And please explain how alpha mass spec analysis of spent fuel from a reactor would help with a U235 based weapon. Also, please explain how you would back out the fractionation of the debris. For extra credit, you can explain how activation products can facilitate your analysis.
Also, Sandia is not the design lab you are looking for. You are confusing them with Los Alamos and Livermore.
I respect the fact that you have a four digit UID, but the problem is not as trivial as you make it out to be.
I think the concept behind the.xxx domain has the potential of leading the internet down a dangerous path. If the other TLD's are forced by their governing entity, e.g. the US government for the.com TLD, to prohibit pornographic content, the precedent will be set to segregate and regulate content.
I'm glad India is taking a stand that supports its national interests and that position coincides with my belief that intellectual property rights have gone to far. The big "however" is that India does not have a great success rate of stopping a treaty. They did not sign the NPT nor the CTBT and the NPT is in force and the CTBT would be if it was not for the Annex II requirement.
The only thing that will kill the ACTA treaty is if a significant number of countries refuse to sign it or reject it during ratification. Unfortunately, I fear that any US administration would gladly sign the treaty and the US Senate would readily ratify it. If only the treaty would harm the gay unborn whales...
I have the Boom and it works great. It also comes up with server software that runs on Linux or Windows so you can serve your music. You can read more details on the Logitech website.
In your case driving works out better than mass transit. That does not mean mass transit is useless. If the state is able to avoid building new roads by utilizing trains, they are saving taxpayers money. Take 495 as an example. The only way the capacity of that road can be increased is to expand into private property or build an elevated road way.
For my commute in the DC area, the train is vastly superior to driving in terms of speed. In fact, almost everybody I work with uses public transportation and the usage is pretty independent of salary. The only way I can drive faster than the train is if I go into work before 5:45 AM or after 9:30. Even if driving was comparable or faster than the train, the cost of parking is not cheap.
In my previous job in the DC area, my 23 mile commute took about an hour (there was no practical public transportation). Fortunately, parking was free.
I would offer the following argument. I think the creation of a.sex or a.xxx namespace will promote censorship rather than free speech. Once you create such a namespace, there will be strong pressure to migrate such content from the.com,.net, etc namespaces to the new naughty namespaces. It is the internet equivalent of a "free speech area."
Once you create a.xxx/.sex namespace, why not create a.political,.nepal or.wariniraq etc TLDs?
If all the bad Cylons got wiped out on the colony, I am surprised that some of the Colonials did not opt to go back to the Colonies. The indications that we have from the show is that the nuclear attack did not render the planet uninhabitable like the Cylon Earth.
There should be a good amount workable technology left and inhabitable structures. Supposedly you only need about 1000 to 5000 humans to repopulate.
The other thought I had was whether anybody went back to pick up the Number Three D'Anna Biers.
Having served as a US delegate to multilateral negotiations, documents that provide information or background on the negotiating position of the United States are typically classified SECRET.
If the other parties knew the hardline positions, they would have an advantage at the negotiations.
It would be nice to have better representation on the advisory panel...
I have to throw down the b.s. flag on your comment that "Mathematica's programming language is a whole lot less flexible than a real programming language like Python."
That comment would indicate that you do not know how to program in a functional programming language like Lisp and APL. When ever I see or hear a comment like that and look at the code the person has written, the person has tried to use a functional language as if it was an imperative language.
That 95.6% uranium can be put back into a reactor as fuel, thus the true waste is 1760 tons, of which 1200 tons is "short-lived fission products."
The long-lived waste products consists of 560 tons, which was produced over about 40 years. Thus, the US produces about.1 to.5 tons of long-lived waste per reactor per year.
It takes more than "a slight change" in the reprocessing method to yield weapons grade Pu. WG Pu needs a low Pu-240 concentration and that means low burn-up or Pu enrichment (which has never been done at a large enough scale). The only practical method to produce WG Pu is to operate a reactor specifically to produce WG Pu and no commercial power plant can do that economically with a light-water moderated reactor.
Second, reprocessing does not produce more radioactive waste than what was originally present. It separates the actinides (U & Pu) from the spent fuel and the fission and activation products remain in the waste stream--and they have much shorter half-lives than the actinides.
About 90% of the original U-235 is not fissioned in a LWR and, thus, can be recovered for reuse. Of the 30 MT tons of fuel that goes into a typical LWR, only 1 MT is waste and 29 MT can be reused. Compare that to the thousands of tons of coal that goes into one coal power plant.
The PUREX process (as well as some of the newer processes in development) are not particularly messy when compared to other industrial processes. Overall, the record of reprocessing facilities has been quite good--I would agree that their records are not flawless but nothing is perfect, particularly in the beginning. We should not forget that the standards in existence today did not exist 40-50 years ago.
The economics of direct disposal will increase as the inventory increases because of the inherent value of the uranium fuel in the "waste." If Yucca Mountain ever opens up, it will become a very valuable repository of uranium.
let us not forget the email-to-ftp gateways that BITNET used to have. Another example is the AutoDRM protocol used for seismic data, which dates to 1991.
I think the purpose is so you can have a contact lookup while you are on the phone. Your computer would show you relevant details about the person. For example, if you were an account manager, you would get information about the client's account. The automated caller ID via voiceprint would avoid the need to type in information while you were on the phone
I concur. You would be crazy not to have redundancy--without out it one disk failure will pull down a good chunk of your data.
As for growing the array. From what I understand (and I have not tested this) you can grow the size of the array if you replace all the disks (one at a time with a resync obviously). Also, as of linux 2.6.17, you can add a disk to the RAID and grow it that way.
I would caution against making your array very large (either in disks or in space). Consider the case of a 3 disk RAID array where each disk has a probability of failing in any given second of 10^-10 (you would do this analysis using the reconstruction time of your array as the time window). The probability for any two drives not failing is (1-10^-10)^2. The total number of 2 drive pairs in a 3 disk RAID is 3, thus the probability of the array not failing in any given second is (1-10^-10)^6=0.99999999940. Over a period of five years, the overall probability of no two drives failing is (1-10^-10)^(6*157680000)=0.909729. If you increase the array size to 10 disks, the overall probability of two drives failing is 0.241927 (the number of 2 drive combinations is 45 so you replace the 3 with 45).
We shouldn't forget the spate of recent security lapses at Los Alamos. I think it is very likely that the new management may be of the opinion of "turn it all off until we get written direction from DOE."
...I would not be suprised if they approached the US to jointly control the Galileo and GPS constellations. I think the Europeans are seriously underestimating the O&M costs associated with running a constellation like GPS, particularly when you factor in the ground segment and user segment. The Air Force has spends a great deal of effort and money to operate GPS.
> If you were to try and run the world on conventional reactors, the supply of uranium would last us 20 years or so.
> If you can use breeders, you will get maybe a 100 years (depends how much we use). If you add in thorium, several
> hundred years.
Twenty years--lets look at that the number carefully. The current mineral inventory of uranium, coupled with current enrichment technology and usage gives you about 70 years. If one projects that number of reactors triples, then we can get the twenty years that you quote.
Let me present the following, albeit rough, argument. The historical trading range for U3O8 has been about $10 in "current year" dollars--in 2006 dollars, the prices has traded in the $10 - $80 range. The two excursions has been in the 70's and 2004+. From 1980 until 2004, the global demand has been low and the HEU blend down program with Russia introduced a cheap source of U3O8 into the market. Thus, investment in uranium mining, conversion, and enrichment has been low. When one factors in loan financing and depreciation, there is little incentive to invest when there is over 30+ years of inventory available.
Lets adopt the 20 year inventory as factual. The assay of U235 in the tailings from enrichment is typically around 0.3% (vice 0.711% in natural uranium)--the amount varies due to the price of uranium feed versus the cost in enrichment. Depending on how many SWU's one uses, current enrichment technology can produce natural uranium feed equal to about 10% - 25% of the mass of the DU feed. If one uses a more efficient enrichment technology, for example atomic vapor laser isotope seperation (AVLIS), even more natural uranium could be produced. Another option is to recover uranium from the oceans.
So depending on what the projected trend is on the price of uranium and the rate of new uranium ore discovery, the economics of tailings enrichment or new enrichment techologies may become viable. If one then factors in reprocessing of spent fuel, the viability of the uranium fuel cycle goes far beyond twenty years.
The biggest problem with solar power is that only 1366 W/m^2 reaches the upper atomosphere of the Earth. Thus to generate 1GW, you would need a 700000 m^2 (0.73 km^2) at 100% effiiciency. If you didn't want to build an orbiting power station, then the solar fluence becomes much less. Lets say half makes it to the surface in the mid latitudes (in North America the range is 125 - 375 W/m^2) and you can make solar cells that are 50% efficient (current cells are 15%) you will need 2.9 km^2 to generate 1 GW. The net generating capacity of the United States is 978 GW, thus one would need 2900 km^2. Of course, one needs sunshine for solar collectors to work, so lets assume in the summer you have a 50% split between day and night and that you get full power for the 12 hours of sunlight. Lets further assume that the night time power consumption in the summer is 20% of the daytime power consumption. Lets further assume that there is some magical energy storage system that is 100% efficient, you would then need 3500 km^2, which is 10 times the size of New York city. If one assumes you can site the collectors with a 50% density (e.g. 1 m^2 collector requires 2 m^2 of real estate), then you need 7000 km^2 (20 times the size of NYC or twice the size of Rhode Island).
For a point of comparison, the Palo Verde nuclear power plant generates 3800 MW and the plant is sited on 16 km^2, thus it generates 0.24 GW/km^2. My widely optimistic solar power plant generates 978 GW in 7000 km^2, which is 0.14 GW/km^2. This does not factor in the "off site" requirements (uranium mines, enrichment, solar panel manufacturing, etc.) but does provide a rough comparison of the two technologies. The Palo Verde generates electricity at 1.33 cents/KWH. A
I wish I could remember her name, but it was quite long ago. She did not make the assertion either way on what factor was driving global warming. She found the apparent stronger correlation with the sun's activity was worth further exploration and the NSF's response to be troubling in that there was no interest in exploring an alternative.
The point of my comment was not to debunk CO2 (though I find some of the conclusions of the global warming proponents are not well demonstrated by the data) it was to point out that a scientific judgement has been made by a very large funding source to the exclusion of all other explanations. It would have been one thing if the NSF had said "interesting, but it didn't make the cut line" insead of "don't bother us with an alternative explanation even if you have data."
The NSF may have approved a grant for her research two years later or ten years later (the grant proposal reviewers may have changed) and this may be a well supported field of research--I just don't know.
I'm sorry, the cause of global warming has been decided and further research is not needed. Please turn off the lights when leaving the hall of scientific inquiry.
In all seriousness, when I was working on my M.S. in Astronomy (circa 1993), we had a seminar given by solar physicist on sunspots. She showed two slides that were quite interesting: The first slide showed a plot of "global average" CO2 concentration and "global average" temperature and the second slide showed sunspot activity and "global average" temperature. From her brief look into the topic (by her own admission), sunspot activity appeared to correlate better than CO2. She submitted a NSF proposal to study it further and was rejected on the grounds "the cause of global warming is well understood and further research is not warranted.'
Thanks for the feedback. I don't want to give the impression that the test was entirely routine and safe--with proper oversight and planning it could have been done safely. In order to conduct the test, there were some emergency shutdown signals that had to be overridden--that right there should have been a warning that the designers must be directly involved. The critical error was the first interruption in the test. That allowed the build-up of Xe-135 in the reactor and the loss of reactivity. If someone had intervened at that point, the whole accident would have been avoided.
I don't think a research-type reactor would have provided the same data, unless the research reactor was a duplicate of a power producing RBMK. A simulation would also have been difficult--this was back in 1986 and the ability to model a system as complex as a RBMK reactor with computers of that era probably was not feasible, particularly in the Soviet Union.
The key point about Cheynobyl is that the RBMK reactor uses graphite as a moderator, which has a positive temperature coefficient in reactivity. A water moderated reactor (the type used by almost all other reactors) has a negative temperature coefficient. As temperature increases, a graphite moderated reactor will have an increase in reactivity. Thus, the safety issues with graphite-moderated reactors goes beyond a design shortcut and straight to the underlying physics.
The turbine spin-down test that the Soviets were attempting to do was not particularly dangerous and was a reasonable test. The Soviets wanted to determine how long the generators would be turned by the turbines if the site lost power from the electrical grid and steam production was lost (low reactor power, ruptured steam line, etc). The turbine spin-down time would provide information on how long they had to bring the diesel-powered generators online.
The problem was in the design of the test protocol and the lack of oversight by nuclear engineers. The test required that the power levels of the reactor be decreased. About 13 hours after the reactor was brought down to 50% power (1600 MWt), the reactor was ordered by the electric-grid dispatcher to resume full power in order to meet demand. At that point, if a nuclear engineer was in charge, would have postponed the test for several days because of Xe-135 production, which has a huge neutron absorption cross-section (it eats neutrons).
Instead of terminating the test, the test director resumes the test and orders the reactor power to be decreased. The operators fail to program the computer to maintain power at the 700 MWt to 1000 MWt. The excess of Xe-135 causes the power to fall to 30 MWt, so the operators withdrew the majority of the control rods in order to maintain power. Soon after, all eight coolant pumps were activated in order to keep the reactor cool after the test. The fact that the high-flow rate was part of the test protocol is unusual because it violated the operating rules, however, the automatic-scram was bypassed for the test. If a nuclear engineer was in charge, the test should have been terminated before this step (not because of the high-flow rate, though). The increased flow rate decreased the reactivity (remember graphite has a positive temperature coefficient), which require additional control rod withdrawl to maintain reactor power level. These control rod withdrawls was in violation of the operating procedures for the reactor. The fact that the operators were having difficulty in maintaining power was a big warning that there was a lot factors contributing negative reactivity to the system (Xe-135 poisoning, excessive heat removal).
At this point, the reactor is too difficult to control automatically, so the operators assumed manual control and turned off more of the emergency shutdown signals. One minute before the accident, the computer indicated excess reactivity was present and the operators blocked the emergency shutdown. Power started to increase rapidly (through the magic of a positive temperature coefficient) and the reactor operators began insertion of the control rods. This step had the opposite effect because the control rods had graphite leaders on them (in order to maintain symmetry when fully inserted). The graphite leaders introduced additional positive reactivity and displaced water (thus removing a source of negative reactivity). The power increased further because of this step. The reactor had several pules in power in the 100 - 500 time normal power range for about 4 seconds.
The operators at Chernobyl were some of the best in the Soviet Union, but were not adequately trained. The test director did not fully understand the safety requirements and was under pressure to complete the test before the May Day holiday. In addition, the next scheduled down time for the reactor would the next year. There was also a poor chain-of-command (too many "bosses") and the test planning process did not involve the desig
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Also, Sandia is not the design lab you are looking for. You are confusing them with Los Alamos and Livermore.
I respect the fact that you have a four digit UID, but the problem is not as trivial as you make it out to be.
I think the concept behind the .xxx domain has the potential of leading the internet down a dangerous path. If the other TLD's are forced by their governing entity, e.g. the US government for the .com TLD, to prohibit pornographic content, the precedent will be set to segregate and regulate content.
The only thing that will kill the ACTA treaty is if a significant number of countries refuse to sign it or reject it during ratification. Unfortunately, I fear that any US administration would gladly sign the treaty and the US Senate would readily ratify it. If only the treaty would harm the gay unborn whales...
I have the Boom and it works great. It also comes up with server software that runs on Linux or Windows so you can serve your music. You can read more details on the Logitech website.
For my commute in the DC area, the train is vastly superior to driving in terms of speed. In fact, almost everybody I work with uses public transportation and the usage is pretty independent of salary. The only way I can drive faster than the train is if I go into work before 5:45 AM or after 9:30. Even if driving was comparable or faster than the train, the cost of parking is not cheap.
In my previous job in the DC area, my 23 mile commute took about an hour (there was no practical public transportation). Fortunately, parking was free.
I would offer the following argument. I think the creation of a .sex or a .xxx namespace will promote censorship rather than free speech. Once you create such a namespace, there will be strong pressure to migrate such content from the .com, .net, etc namespaces to the new naughty namespaces. It is the internet equivalent of a "free speech area."
Once you create a .xxx/.sex namespace, why not create a .political, .nepal or .wariniraq etc TLDs?
If all the bad Cylons got wiped out on the colony, I am surprised that some of the Colonials did not opt to go back to the Colonies. The indications that we have from the show is that the nuclear attack did not render the planet uninhabitable like the Cylon Earth.
There should be a good amount workable technology left and inhabitable structures. Supposedly you only need about 1000 to 5000 humans to repopulate.
The other thought I had was whether anybody went back to pick up the Number Three D'Anna Biers.
Having served as a US delegate to multilateral negotiations, documents that provide information or background on the negotiating position of the United States are typically classified SECRET. If the other parties knew the hardline positions, they would have an advantage at the negotiations. It would be nice to have better representation on the advisory panel...
I have to throw down the b.s. flag on your comment that "Mathematica's programming language is a whole lot less flexible than a real programming language like Python."
That comment would indicate that you do not know how to program in a functional programming language like Lisp and APL. When ever I see or hear a comment like that and look at the code the person has written, the person has tried to use a functional language as if it was an imperative language.
That 95.6% uranium can be put back into a reactor as fuel, thus the true waste is 1760 tons, of which 1200 tons is "short-lived fission products." The long-lived waste products consists of 560 tons, which was produced over about 40 years. Thus, the US produces about .1 to .5 tons of long-lived waste per reactor per year.
Second, reprocessing does not produce more radioactive waste than what was originally present. It separates the actinides (U & Pu) from the spent fuel and the fission and activation products remain in the waste stream--and they have much shorter half-lives than the actinides.
About 90% of the original U-235 is not fissioned in a LWR and, thus, can be recovered for reuse. Of the 30 MT tons of fuel that goes into a typical LWR, only 1 MT is waste and 29 MT can be reused. Compare that to the thousands of tons of coal that goes into one coal power plant.
The PUREX process (as well as some of the newer processes in development) are not particularly messy when compared to other industrial processes. Overall, the record of reprocessing facilities has been quite good--I would agree that their records are not flawless but nothing is perfect, particularly in the beginning. We should not forget that the standards in existence today did not exist 40-50 years ago.
The economics of direct disposal will increase as the inventory increases because of the inherent value of the uranium fuel in the "waste." If Yucca Mountain ever opens up, it will become a very valuable repository of uranium.
let us not forget the email-to-ftp gateways that BITNET used to have. Another example is the AutoDRM protocol used for seismic data, which dates to 1991.
I think the purpose is so you can have a contact lookup while you are on the phone. Your computer would show you relevant details about the person. For example, if you were an account manager, you would get information about the client's account. The automated caller ID via voiceprint would avoid the need to type in information while you were on the phone
I wish I could use my mod points to mod the article -5, Idiotic.
I concur. You would be crazy not to have redundancy--without out it one disk failure will pull down a good chunk of your data.
As for growing the array. From what I understand (and I have not tested this) you can grow the size of the array if you replace all the disks (one at a time with a resync obviously). Also, as of linux 2.6.17, you can add a disk to the RAID and grow it that way.
I would caution against making your array very large (either in disks or in space). Consider the case of a 3 disk RAID array where each disk has a probability of failing in any given second of 10^-10 (you would do this analysis using the reconstruction time of your array as the time window). The probability for any two drives not failing is (1-10^-10)^2. The total number of 2 drive pairs in a 3 disk RAID is 3, thus the probability of the array not failing in any given second is (1-10^-10)^6=0.99999999940. Over a period of five years, the overall probability of no two drives failing is (1-10^-10)^(6*157680000)=0.909729. If you increase the array size to 10 disks, the overall probability of two drives failing is 0.241927 (the number of 2 drive combinations is 45 so you replace the 3 with 45).
We shouldn't forget the spate of recent security lapses at Los Alamos. I think it is very likely that the new management may be of the opinion of "turn it all off until we get written direction from DOE."
...I would not be suprised if they approached the US to jointly control the Galileo and GPS constellations. I think the Europeans are seriously underestimating the O&M costs associated with running a constellation like GPS, particularly when you factor in the ground segment and user segment. The Air Force has spends a great deal of effort and money to operate GPS.
If you want to quote numbers, you should be complete. Below is a summary for 2007
- 586.1 billion (+7.0%) - Social Security
- $466.0 billion (+4.0%) - Defense
- $394.5 billion (+12.4%) - Medicare
- $367.0 billion (+2.0%) - Unemployment and welfare
- $276.4 billion (+2.9%) - Medicaid and other health related
- $243.7 billion (+13.4%) - Interest on debt
- $89.9 billion (+1.3%) - Education and training
- $76.9 billion (+8.1%) - Transportation
- $72.6 billion (+5.8%) - Veterans' benefits
- $43.5 billion (+9.2%) - Administration of justice
- $33.1 billion (+5.7%) - Natural resources and environment
- $32.5 billion (-15.4%) - Foreign affairs
- $27.0 billion (+3.7%) - Agriculture
- $26.8 billion (+28.7%) - Community and regional development
- $25.0 billion (+4.0%) - Science and technology
- $20.1 billion (+11.4%) - General government
- $1.1 billion (-47.6%) - Energy
If you group it by "human services/community/education," "defense/veterans/foreign affairs" you get- $1740.7 billion - "Human Services"
- $571.1 billion - "Defense"
Thus, for every $1 spent on "defense" $3 is spent on "human services."I won't even bother getting into a discussion about tax policy--you might as well argue which religon is best. I will point out the following facts:
- The top 5% of earners paid 53% of the income tax
- The top 1% of earners paid 33% of the income tax
- The bottom 50% of earners paid less than 5% of the income tax
Also, do not forget that individual income tax includes unincorporated businesses.> If you can use breeders, you will get maybe a 100 years (depends how much we use). If you add in thorium, several
> hundred years.
Twenty years--lets look at that the number carefully. The current mineral inventory of uranium, coupled with current enrichment technology and usage gives you about 70 years. If one projects that number of reactors triples, then we can get the twenty years that you quote.
Let me present the following, albeit rough, argument. The historical trading range for U3O8 has been about $10 in "current year" dollars--in 2006 dollars, the prices has traded in the $10 - $80 range. The two excursions has been in the 70's and 2004+. From 1980 until 2004, the global demand has been low and the HEU blend down program with Russia introduced a cheap source of U3O8 into the market. Thus, investment in uranium mining, conversion, and enrichment has been low. When one factors in loan financing and depreciation, there is little incentive to invest when there is over 30+ years of inventory available.
Lets adopt the 20 year inventory as factual. The assay of U235 in the tailings from enrichment is typically around 0.3% (vice 0.711% in natural uranium)--the amount varies due to the price of uranium feed versus the cost in enrichment. Depending on how many SWU's one uses, current enrichment technology can produce natural uranium feed equal to about 10% - 25% of the mass of the DU feed. If one uses a more efficient enrichment technology, for example atomic vapor laser isotope seperation (AVLIS), even more natural uranium could be produced. Another option is to recover uranium from the oceans.
So depending on what the projected trend is on the price of uranium and the rate of new uranium ore discovery, the economics of tailings enrichment or new enrichment techologies may become viable. If one then factors in reprocessing of spent fuel, the viability of the uranium fuel cycle goes far beyond twenty years.
The biggest problem with solar power is that only 1366 W/m^2 reaches the upper atomosphere of the Earth. Thus to generate 1GW, you would need a 700000 m^2 (0.73 km^2) at 100% effiiciency. If you didn't want to build an orbiting power station, then the solar fluence becomes much less. Lets say half makes it to the surface in the mid latitudes (in North America the range is 125 - 375 W/m^2) and you can make solar cells that are 50% efficient (current cells are 15%) you will need 2.9 km^2 to generate 1 GW. The net generating capacity of the United States is 978 GW, thus one would need 2900 km^2. Of course, one needs sunshine for solar collectors to work, so lets assume in the summer you have a 50% split between day and night and that you get full power for the 12 hours of sunlight. Lets further assume that the night time power consumption in the summer is 20% of the daytime power consumption. Lets further assume that there is some magical energy storage system that is 100% efficient, you would then need 3500 km^2, which is 10 times the size of New York city. If one assumes you can site the collectors with a 50% density (e.g. 1 m^2 collector requires 2 m^2 of real estate), then you need 7000 km^2 (20 times the size of NYC or twice the size of Rhode Island).
For a point of comparison, the Palo Verde nuclear power plant generates 3800 MW and the plant is sited on 16 km^2, thus it generates 0.24 GW/km^2. My widely optimistic solar power plant generates 978 GW in 7000 km^2, which is 0.14 GW/km^2. This does not factor in the "off site" requirements (uranium mines, enrichment, solar panel manufacturing, etc.) but does provide a rough comparison of the two technologies. The Palo Verde generates electricity at 1.33 cents/KWH. A
The point of my comment was not to debunk CO2 (though I find some of the conclusions of the global warming proponents are not well demonstrated by the data) it was to point out that a scientific judgement has been made by a very large funding source to the exclusion of all other explanations. It would have been one thing if the NSF had said "interesting, but it didn't make the cut line" insead of "don't bother us with an alternative explanation even if you have data."
The NSF may have approved a grant for her research two years later or ten years later (the grant proposal reviewers may have changed) and this may be a well supported field of research--I just don't know.
In all seriousness, when I was working on my M.S. in Astronomy (circa 1993), we had a seminar given by solar physicist on sunspots. She showed two slides that were quite interesting: The first slide showed a plot of "global average" CO2 concentration and "global average" temperature and the second slide showed sunspot activity and "global average" temperature. From her brief look into the topic (by her own admission), sunspot activity appeared to correlate better than CO2. She submitted a NSF proposal to study it further and was rejected on the grounds "the cause of global warming is well understood and further research is not warranted.'
I don't think a research-type reactor would have provided the same data, unless the research reactor was a duplicate of a power producing RBMK. A simulation would also have been difficult--this was back in 1986 and the ability to model a system as complex as a RBMK reactor with computers of that era probably was not feasible, particularly in the Soviet Union.
The turbine spin-down test that the Soviets were attempting to do was not particularly dangerous and was a reasonable test. The Soviets wanted to determine how long the generators would be turned by the turbines if the site lost power from the electrical grid and steam production was lost (low reactor power, ruptured steam line, etc). The turbine spin-down time would provide information on how long they had to bring the diesel-powered generators online.
The problem was in the design of the test protocol and the lack of oversight by nuclear engineers. The test required that the power levels of the reactor be decreased. About 13 hours after the reactor was brought down to 50% power (1600 MWt), the reactor was ordered by the electric-grid dispatcher to resume full power in order to meet demand. At that point, if a nuclear engineer was in charge, would have postponed the test for several days because of Xe-135 production, which has a huge neutron absorption cross-section (it eats neutrons).
Instead of terminating the test, the test director resumes the test and orders the reactor power to be decreased. The operators fail to program the computer to maintain power at the 700 MWt to 1000 MWt. The excess of Xe-135 causes the power to fall to 30 MWt, so the operators withdrew the majority of the control rods in order to maintain power. Soon after, all eight coolant pumps were activated in order to keep the reactor cool after the test. The fact that the high-flow rate was part of the test protocol is unusual because it violated the operating rules, however, the automatic-scram was bypassed for the test. If a nuclear engineer was in charge, the test should have been terminated before this step (not because of the high-flow rate, though). The increased flow rate decreased the reactivity (remember graphite has a positive temperature coefficient), which require additional control rod withdrawl to maintain reactor power level. These control rod withdrawls was in violation of the operating procedures for the reactor. The fact that the operators were having difficulty in maintaining power was a big warning that there was a lot factors contributing negative reactivity to the system (Xe-135 poisoning, excessive heat removal).
At this point, the reactor is too difficult to control automatically, so the operators assumed manual control and turned off more of the emergency shutdown signals. One minute before the accident, the computer indicated excess reactivity was present and the operators blocked the emergency shutdown. Power started to increase rapidly (through the magic of a positive temperature coefficient) and the reactor operators began insertion of the control rods. This step had the opposite effect because the control rods had graphite leaders on them (in order to maintain symmetry when fully inserted). The graphite leaders introduced additional positive reactivity and displaced water (thus removing a source of negative reactivity). The power increased further because of this step. The reactor had several pules in power in the 100 - 500 time normal power range for about 4 seconds.
The operators at Chernobyl were some of the best in the Soviet Union, but were not adequately trained. The test director did not fully understand the safety requirements and was under pressure to complete the test before the May Day holiday. In addition, the next scheduled down time for the reactor would the next year. There was also a poor chain-of-command (too many "bosses") and the test planning process did not involve the desig