Who cares if the cyanide you take is barely detectable by science. It will still kill you.
From a textbook on inorganic toxicology I read many years ago, and I'm paraphrasing: almost every inorganic substance that is toxic at one dosage level is needed by the body at another level, or is chemically similar to another substance that is needed by the body. The one exception they listed was arsenic.
Iron is needed by humans, yet large amounts of iron is toxic.
Iodine is used by the body, but its also a poison in high doses.
Stronium is chemically similar to calcium, which is used by the body.
This is why its absorbed if there is a deficiency in calcium.
Inorganic toxicology has a triad that determines toxicity for a given species: substance, exposure method, and dosage.
Example: drinking a pint of water is generally not harmful. Inhaling a pint of water could be.
Note: I am not a doctor nor a toxicologist, nor do I play one one tv nor the internet. The above information was gathered while investigating what I that was a simple question "what is the most toxic substance in the world?", which turns out to be a far more complicated than I first thought.
so youd rather sit and watch it permutate for hundreds or thousands (or more) hours depending on the algorithm?
If the data is needed immediately, I would have the professor run a dictionary attack.
If you want to be fancy, have him "run a rainbow lookup".
I'd actually like to see the analogy they come up with for time vs space:-).
If more time is needed, have the dictionary attack fail and then he says he needs to brute force it instead.
As for quality of the science in general, I find that Numb3rs is generally pretty good.
Ok, I didn't go to the site, I assumed by drone they were talking about a predator size drone, not something hand held. For hand helds I'd go with the AeroEnviorment micro air vehicles. All you would need to do is add a laser range finder. Find the target with the video, lase to get range and bearing, calc gps differential and send a GBU after those coordinates. Or for a mobile target, chase the target with the MAV and have the GBU follow the MAV all the way in.
Hm, this system could make the visual identification harder, but the dual positive and negative doppler shift on a radar would be a dead giveaway to its presence. So is that SAM on the ground radar or optical? To paraphrase Client Eastwood as Dirty Harry: do you feel lucky?
Of course most scientists seem to be a little wary of string theory too. The problem is that while it sucks, nobody has come up with anything better yet. If think if someone came up with a competing theory that was a bit more elegant you would see scientists flocking to it in a hurry. You can't just give up entirely on String Theory until you have something better.
This is exactly what I felt about quantum mechanics as well. Compared to Einstein's relativity, it was too complicated, too random, to messy. That's why when I first heard of string theory I was interested. Just one component a string. But then they said it has 10, or 11, or 33 or however many dimensions they have nowadays.
And the math was showing values what were just so hugely large or small that nothing could be tested.
Personally I think both quantum and string theory are like those old models that showed the universe going around the earth.
And as more accurate observations of the heavens came along, the modelers would add wheels inside of wheels inside of wheels to compensate for the observed movements.
I'm hoping to live long enough to see someone come along, put a few lines on the blackboard that turn one of our assumptions on its head, that explain all the effects, and watch a stunned audience go silent and then say "of course, why didn't I think of that?".
While I am a believer in string theory, it has yet to come up with a prediction that can be tested or observed.
That is generally the acid test for a theory to gain substantial credibility.
Everything so far requires more power than a galaxy or needs to see things smaller than planks (?) constant, neither of which we have access to.
I believe I recall even one of the supports saying that they have come up with an untestable theory.
However, no one has been able to conflicts in the theory either.
It could be that we're like the dog being taught nuclear physics, its just beyond our comprehension, so far.
The problem with using Pu-238 in a bomb is that it's too hard to assemble a critical mass due to the chain reaction starting too early.
Pu-238 is not usable in a chain reaction at all.
Its major use is a heat source for RTG type generators.
Pu239 is what you use in a nuclear reactor or a bomb.
Pu-240 is ok for a reactor, but not ok for a bomb.
Pu-240 emits neutrons spontanously, so in a bomb it will either slowly burn away the Pu-239 making it useless, or it will set off the bomb prematurely, but only with a relative "fizzle". Neither of these you want to happen.
The discovery of Pu-240 almost killed the plutonium bomb in WW2.
Worse. Imagine a 'gas station' of the future with a dozen 'pumps' hammering away. Imagine the electrical feeder line that will be needed going into the station.
To lower the surge on the feed to the "gas" station, you could use homo static (?) generators.
These are huge flywheels tied to a motor generator. You spin up the flywheel at a rate that the power grid can handle, and then when someone comes in for a charge you just suck it off the flywheel. I recall these generators being developed for something else, but its been a few years so I don't recall what it was for. (Laser fusion?).
However, I would be a bit more skeptical of this until I see real evidence repeated by others.
Remember cold fusion?
For instance during World War II, even after the allies had broken a German code or devised a method to figure out that day's cipher string, they would still go about their routine of acting like they didn't know what the Germans were going to do. Meaning that if a cargo ship was headed towards a line of submarines, they might find it best to sacrifice that cargo ship at the possibility of saving a warship later in the day.
I believe I once saw on the History Channel someone who said that even though they knew where the U boats were, they never went after them unless they had an aircraft in the area to provide a reasonable explanation (they had an airplane in the area that spotted us with radar).
So if the Germans got away or if they got a radio message out, they would blame the airplane patrol, and not suspect that their "unbreakable" code machine was broken.
Gee, I think this would eliminate an entire class of movies, the teenage sex and slasher movies. Not that that would be any great loss, except to the producers. But I really don't understand the menality. Posessing a hammer should not be against the law. Bashing a head in with the same hammer should be. Having a tool like nmap should not be against the law, but breaking into a place you have no authorization should be. Having violent porn should not be illegal. Murder with or without violent porn should be.
A bomb in a cafe that only goes off when there are over a certain number of americans in range. Or, if you can tell, when a certain number of american military are within range. Or a diplomat.
The US GPS system also has two encrypted channels, P1 and P2, which use undocumented PRN generators (or at least I've never found them). Has anyone ever cracked them? The CA signal is what the civilian systems use.
So Microsoft wants to interoperate with Linux and other open source programs?
There are a number of ways that they could show good intent, as opposed to good sound bites.
Make the CIFS documentation that you have already been ordered to produce by the EU ACTUALLY USEFUL and freely available.
For Pete's sake, even the monitor YOU APPROVED says that your documentation is useless.
And no more poison apple tricks like showing the source code with the intent of launching future lawsuits, unless you are prepared to open source it.
Remove the restriction that torpedoed the anti spam sender authentication standard.
Yes it won't eliminate all spam and phishing, but it would greatly help.
Make the licensing on your extensions to Kerberos freely available instead of NDA'ed.
Support the ODF format in your office products.
From what I've seen of the open source community, actions speak louder than words, even that of history.
IBM used to be considered the evil company.
But they put their money in, did a lot of great things, and now I'd say they are well reguarded.
You (Microsoft) can do the same thing, if you want to.
Or, you can continue to be and act like the convicted monopolist, and continue to do things that piss off the rest of the industry at you.
Do you really wonder why people look at everything you do with suspicion?
The choice is yours.
You just know that the step after a web site paying to get better service will be paying to cut out the competition. Just like Intel did to AMD: giving the founderies business provided they did not do business with AMD. Typical behavior of a monopolist. At that point the web will stop being the great leveler and will become another cartel owned by the media elite.
Lets hope and work to make sure that day never arrives.
Breaking down a glass bottle into individual atoms seems rather silly when we might reuse it for a few joules of effort with a bottle brush. I think these ideas are more born from star trek type fantasy than real world reality.
Glass bottles are easy problems. How about the hard ones like plastics that are really repurposed, not recycled, since you can't really reuse most plastics for food and a lot of other things.
How about taking things like electronics and being able to strip out the lead, the arsenic, the gold, etc, so they can be reused so that we both have less landfill and have less mining?
How about being able to break composites and custom formulated materials stripping out the alloying compounds so that they can be reused over again?
One of the problems of material sciences is that they start with very pure substances and very lightly alloy in other substances to change characteristics.
Can't do that with current recycled substances because they are already alloyed with different and varying substances.
How about being able to break down medical wastes, extracting out the steel and polymer substances, simultanously sterilizing everything to prevent the spread of disease?
And my idea was not from Star Trek.
It was from as a kid reading a book on the Manhatten project where they described uranium isotope seperation using calcatrons (?).
They sent ions through a magnetic field and seperated the ions by weight.
I thought that with enough power, this could be expanded to use garbage to extract out all the substances for reuse.
Its amazing what you can find with google. I'm using this as a reference:
http://www.uic.com.au/nip75.htm.
3.5 million tons known reserves, will last about 50 years.
Estimated reserves (in addition to known): 9.7 million tons.
Phosophate extraction: 22 million tons, seawater extraction: 4 BILLION tons.
So fuel will not be a problem.
Its been a few years, but I think that Pu239 is the only isotope that is useful in a bomb. Everything else takes away. If anyone can confirm or deny this I'd appreciate it.
I like fusion, but after 50 years it seems like a Don Quiote type quest.
Frankly, I hope we get it some year.
With lots of energy we can start doing fun stuff like breaking down garbage into individual atoms and start doing recycling on a tremendous scale.
Similarly people point out that U235 is not up to our predicted unmodified energy use (estimates of less than 70 years are commonly touted), to which nuclear advocates then suggest fast breeders - which produce easily purified plutonium, easily manufactured into bombs - or searching for more dilute sources of U235 requiring vast mining operations (and nobody mentions the oil required to power the diggers) with their attendant environmental disruption.
Does anyone know where this number of between 50 and 100 years comes from?
I really doubt its that low, but I'll take that as a given for now.
Normal reactors as well as fast breeders both produce plutonium.
But both reactors produce both Pu240 as well as Pu239. Whats the difference of one neutron?
Kind of like the difference between methyl and ethyl alcohol.
One you can drink, the other you go blind.
Pu239 you want for bomb making.
Pu240 puts too many neutrons into the local environment, causing the explosion
to either fizzle or go off before you want it. Neither is good for bomb making.
To seperate Pu239 from Pu240 is about as hard as seperating U235 from U238.
The discovery of Pu240 almost killed the original plutonum bomb.
They got around it by limiting the exposure in the reactor, which is something not really viable in most power reactors.
As for more dilute sources of uranium, the pitchblend (low grade coal) mined in Canada as more energy available as the uranium than it does in burning it as coal.
Several of the beaches in India have very high concentrations of thorium, almost as useful in reactors as uranium.
The lower average neutron emission rate makes reactor design very fussy, but it does work.
I also recall some experimental work to use a form of algae to extract heavy metals such as gold and uranium out of seawater.
No idea if its viable, but it is an interesting idea.
Nor have we solved the waste storage problem - nuclear power produces large amounts of low grade waste (such as contaminated overalls) which we just keep shuffling around.
Actually most of the low level radioactive waste is medical waste.
So nuclear power plants or not, you will still have it.
As for high level nuclear waste: you can recycle it to greatly reduce the volume needed.
There are modern high neutron reactors that burn the long life nuclear waste into short life nuclear waste that becomes less radioactive far faster.
If not all that, put it into a pyramid.
In between 300 and 1200 years it will be less toxic than the ore it came from.
(the range depends on ingestion vs inhalation threats.)
The pyramids have been around for at least 2000 years, surely we can do better.
Why does SCO even bother to continue this charade?
Why? SCO is the expendable pit bull that Microsoft hired to do its dirty work. Microsoft realized that it could not win the war directly, so they invested in this company. I'm sure one of the unofficial requirements for getting this investiment was that they (SCO) run the company into the ground going after Linux. It wouldn't surprise me if BillyG has a swiss bank account with Daryl's name on it to as congradulations for a job well done.
We damn Microsoft if they do, and damn them if they don't.
To badly paraphase Forest Gump, "Damnable is as damnable does".
If Microsoft is either quiet or makes positive contributions to the ODF standard, more power to them and maybe they will become a good corporate citizen.
But if history is any guide, they will do everything in their power to beat the standard into the ground and anyone who supports it.
They will do everything from dirty tricks (remember DRDOS?) to patent litigation (OpenGL), just ignore your patent (Stacker), to "growing the polluted environment" (Java) to "cutting off the air supply" (Netscape) to making incompatible versions (Kerberos, CHAP, DNS, TCP) to "put the competition on a treadmill" (everyone) to FUD (Linux and GPL are a cancer).
What do you mean by "explode"? Are you thinking "turn into a nuclear bomb" explode? If so, yah, I agree, but that's mainly because reactors aren't built to be a bomb. Chernobyl did blow up - the boiler definitely exploded. Blew the roof off of the building. Several other things blew up, too. Heck, there was a seismic event recorded near Chernobyl at the same time, so I think it's safe to say there was an explosion.
The most accurate description of Chernobyl that I've seen was it was a nuclear assisted steam explosion.
The reactor went prompt neutron critical, the power output went to something like a million times normal. The water instantly flashed into steam and blew the reactor top off.
The graphite modulator then was exposed to oxygen and then caught fire.
Three Mile Island was an explosion, too. The core became exposed, boiled away a ton of water (and split it into hydrogen and oxygen), and detonated the resulting hydrogen as well.
Um, read the Keremey report before you say things like this.
What happened was the overheat caused the zircronium that covers the fuel rods to react with the water.
The reaction pulled the oxygen atoms from the water and produced zircronium dioxide, releasing the hydrogen.
Remember the infamous term "rapid oxidation"? This is what was going on.
Once the hydrogen got released, it accumulated at the top of the reactor vessel, and some of it leaked into the containment building. Hydrogen molecules are far smaller than water molecules and therefore can go through smaller holes than water can.
Once in the containment building pockets of hydrogen built up and detonated in various areas due to sparks from motors, switches, and relays. I believe the atmosphere pressure recorders logged about a dozen of these pressure spikes.
The Keremey report concluded that there was no danger from these spikes.
For that matter, I think Keremey recommended placing sparking devices around the core to safely ignite any hydrogen to prevent buildups.
Now back to the reactor core.
Hydrogen was building up, that was true.
Could there be a hydrogen explosion?
No, because the oxygen was consumed by the zircronium.
Basic fire triangle. Fuel plus ignition source minus oxygen equals no fire.
Note: the above also illustrates a difference between active and passive safety.
TMI needed the water flow to keep the zircronium below the temperature it would react with the water.
The ceramic coatings on PBR designs melt far hotter than the reactors are capable of producing, so they are passively safe.
PS: its been a few years since I've read the Keremey reports (like about 15 years), so if anyone has access to the reports and finds errors, please correct them.
No, no,... no. In the TMI incident, the operators gave a series of commands to the valves and pumps to avert, as their (faulty) instruments were reporting, "going solid." Going solid is where the entire reactor fills with water, and because there is no room for expansion (water doesn't expand,) the pressure would skyrocket and the reactor would rupture with enough force to blow apart the containment building, ruining everyone's decade on the East coast.
Its been a few years, but I believe the "going solid" refers to the secondary loop in the heat exchanger.
The primary loop (the one with the reactor core) is normally all water under high pressure.
The secondary flashes water into steam in the heat exchanger to power the turbines.
Slashdot Mirror
From a textbook on inorganic toxicology I read many years ago, and I'm paraphrasing: almost every inorganic substance that is toxic at one dosage level is needed by the body at another level, or is chemically similar to another substance that is needed by the body. The one exception they listed was arsenic. Iron is needed by humans, yet large amounts of iron is toxic. Iodine is used by the body, but its also a poison in high doses. Stronium is chemically similar to calcium, which is used by the body. This is why its absorbed if there is a deficiency in calcium.
Inorganic toxicology has a triad that determines toxicity for a given species: substance, exposure method, and dosage. Example: drinking a pint of water is generally not harmful. Inhaling a pint of water could be.
Note: I am not a doctor nor a toxicologist, nor do I play one one tv nor the internet. The above information was gathered while investigating what I that was a simple question "what is the most toxic substance in the world?", which turns out to be a far more complicated than I first thought.
If the data is needed immediately, I would have the professor run a dictionary attack. If you want to be fancy, have him "run a rainbow lookup". I'd actually like to see the analogy they come up with for time vs space :-).
If more time is needed, have the dictionary attack fail and then he says he needs to brute force it instead.
As for quality of the science in general, I find that Numb3rs is generally pretty good.
Ok, I didn't go to the site, I assumed by drone they were talking about a predator size drone, not something hand held. For hand helds I'd go with the AeroEnviorment micro air vehicles. All you would need to do is add a laser range finder. Find the target with the video, lase to get range and bearing, calc gps differential and send a GBU after those coordinates. Or for a mobile target, chase the target with the MAV and have the GBU follow the MAV all the way in.
Hm, this system could make the visual identification harder, but the dual positive and negative doppler shift on a radar would be a dead giveaway to its presence. So is that SAM on the ground radar or optical? To paraphrase Client Eastwood as Dirty Harry: do you feel lucky?
This is exactly what I felt about quantum mechanics as well. Compared to Einstein's relativity, it was too complicated, too random, to messy. That's why when I first heard of string theory I was interested. Just one component a string. But then they said it has 10, or 11, or 33 or however many dimensions they have nowadays. And the math was showing values what were just so hugely large or small that nothing could be tested.
Personally I think both quantum and string theory are like those old models that showed the universe going around the earth. And as more accurate observations of the heavens came along, the modelers would add wheels inside of wheels inside of wheels to compensate for the observed movements. I'm hoping to live long enough to see someone come along, put a few lines on the blackboard that turn one of our assumptions on its head, that explain all the effects, and watch a stunned audience go silent and then say "of course, why didn't I think of that?".
You mean Heisenberg?
While I am a believer in string theory, it has yet to come up with a prediction that can be tested or observed. That is generally the acid test for a theory to gain substantial credibility. Everything so far requires more power than a galaxy or needs to see things smaller than planks (?) constant, neither of which we have access to. I believe I recall even one of the supports saying that they have come up with an untestable theory. However, no one has been able to conflicts in the theory either. It could be that we're like the dog being taught nuclear physics, its just beyond our comprehension, so far.
Pu-238 is not usable in a chain reaction at all. Its major use is a heat source for RTG type generators. Pu239 is what you use in a nuclear reactor or a bomb. Pu-240 is ok for a reactor, but not ok for a bomb. Pu-240 emits neutrons spontanously, so in a bomb it will either slowly burn away the Pu-239 making it useless, or it will set off the bomb prematurely, but only with a relative "fizzle". Neither of these you want to happen. The discovery of Pu-240 almost killed the plutonium bomb in WW2.
To lower the surge on the feed to the "gas" station, you could use homo static (?) generators. These are huge flywheels tied to a motor generator. You spin up the flywheel at a rate that the power grid can handle, and then when someone comes in for a charge you just suck it off the flywheel. I recall these generators being developed for something else, but its been a few years so I don't recall what it was for. (Laser fusion?).
However, I would be a bit more skeptical of this until I see real evidence repeated by others. Remember cold fusion?
I believe I once saw on the History Channel someone who said that even though they knew where the U boats were, they never went after them unless they had an aircraft in the area to provide a reasonable explanation (they had an airplane in the area that spotted us with radar). So if the Germans got away or if they got a radio message out, they would blame the airplane patrol, and not suspect that their "unbreakable" code machine was broken.
Gee, I think this would eliminate an entire class of movies, the teenage sex and slasher movies. Not that that would be any great loss, except to the producers. But I really don't understand the menality. Posessing a hammer should not be against the law. Bashing a head in with the same hammer should be. Having a tool like nmap should not be against the law, but breaking into a place you have no authorization should be. Having violent porn should not be illegal. Murder with or without violent porn should be.
Does anyone know of any open source photo stichers? And by the way, what does NASA use to generate those awesome collages that they produce?
A bomb in a cafe that only goes off when there are over a certain number of americans in range. Or, if you can tell, when a certain number of american military are within range. Or a diplomat.
The US GPS system also has two encrypted channels, P1 and P2, which use undocumented PRN generators (or at least I've never found them). Has anyone ever cracked them? The CA signal is what the civilian systems use.
So Microsoft wants to interoperate with Linux and other open source programs? There are a number of ways that they could show good intent, as opposed to good sound bites.
From what I've seen of the open source community, actions speak louder than words, even that of history. IBM used to be considered the evil company. But they put their money in, did a lot of great things, and now I'd say they are well reguarded. You (Microsoft) can do the same thing, if you want to. Or, you can continue to be and act like the convicted monopolist, and continue to do things that piss off the rest of the industry at you. Do you really wonder why people look at everything you do with suspicion? The choice is yours.
You just know that the step after a web site paying to get better service will be paying to cut out the competition. Just like Intel did to AMD: giving the founderies business provided they did not do business with AMD. Typical behavior of a monopolist. At that point the web will stop being the great leveler and will become another cartel owned by the media elite.
Lets hope and work to make sure that day never arrives.
Remind me to change the combination on my luggage :-).
Glass bottles are easy problems. How about the hard ones like plastics that are really repurposed, not recycled, since you can't really reuse most plastics for food and a lot of other things. How about taking things like electronics and being able to strip out the lead, the arsenic, the gold, etc, so they can be reused so that we both have less landfill and have less mining? How about being able to break composites and custom formulated materials stripping out the alloying compounds so that they can be reused over again? One of the problems of material sciences is that they start with very pure substances and very lightly alloy in other substances to change characteristics. Can't do that with current recycled substances because they are already alloyed with different and varying substances. How about being able to break down medical wastes, extracting out the steel and polymer substances, simultanously sterilizing everything to prevent the spread of disease?
And my idea was not from Star Trek. It was from as a kid reading a book on the Manhatten project where they described uranium isotope seperation using calcatrons (?). They sent ions through a magnetic field and seperated the ions by weight. I thought that with enough power, this could be expanded to use garbage to extract out all the substances for reuse.
Its amazing what you can find with google. I'm using this as a reference: http://www.uic.com.au/nip75.htm. 3.5 million tons known reserves, will last about 50 years. Estimated reserves (in addition to known): 9.7 million tons. Phosophate extraction: 22 million tons, seawater extraction: 4 BILLION tons. So fuel will not be a problem.
Its been a few years, but I think that Pu239 is the only isotope that is useful in a bomb. Everything else takes away. If anyone can confirm or deny this I'd appreciate it.
I like fusion, but after 50 years it seems like a Don Quiote type quest. Frankly, I hope we get it some year. With lots of energy we can start doing fun stuff like breaking down garbage into individual atoms and start doing recycling on a tremendous scale.
Does anyone know where this number of between 50 and 100 years comes from? I really doubt its that low, but I'll take that as a given for now. Normal reactors as well as fast breeders both produce plutonium. But both reactors produce both Pu240 as well as Pu239. Whats the difference of one neutron? Kind of like the difference between methyl and ethyl alcohol. One you can drink, the other you go blind. Pu239 you want for bomb making. Pu240 puts too many neutrons into the local environment, causing the explosion to either fizzle or go off before you want it. Neither is good for bomb making. To seperate Pu239 from Pu240 is about as hard as seperating U235 from U238. The discovery of Pu240 almost killed the original plutonum bomb. They got around it by limiting the exposure in the reactor, which is something not really viable in most power reactors.
As for more dilute sources of uranium, the pitchblend (low grade coal) mined in Canada as more energy available as the uranium than it does in burning it as coal. Several of the beaches in India have very high concentrations of thorium, almost as useful in reactors as uranium. The lower average neutron emission rate makes reactor design very fussy, but it does work. I also recall some experimental work to use a form of algae to extract heavy metals such as gold and uranium out of seawater. No idea if its viable, but it is an interesting idea.
Nor have we solved the waste storage problem - nuclear power produces large amounts of low grade waste (such as contaminated overalls) which we just keep shuffling around.
Actually most of the low level radioactive waste is medical waste. So nuclear power plants or not, you will still have it. As for high level nuclear waste: you can recycle it to greatly reduce the volume needed. There are modern high neutron reactors that burn the long life nuclear waste into short life nuclear waste that becomes less radioactive far faster. If not all that, put it into a pyramid. In between 300 and 1200 years it will be less toxic than the ore it came from. (the range depends on ingestion vs inhalation threats.) The pyramids have been around for at least 2000 years, surely we can do better.
Why? SCO is the expendable pit bull that Microsoft hired to do its dirty work. Microsoft realized that it could not win the war directly, so they invested in this company. I'm sure one of the unofficial requirements for getting this investiment was that they (SCO) run the company into the ground going after Linux. It wouldn't surprise me if BillyG has a swiss bank account with Daryl's name on it to as congradulations for a job well done.
And then exterminate.
To badly paraphase Forest Gump, "Damnable is as damnable does". If Microsoft is either quiet or makes positive contributions to the ODF standard, more power to them and maybe they will become a good corporate citizen.
But if history is any guide, they will do everything in their power to beat the standard into the ground and anyone who supports it. They will do everything from dirty tricks (remember DRDOS?) to patent litigation (OpenGL), just ignore your patent (Stacker), to "growing the polluted environment" (Java) to "cutting off the air supply" (Netscape) to making incompatible versions (Kerberos, CHAP, DNS, TCP) to "put the competition on a treadmill" (everyone) to FUD (Linux and GPL are a cancer).
The most accurate description of Chernobyl that I've seen was it was a nuclear assisted steam explosion. The reactor went prompt neutron critical, the power output went to something like a million times normal. The water instantly flashed into steam and blew the reactor top off. The graphite modulator then was exposed to oxygen and then caught fire.
Three Mile Island was an explosion, too. The core became exposed, boiled away a ton of water (and split it into hydrogen and oxygen), and detonated the resulting hydrogen as well.
Um, read the Keremey report before you say things like this. What happened was the overheat caused the zircronium that covers the fuel rods to react with the water. The reaction pulled the oxygen atoms from the water and produced zircronium dioxide, releasing the hydrogen. Remember the infamous term "rapid oxidation"? This is what was going on. Once the hydrogen got released, it accumulated at the top of the reactor vessel, and some of it leaked into the containment building. Hydrogen molecules are far smaller than water molecules and therefore can go through smaller holes than water can. Once in the containment building pockets of hydrogen built up and detonated in various areas due to sparks from motors, switches, and relays. I believe the atmosphere pressure recorders logged about a dozen of these pressure spikes. The Keremey report concluded that there was no danger from these spikes. For that matter, I think Keremey recommended placing sparking devices around the core to safely ignite any hydrogen to prevent buildups. Now back to the reactor core. Hydrogen was building up, that was true. Could there be a hydrogen explosion? No, because the oxygen was consumed by the zircronium. Basic fire triangle. Fuel plus ignition source minus oxygen equals no fire.
Note: the above also illustrates a difference between active and passive safety. TMI needed the water flow to keep the zircronium below the temperature it would react with the water. The ceramic coatings on PBR designs melt far hotter than the reactors are capable of producing, so they are passively safe.
PS: its been a few years since I've read the Keremey reports (like about 15 years), so if anyone has access to the reports and finds errors, please correct them.
Its been a few years, but I believe the "going solid" refers to the secondary loop in the heat exchanger. The primary loop (the one with the reactor core) is normally all water under high pressure. The secondary flashes water into steam in the heat exchanger to power the turbines.