping from the burgers leads to a raging grease fire, which lends a sooty taste reminiscent of burnt plastic to the burgers. Attempts at putting out the grease fire with a squirt bottle usually causes it to rage even more and kicks up ash which further gives a bad taste to the burgers.
My favorite way to grill burgers and steaks over charcoal is on a hibachi. Do they even make those anymore?