Every storage media uses a FAT. The word is an acronym for File Allocation Table. I guess you mean the MSDOS FAT system that Microsoft made ubiquitous back in the day. NTFS is a type of FAT. UDF is a type of FAT designed for optical media. Microsoft tried to copyright their type of FAT and even copyright the acronym but there was too much prior art to pull it off. Just another skirmish in the battle of compatibility vs proprietary. The evolution of file allocation algorithms has been to be able to address larger and larger volumes and with more descriptive file names. CP/M (and MSDOS) started with a 6+3 scheme and UNIX (Linux) with an 8+4 scheme for naming files. (file name plus type extension)
I laughed my ass off when I read that article. A troxler soil moisture detector doesn't have enough radionuclides in it to be a huge hazard. A truck load of smoke detectors would be a bigger hazard.
This really sounds like inter-departmental sniping to me.
If you want to order "sealed source special form" radioactive material it doesn't take a huge investigation. You have to have a lockable storage facility and be trained to lock it up when you aren't using it.
This article is pure fear mongering. Now, is the fear mongering due to a desire of the press to manufacture a story or journalistic ignorance?
I think someone with a grudge at the GAO used the common ignorance of journalists for some agenda. Most likely building the agenda of more draconian totalitarian restrictions on the citizens of the country.
The soil moisture detectors can commonly be found in lockable boxes of city water department pickup trucks. Have a look in the back of construction and civic work vehicles parked at the local diner sometime.
It was "Ma Bell" long before the antitrust suit broke up AT&T. The company was a "mother" because it knew better what you needed than you did. Your service was what they wanted to give you at what they wanted to charge you. It didn't matter what you wanted, you got what they thought you needed.
You hit the nail on the head. Oil is too useful to keep blowing out the stacks of power plants when there are cheaper and cleaner ways to generate electric power.
What is needed is not a federal nuclear program but backing off by the federal government of actively blocking commercial nuclear power.
1> The atomic energy act of 1972 put the handling of spent fuel into the hands of the DOE. No commercial facility may reprocess or recycle nuclear fuel. 2> DOE was mandated to take custody of all spent commercial fuel by October 31, 1999. The DOE has yet to take custody of a single stick of spent commercial fuel and has shut down the only facilities that could have been used to recycle the spent fuel. 3> We are the only industrial country that has commercial nuclear power that does not recycle the fuel. Instead it is kept sitting around the power plants and large costs are entailed in building storage facilities at the power plants. 4> Until 2003 there had been no application for permits to build a nuclear power plant for over a decade in the U.S. Meanwhile, countries like Malaysia, China, and Thailand have built several nuclear power plants and are rapidly industrializing with modern technology. (Outsourcing anyone?)
I could bore on, but the point is more than made. THe second cheapest and least environmentally impacting source of industrial levels of electrical power is politically constipated and it is costing the average person in cost and job stability.
You get three things in primary coolant, fission fragments, activation products and corrosion products (read as radioactive rust).
Activation products... when exposed to a lot of neutrons, hydrogen (H1) gains neutrons and becomes tritium (H3). Oxygen becomes Nitrogen-16. N-16 heas a very short half-live (17 seconds) but emits a high energy gamma when it decays back to Oxygen. This is why the radiation levels are so high during operation. Tritium has a 12 year half life but only emits a very wimpy beta particle. It is only a hazard if you drink copius quanities of tritiated water. The solution used is to save the water from the reactor, filter out the other stuff, and re-use it. This is somewhat of a hazard to persons caught in a steam cloud from primary water if there is an accident. The solution if exposed is diuretics. In some, nuclear fuel plants, if a worker is exopsed to tritium, they are issued a 12-pack of beer to consume when they get home then are tested for internal tritium the next day. (I think it is a bit humorous, but it works well.)
Corrosion products..... from rusting of plant materials. The predominant part of this is Cobalt-60. In fact, this is the predominant source of radiation in a shut down power reactor (other than the fuel in the core). It has a 5.7 year half life and will decay away in a reasonable amount of time. The thing to do for it is to filter the water (done continuously) to remove the Co-60. The removed radioactive material is then sent for controlled burial. This also applies to Fe-59 (activated Iron)
Fission Fragments.....
Bits of radioactive material left over from the actual fission. Small amounts end up in the coolant. The primary nuclides produced are Cesium, Rubidium, Strontium, and Iodine (Cs-137, Rb-88, Sr-90, and I-131).
The Iodine can be carried in air and will seek the thyroid gland if in the human body. Charcoal filtering of the air in the containment building and continous monitoring of the air systems and of the air exhausted to the environment is the method of control. THIS IS THE ONLY NUCLIDE THAT TAKING POTASSIUM IODID PILLS WILL HELP WITH IF YOU GET SOME INTERNALLY. Don't let people fool you about KI tablets.
Cs-137, a metal ion, removed by filtering. See Co-60 above. A bit less energetic gamma emitter than Co-60.
Sr-90 is one of the nuclides that is monitored for the closest. It reacts chemically the same as calcium and can replace calcium in biological organisms. It is removed by filtering and ion exchange.
Fuel nuclides such as Uranium and Plutonium are also present. Uranium doesn't interact with an organism too very well and is removed by filtration. Plutonium is a hazard as it is an alpha emitter and lodges in the bones when ingested. It is removed from primary coolant by filtration and ion exchange.
Now, what becomes airborne in a steam leak out of a containment (such as Three Mile Island) is Tritium, Iodine, and Nitrogen-16. Real world numbers... the N-16 is no hazard after an hour. The Iodine takes 6 weeks to completely go away. The tritium component is actually a very small part of the steam and dilutes away to where it cannot be found among the naturally occurring radiation.
Back to the original question of how hot is the primary coolant, after the filtering, the water in the holdup tanks would be bathed in with no ill effects but you wouldn't want to drink it for decades. You don't want it on you though because of the other chemicals used in the water. (boric acid)
Back when I did reactor chemistry, I remember getting results a week after shutting off the reactor of 5E-10 microcuries per milliliter. The specification for drinking water was 1E-9 microcuries per milliliter. This was gross beta/gamma emitters with no detectable alpha emitters.
Now, after answering a question for the time with a trestise on building a clock, I leave you.
Check the numbers. Nuclear comes out as the second cheapest source of power and, in the end, the least environmentally impacting.
If you had to design from ground zero, domestic loads (homes) could easily be powered by wind and/or solar power. You would still need industrial sources of high volume power. Nuclear would be the least environmentally impacting source.
The dome shape is the containment building. It is designed for maximum structural integrity. The ultimate design for biggest inside for the amount of wall you have to build to impact specifications would be a sphere, but it is very hard to build equipment to mount on other than a flat floor, not to mention getting people around for maintenance, hence the dome shape.
Often a containment building is kept at a vacuum during operation as well.
Anyway, the dome shape comes out as a good compromise in shape for maximum strength as well as ability to mount equipment.
Some of the design specifications of a reactor containment building include being able to fly a 747 into the side of it and not breach integrity. It is not just a concrete structure but contains stressed steel cable tenons strengthening the structure.
Hey, I always said that in case of hurricane or tornadoe, I want to be in a reactor building.
MercTech Mercenary Health Physics Technician (Radiation Protection)
What bureaucratic government anywhere would allow a population access to unrestricted travel? Horror of horrors, the people might find out that the enemy over the border wants the same thing they do, to be left alone by their government. Or, even more horrible, goods and services might be traded across the border without the government poking their nose and greedy fingers into the transaction.
Personal air travel seems to have been legislated to near non-existence in most "civilized" areas of the world no matter the engineering viability.
Hmmm, I thought the idea was so self evident that it didn't need mentioning. But, I guess the corporate management types are truly clueless. Someone brought the article references by the slashdot article to a meeting and wanted us to start doing this.
The rub is that we have been using VCDs for training video for almost three years now.
I find the use of a lab for routine blood work lucridous. It takes a half hour to run a routine spectrum of blood work manually.
My own physician finds it lucridous that the HMO he is affiliated with will not allow him to draw his own blood nor do his own routine tests. Hell the lab charges $145.00 for a CBC that he could have done in his office for $35.00
It is interesting that people always talk about the "risk associated with nuclear power" since the risk has been studied ad-infinitum and is well known. But fail to look at the risk compared to things in their every day lives.
Nuclear still remains the second cheapest and least environmentally impacting form of large scale power generation.
Remember, the original definition for a Roentgen (unit of radiation exposure) was that amount of x-rays that caused a visible reddening of the skin (erethema).
The dose allowed to the workers that only work in the vicinity of nuclear facilities, by federal law, is 125 milliroentgen (0.125 roentgen).
Most radiation exposure accidents in the last five decades deal with industrial x-ray machinery.
An X-Ray machine is exceedingly easy to build, but very very difficult to run calibrated and collimated so it doesn't cause a problem to those in the general vicinity.
It is just like it is very easy to make nitroglycerine. But, rather difficult to make it safely.
In 1976 I had the chance to take a behind the scenes tour at Disneyworld. Epcot was newly opened at the time and Card Walker had stated a commitment to continueing the Walt Disney Dream. Frankly, from what I saw, if Disney had been in charge of the space program, he would have had a resort on the moon by '69 instead of just a few trips there.
There were a lot of roadblocks to what Walt Disney wanted to do in Florida. One of the largest ones is that Disney was never allowed to build its own power plant. That was one of the big ideas for making a self sustaining community. (As a sidebar, note that Florida Power's Tampa plant, newly built to handle the increased load of the Kissimee-Tampa resort corridor, blew up last year killing several people)
The Disney Seaside resort near Ft. Pierce with Monorail transit to the Magic Kingdome died due to legislative roadblocks.
Orlando is very much a technical dichotomy of a city. The high tech in the closed communities of the Kississimmee are contrast greatly with the areas of Orange County to the north were you have outdated phone switching equiment making more that a 14.4 connection startling.
Contrast what you see in the Kissimmee area for tech with what you will see at the Sanford Flea Market. Orlando is an area where the tech and the money concentrated with a few and left the rest of the area depressed below the norm.
I left Orlando in January of this year for a job in Washington.
Use contact cement to put aluminum foil on the inside of the wooden case. Attach a grounding strap such as a screw and eye conntctor to attach the aluminum foil to ground. Attach the other end of the connector to chassis ground. Voila, a shielded case.
I originally saw this in a HAM radio manual and used it on a homebrew computer a few years ago.
I have to wonder if a lot of the resistance to such an information base on the NIH website is due to an elitist view that the common man could not understand such information and it would be dangerous to have it available.
The medical traditon seems to me compelled to deny information to the average person. Try having a look at your own chart in a hospital tome time. Medical records on your own body are not considered your own property and you are often denied access to them.
I applaud the idea of research information being widely diseminated this way.
Slashdot Mirror
Every storage media uses a FAT. The word is an acronym for File Allocation Table. I guess you mean the MSDOS FAT system that Microsoft made ubiquitous back in the day. NTFS is a type of FAT. UDF is a type of FAT designed for optical media.
Microsoft tried to copyright their type of FAT and even copyright the acronym but there was too much prior art to pull it off.
Just another skirmish in the battle of compatibility vs proprietary.
The evolution of file allocation algorithms has been to be able to address larger and larger volumes and with more descriptive file names.
CP/M (and MSDOS) started with a 6+3 scheme and UNIX (Linux) with an 8+4 scheme for naming files. (file name plus type extension)
Remember your basics...
I laughed my ass off when I read that article. A troxler soil moisture detector doesn't have enough radionuclides in it to be a huge hazard. A truck load of smoke detectors would be a bigger hazard.
This really sounds like inter-departmental sniping to me.
If you want to order "sealed source special form" radioactive material it doesn't take a huge investigation. You have to have a lockable storage facility and be trained to lock it up when you aren't using it.
This article is pure fear mongering. Now, is the fear mongering due to a desire of the press to manufacture a story or journalistic ignorance?
I think someone with a grudge at the GAO used the common ignorance of journalists for some agenda. Most likely building the agenda of more draconian totalitarian restrictions on the citizens of the country.
The soil moisture detectors can commonly be found in lockable boxes of city water department pickup trucks. Have a look in the back of construction and civic work vehicles parked at the local diner sometime.
MercTech
It was "Ma Bell" long before the antitrust suit broke up AT&T. The company was a "mother" because it knew better what you needed than you did. Your service was what they wanted to give you at what they wanted to charge you. It didn't matter what you wanted, you got what they thought you needed.
You hit the nail on the head. Oil is too useful to keep blowing out the stacks of power plants when there are cheaper and cleaner ways to generate electric power.
What is needed is not a federal nuclear program but backing off by the federal government of actively blocking commercial nuclear power.
1> The atomic energy act of 1972 put the handling of spent fuel into the hands of the DOE. No commercial facility may reprocess or recycle nuclear fuel.
2> DOE was mandated to take custody of all spent commercial fuel by October 31, 1999. The DOE has yet to take custody of a single stick of spent commercial fuel and has shut down the only facilities that could have been used to recycle the spent fuel.
3> We are the only industrial country that has commercial nuclear power that does not recycle the fuel. Instead it is kept sitting around the power plants and large costs are entailed in building storage facilities at the power plants.
4> Until 2003 there had been no application for permits to build a nuclear power plant for over a decade in the U.S. Meanwhile, countries like Malaysia, China, and Thailand have built several nuclear power plants and are rapidly industrializing with modern technology. (Outsourcing anyone?)
I could bore on, but the point is more than made. THe second cheapest and least environmentally impacting source of industrial levels of electrical power is politically constipated and it is costing the average person in cost and job stability.
While operatiing or after shutdown?
You get three things in primary coolant, fission fragments, activation products and corrosion products (read as radioactive rust).
Activation products... when exposed to a lot of neutrons, hydrogen (H1) gains neutrons and becomes tritium (H3). Oxygen becomes Nitrogen-16. N-16 heas a very short half-live (17 seconds) but emits a high energy gamma when it decays back to Oxygen. This is why the radiation levels are so high during operation. Tritium has a 12 year half life but only emits a very wimpy beta particle. It is only a hazard if you drink copius quanities of tritiated water. The solution used is to save the water from the reactor, filter out the other stuff, and re-use it. This is somewhat of a hazard to persons caught in a steam cloud from primary water if there is an accident. The solution if exposed is diuretics. In some, nuclear fuel plants, if a worker is exopsed to tritium, they are issued a 12-pack of beer to consume when they get home then are tested for internal tritium the next day. (I think it is a bit humorous, but it works well.)
Corrosion products..... from rusting of plant materials. The predominant part of this is Cobalt-60. In fact, this is the predominant source of radiation in a shut down power reactor (other than the fuel in the core). It has a 5.7 year half life and will decay away in a reasonable amount of time. The thing to do for it is to filter the water (done continuously) to remove the Co-60. The removed radioactive material is then sent for controlled burial. This also applies to Fe-59 (activated Iron)
Fission Fragments.....
Bits of radioactive material left over from the actual fission. Small amounts end up in the coolant. The primary nuclides produced are Cesium, Rubidium, Strontium, and Iodine (Cs-137, Rb-88, Sr-90, and I-131).
The Iodine can be carried in air and will seek the thyroid gland if in the human body. Charcoal filtering of the air in the containment building and continous monitoring of the air systems and of the air exhausted to the environment is the method of control. THIS IS THE ONLY NUCLIDE THAT TAKING POTASSIUM IODID PILLS WILL HELP WITH IF YOU GET SOME INTERNALLY. Don't let people fool you about KI tablets.
Cs-137, a metal ion, removed by filtering. See Co-60 above. A bit less energetic gamma emitter than Co-60.
Sr-90 is one of the nuclides that is monitored for the closest. It reacts chemically the same as calcium and can replace calcium in biological organisms. It is removed by filtering and ion exchange.
Fuel nuclides such as Uranium and Plutonium are also present. Uranium doesn't interact with an organism too very well and is removed by filtration. Plutonium is a hazard as it is an alpha emitter and lodges in the bones when ingested. It is removed from primary coolant by filtration and ion exchange.
Now, what becomes airborne in a steam leak out of a containment (such as Three Mile Island) is Tritium, Iodine, and Nitrogen-16. Real world numbers... the N-16 is no hazard after an hour. The Iodine takes 6 weeks to completely go away. The tritium component is actually a very small part of the steam and dilutes away to where it cannot be found among the naturally occurring radiation.
Back to the original question of how hot is the primary coolant, after the filtering, the water in the holdup tanks would be bathed in with no ill effects but you wouldn't want to drink it for decades. You don't want it on you though because of the other chemicals used in the water. (boric acid)
Back when I did reactor chemistry, I remember getting results a week after shutting off the reactor of 5E-10 microcuries per milliliter. The specification for drinking water was 1E-9 microcuries per milliliter. This was gross beta/gamma emitters with no detectable alpha emitters.
Now, after answering a question for the time with a trestise on building a clock, I leave you.
MercTech
(Mercenary Health Physics Technician)
Popular press misconceptions galore.
Check the numbers. Nuclear comes out as the second cheapest source of power and, in the end, the least environmentally impacting.
If you had to design from ground zero, domestic loads (homes) could easily be powered by wind and/or solar power.
You would still need industrial sources of high volume power. Nuclear would be the least environmentally impacting source.
MercTech
The dome shape is the containment building. It is designed for maximum structural integrity. The ultimate design for biggest inside for the amount of wall you have to build to impact specifications would be a sphere, but it is very hard to build equipment to mount on other than a flat floor, not to mention getting people around for maintenance, hence the dome shape.
Often a containment building is kept at a vacuum during operation as well.
Anyway, the dome shape comes out as a good compromise in shape for maximum strength as well as ability to mount equipment.
Some of the design specifications of a reactor containment building include being able to fly a 747 into the side of it and not breach integrity. It is not just a concrete structure but contains stressed steel cable tenons strengthening the structure.
Hey, I always said that in case of hurricane or tornadoe, I want to be in a reactor building.
MercTech
Mercenary Health Physics Technician
(Radiation Protection)
Boy, that headline caught my eye. What is radiation protection technology doing on SlashDot.
I am reminded of one company that laid off all the loading dock workers to save money. So they had >60k/year design engineers unloading trucks.
Productivity is increased by decreasing the overhead. That means fewer managers and more productive workers.
In 1990, major US companies averaged 5 management personnel for each productive worker. When did the organizational pyramid invert?
What bureaucratic government anywhere would allow a population access to unrestricted travel? Horror of horrors, the people might find out that the enemy over the border wants the same thing they do, to be left alone by their government. Or, even more horrible, goods and services might be traded across the border without the government poking their nose and greedy fingers into the transaction.
Personal air travel seems to have been legislated to near non-existence in most "civilized" areas of the world no matter the engineering viability.
Hmmm, I thought the idea was so self evident that it didn't need mentioning. But, I guess the corporate management types are truly clueless. Someone brought the article references by the slashdot article to a meeting and wanted us to start doing this.
The rub is that we have been using VCDs for training video for almost three years now.
I find the use of a lab for routine blood work lucridous. It takes a half hour to run a routine spectrum of blood work manually.
My own physician finds it lucridous that the HMO he is affiliated with will not allow him to draw his own blood nor do his own routine tests. Hell the lab charges $145.00 for a CBC that he could have done in his office for $35.00
I remember the short run that Tales from an Alternate Universe had on HBO.
If you want to see the very beginning of LEXX, go rent the movie: "I Worship His Shadow"
It is interesting that people always talk about the "risk associated with nuclear power" since the risk has been studied ad-infinitum and is well known. But fail to look at the risk compared to things in their every day lives.
Nuclear still remains the second cheapest and least environmentally impacting form of large scale power generation.
Remember, the original definition for a Roentgen (unit of radiation exposure) was that amount of x-rays that caused a visible reddening of the skin (erethema).
The dose allowed to the workers that only work in the vicinity of nuclear facilities, by federal law, is 125 milliroentgen (0.125 roentgen).
Most radiation exposure accidents in the last five decades deal with industrial x-ray machinery.
An X-Ray machine is exceedingly easy to build, but very very difficult to run calibrated and collimated so it doesn't cause a problem to those in the general vicinity.
It is just like it is very easy to make nitroglycerine. But, rather difficult to make it safely.
MercTech
Mercenary Radiation Protection Technologist
I may hve to re-read "Mission of Gravity". I never expected to see a review pop up of a novel written decades ago.
In 1976 I had the chance to take a behind the scenes tour at Disneyworld. Epcot was newly opened at the time and Card Walker had stated a commitment to continueing the Walt Disney Dream.
Frankly, from what I saw, if Disney had been in charge of the space program, he would have had a resort on the moon by '69 instead of just a few trips there.
There were a lot of roadblocks to what Walt Disney wanted to do in Florida. One of the largest ones is that Disney was never allowed to build its own power plant. That was one of the big ideas for making a self sustaining community. (As a sidebar, note that Florida Power's Tampa plant, newly built to handle the increased load of the Kissimee-Tampa resort corridor, blew up last year killing several people)
The Disney Seaside resort near Ft. Pierce with Monorail transit to the Magic Kingdome died due to legislative roadblocks.
Orlando is very much a technical dichotomy of a city. The high tech in the closed communities of the Kississimmee are contrast greatly with the areas of Orange County to the north were you have outdated phone switching equiment making more that a 14.4 connection startling.
Contrast what you see in the Kissimmee area for tech with what you will see at the Sanford Flea Market. Orlando is an area where the tech and the money concentrated with a few and left the rest of the area depressed below the norm.
I left Orlando in January of this year for a job in Washington.
Steven
Simple, effective, and cheap...
Use contact cement to put aluminum foil on the inside of the wooden case. Attach a grounding strap such as a screw and eye conntctor to attach the aluminum foil to ground. Attach the other end of the connector to chassis ground. Voila, a shielded case.
I originally saw this in a HAM radio manual and used it on a homebrew computer a few years ago.
Steven
I think Christopher Stassheff's "Patron Sain of Computer Operators" from his novels fits the bill.
What the matter that he will not be born for a couple of more decades.
I have to wonder if a lot of the resistance to such an information base on the NIH website is due to an elitist view that the common man could not understand such information and it would be dangerous to have it available.
The medical traditon seems to me compelled to deny information to the average person. Try having a look at your own chart in a hospital tome time. Medical records on your own body are not considered your own property and you are often denied access to them.
I applaud the idea of research information being widely diseminated this way.
Polywater... now I remember.
It did make for a great brand name for a certain water based industrial lubricant. I knew I had seen that name before and you just reminded me.
Polywater (tm) is like buying your K-Y by the 55 gallon drum