I have wondered about the feasibility of copyrighting my e-mail address(es) and registering the copyrights with the LoC. The addresses are unique and my own creations (though the idea of an e-mail address is not, it is the expression which is copyrightable). Then I just wait for spammers to harvest my address and start spamming me. When they do, I track them down and hit them for the statutory penalties for copyright violation. Boom, they're bankrupt and I have all their money.
I have not bothered to see if this is feasible because I don't have enough confidence that it will work to believe it's worth the money to consult a copyright lawyer, but if enough people think it might be worth getting together and doing it as a group effort (dividing the cost) - hey, might be fun.;)
Guesstimate. Any limitations of the mirrors aside, you can't shoot through the earth, clouds or even thick haze. Even at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet or so, you can really only depend on being able to hit things above your local horizontal. The horizon is only 200-odd miles away at 35,000 feet up, and from farther away you can't even see down to the ground. Once you're 1000 miles away (like a plane outside the Asian continent is from the missile silos of China and Russia) the missile would be out of boost phase before you got it into view. Too late to shoot at. N. Korea and Iraq are a completely different situation. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
The laser has to stay on target for some duration to do damage (several minutes, apparently...
The article quotes an 18 second window to acquire and kill the target. That's 3.3 targets/minute, assuming each one requires the full 18 seconds. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
2.In the article, it reads that each shot for the laser takes several minutes, much longer than it takes for an AA missile to reach its target.
Try again. From the article:
The laser has about only an 18-second "kill window" in which to lock on and destroy a rising missile, said Wills.
The "several minutes" is all but certainly the total run-time of the laser between fuellings. -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Chrome is ineffective, but not why you think.
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the real damage done by high power lasers isnt so much from the light itself, but the PRESSURE which the light hits the object with.
Pressure? For perfect reflection, you get about 6.5 newtons per gigawatt. You're not going to push anything around with that.
No mirror is perfectly reflective even at low power levels, and sufficiently high power levels will rip electrons free of the surface no matter what it's made of. This leaves two methods for destroying missiles, mirrored or not:
Throw enough energy at them to thermally damage them with whatever fraction is absorbed.
Throw the energy in short enough pulses, focussed on small enough areas, that the surface explodes into a high-pressure plasma and acts like a bomb going off against the skin.
The first requires a highly reflective, well-cooled mirror (to avoid overloading the optics before killing the target), the second requires very precise optics and a large mirror area to keep the transmitter well below the power/area limits while achieving the critical power/area at the target to flash the surface into plasma. The accounts did say that the laser was the easy part; I believe them!
-- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Re:...but will it keep up with the upgrades?
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The one thing I didn't see... was any description of how the computer-guided tracking system identifies something as a missile...
What else climbs beyond 60,000 feet at hypersonic speeds and leaves a multi-gigawatt infrared track? Can you think of anything? -- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
1. They are designed to shoot down missiles from "rogue states", all of which are showing increasing signs of political stability (Iran and North Korea are often quoted).
Stability will be helped by making their hard-liners appear hopelessly out of touch. Making the weapons programs of the hard-liners look useless, and thus making military action appear very undesirable, helps the peaceful forces.
2. Launching a missile at the US, regardless of the choice of device in the tip, is suicide.
Oh, did we kill Saddam Hussein and forget to crow about it? Please get real. Besides, the use of a nuke against the US is more valuable as a threat of retaliation than pre-emption; if the world's policeman can be blackmailed into looking the other way, the crooks can get away with whatever they want. If the missiles suddenly lose their threat value (because they can be shot down without making a huge incident of it, long before they'd pose a threat to US forces or civilians), the policeman has a free hand. Again, the crooks lose, peace wins.
3. Does the high technology match the threat? How will nose mounted laser deal with a missile heading for it's lower back end?
Infrared flares for IR seekers, chaff and jammers for radar seekers. The other things you talk about can be dealt with by other means.
4. Why risk scrapping nuclear anti-proliferation treaties which forbid the development of missile killers such as a missile shield or a laser-747?
This does not pose the slightest threat to Russia or China. The laser's range is under 200 miles, and a big, slow 747 could never get close enough to their missile fields to shoot down their ICBMs. This only threatens rogue states with missiles, like Iraq and N. Korea.
5. Most importantly, this is incredibly expensive.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and the sentiment "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!" is just as valid today as it was 200 years ago.
-- Knowledge is power Power corrupts Study hard
Everyone of Katz's stories were submitted by people that need to learn responsibility. The one exception being the 16 year old who was charged with a misdemeanor...
Are you saying the 16-yr-old wasn't responsible for what he did? What about Dan, who got hit by the deer (one from the side, where it may very well have come at him from outside the spread of his headlights)? What about JD, whose student loan was denied for a debt he was legally too young to incur?
Your attitude amounts to "The system is perfect, it's the people who screwed up even if they were not personally to blame." But people made the system, how can it be perfect? How can anything that needs a registered letter to get any information about a so-called bad debt be called anything but deliberately obstructive?
You need an attitude adjustment.
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I think it's much worse than that. How do you construct the engine in the first place? You can't start with any sizeable chunks of material, because if a foil is a critical configuration then a chunk would be well beyond supercritical (BOOM!). It appears to me that you might have to carry the Am-242m as a fine dust in a neutron-absorbing matrix, then use something like a plasma-spray process to form it into a foil in place when you want to start your engine. To shut down the engine you have to make it back into a sub-critical configuration. I could see scraping it off with robotic X-acto knives and putting the shavings back in your boron/cadmium casings, or just vaporizing the film off the back with a laser and starting over with new material for the next trip.
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a while back a space probe of some sort was skipped off the earths atmosphere to give it a speed boost out into space
it slowed down the earths rotation, albeit just barely, and it was a fairly small vehicle
And how much was this slowing compared to the tidal tugs of the Moon and the Sun which are dissipating gigawatts or terawatts of power against Earth's rotation, 24/7/365? Was it detectable in any way? This factoid of yours sounds like scare-mongering by people trying to get the ignorant worked up about nothing (like the Christic Institute) or plain sensationalism for its own sake. Neither is worth any attention beyond scorn.
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My question is, what ARE the byproducts of this process, and are they radioactive?
If they are fission products from a trans-uranic element, they will certainly include radionuclides. There's no avoiding it.
Would a drive based on this process wind up spitting out a radioactive plume?
But of course. The only way to use a foil-thin material for a fission drive would be to use it to paper the back of the ship, so that particles emitted from the fission escape backwards. There's your plume.
If so, NO THANKS.
Why? The material in said plume would be taken up by the solar wind and swept out of the solar system within a few weeks. It would be the ultimate in non-persistent problems. It would join a galaxy full of stuff being bombarded by cosmic rays and other nasties, and even if there were fleets of these things running you'd have to be looking for the tiniest of traces of stuff "downwind" to detect their exhaust. The Sun blows an amazing amount of stuff into space every second (part of it radioactive), and rockets like this would be like a fart in a hurricane.
The thing I find most interesting, and which is not addressed in the article (dammit), is whether Am-242m emits its fission/decay products in any particular direction relative to the spin axis of the nucleus. If the nucleus can be aligned with a magnetic field so that the fission products go backwards, that would be a tremendous advantage for propulsion. One more thing to look up when I get home, if it's even mentioned in my table of the isotopes...
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Expanding on the previous reply, w. references
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Wasn't Wagner's (sp?) "Ring Cycle" (I think I have that right) written (and performed) during the Nazi regime?
No. According to Compton's Encyclopedia, Wagner was born in 1813. This page from Lucid Café repeats that and states his year of death as 1883, some 50 years before the Nazis came to power.
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Scratch two grooves in the aluminized side, to divide the coating into four sectors. Connect two opposite sectors on each disc. Now you've got the plates for a butterfly variable capacitor. Nylon washers and the like could probably let you stack up a bunch of these and set the plate spacing effortlessly.
Love the idea for the Tesla turbine. Sounds like it would make a really cool science-fair project.
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CANDU reactors *do* actually consume the natural uranium
Nice attempt at damage control, except that's not what you said in #214:
Uranium 238 ("natural uranium") is used instead of the U-235 used in most other reactors.
U-235, U-238, natural uranium, enriched uranium (what grade?), depleted uranium... these are all different things, and you have to keep your terminology straight if you're not going to mislead people. Consider it an attempt to improve the quality of your posts.
you've failed miserably... to acknowledge gaps in the book knowledge you've acquired when faced with a disagreement from those who have actually *done* the things you've only read about.
I'm willing to place wagers to keep things interesting for you (and for me, I've got a stable of experts to tap). You might even be surprised what isn't in the books yet.
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Uranium 238 ("natural uranium") is used instead of the U-235 used in most other reactors. U-235 requires the added steps of processing and is also vulnerable for use in weapons.
Nits:
Natural uranium is not 100% U-238, it's about 99.3% U-238. The balance, about 0.71%, is U-235. U-238 is not fissile, and if you filled a CANDU with it you wouldn't get a reaction going. (I understand that a CANDU can burn "spent" PWR fuel, interestingly enough. The question then becomes why you'd want to.)
PWR-grade enriched uranium (3.5% U-235) is not a proliferation risk. It can't go critical without a moderator, so it can't be used in a bomb. Anyone who could enrich PWR fuel up to bomb-grade (93% U-235) could just as easily start with natural uranium (UO2, "yellowcake") and save a bunch of money while they avoid tipping off the atomic watchdogs when the fuel went missing.
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I think my energy bill is high enough as it is, including home and autos.
My calculations are leading me rather inexorably to the conclusion that you could cut your fossil-fuel consumption in half (or better), save money, and affect your lifestyle not one bit. It sounds at first blush that "more is better", but improved technology makes a hash out of this. Value isn't what you put into it, it's what you get out.
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What water? Ceramic pebble-beds typically use carbide fuel layered with graphite (which becomes the moderator as well as the cladding). You can't use water with graphite, because it reacts to produce CO and H2. All pebble-bed designs I've ever seen are designed for gas cooling (which lets them run a lot hotter than water-cooled reactors can, and achieves higher thermal efficiencies in the bargain).
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...the waste, while small, sticks around for a VERY long time. It is very possible that civilization as we know it will not exist by the time the nuclear waste is back to normal.
I've read figures as short as a couple of hundred years for spent fuel to become less radioactive than the natural uranium from which it came, but I can't vouch for this because I have no idea how it was calculated. The fact remains that the use of uranium as fuel depletes it in U-235 (the more radioactive of the two isotopes) and all but the "coolest" of the fission products are gone in a couple hundred years, due to their short (but furious) radioactivity.
Don't just take my word for it. You can look up the distribution of fission products in any number of handbooks, and look at their half-lives and decay chains. Isotopes like Sr-90 are good as gone in less than 1000 years; if the Romans had produced a metric ton of Sr-90 for Caesar, in the 71 half-lives since all but a few million atoms of it would have decayed. (It decays to yttrium-90, which beta decays to zirconium-90 with a half-life of 64 hours.)
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But isn't the mass of the fused atom after nuclear fusion less than the sum of the initial atoms?
Yes. The mass of the fission products is less than the mass of the fissile atom as well. Any time you have a loss of energy, from any source, you lose mass. That's what "mass-energy equivalence" means.
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The IFR is not required to burn reprocessed fuel, although it would have been able to do so. (Japan has been receiving shipments of mixed-oxide [MOX] fuel containing reprocessed plutonium, which they intend to burn in pressurized-water reactors.) The intent of the IFR was to have a nuclear-fuel cycle in which nothing ever left the reactor except encapsulated fission products in a disposal-ready condition, and the fuel itself was always too radioactive to steal and too contaminated with high isotopes of plutonium to be used for weapons anyway. In other words, proliferation-proof.
It got canned by the Clinton administration, I think.
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Yes there is. It's non-fissile, has a half-life of 89 years, and is the power source for the RTG's used by NASA on the outer-planets missions. Remember when the Christic Institute and other idiots tried to prevent the Cassini probe from flying past Earth? It's because of the Pu-238 in the RTG's.
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Interesting math you do there. The half-life of Sr-90 is 28 years. 1 million years is 35714 half-lives, reducing the final amount to 2^(-35714) of the original amount. 2^(-35714) is about 10^(-10750).
That's a very small number. By way of comparison, the visible universe is composed of less than 10^100 elementary particles. So by this math, if there was one atom of Sr-90 for every elementary particle in the universe, in a million years you would only have one chance in 10^10650 of having one left.
Try a thousand years at the outside, not a million. It would make more sense to just get your water from elsewhere, but with ion-exchange techniques known since the 60's you could make Chernobyl water safe to drink if you had to. (There were studies done on detoxifying fallout-contaminated milk. I happened to read one of them that was in my school library. Fascinating and thought-provoking.)
Did you know that the exclusion area around Chernobyl has become home to all kinds of rare species? It seems they do well when humans aren't around. Chernobyl may be one of the biggest favors the Russians have done for biodiversity... not that I'd want it in my back yard either.
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The US has NO policy for the permanent disposal of nuclear waste, therefore, it's all piling up AT the plants sites themselves. Precisely where it was NOT supposed to be stored long-term.
You can blame the Greenies for that. The original idea was to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, package the fission products (the large majority of which have half-lives under 30 years and will be gone in far less than the age of the Pyramids) for dumping into a hole, and recycle the rest. When reprocessing was shelved we acquired the problem of disposing of trans-uranics, and the unbending opposition to a safe disposal site in Nevada forces the fuel to accumulate in much less safe sites around the country. The problem isn't technical, it's political.
Seeing as how this stuff is lethal for periods of time much longer than humanity has even existed as a SPECIES let alone a civilization, and seeing as how the OLDEST structures we've ever created are only thousands of years old...
I have just a few corrections to make to that.
Among the longest-lived of the strong fission products is strontium-90. Its half-life is 28 years. If you stored it for 30 half-lives (840 years), there would be about one-billionth of the original amount left. We can consider that "gone". 840 years is about 1/6 the age of the oldest pyramid in Egypt.
The long-lived products are mostly transuranics, which are valuable as nuclear fuel. Throwing them away as waste is technically stupid, but the Greenies who demand an end to nuclear power favor it because they don't want to see the neptunium, plutonium etc. go away both physically and as a political issue.
The earth is full of toxic materials which will never disappear, like lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic. Coal plants may emit more toxins as mercury than are produced by a nuclear plant, and the nuclear plant's stuff will eventually disappear even if you do nothing.
The toxicity of most trans-uranics is over-rated. A number of people contaminated with plutonium have lived long, healthy lives.
Personally, if we could just launch it into the sun, or reprocess it into harmlessness, I would accept a sodium-moderated reactor in my neighborhood.
(What's this obsession people have with shooting things into the sun? Don't they know any orbital mechanics? This is many times as difficult as shooting it off to infinity, and we won't even get into the hazards of launch-vehicle failures. But I digress.) Given that the stuff can be reprocessed into something that becomes nearly harmless within a millenium, and that we can feed the rest back into the cycle and get rid of it, does that change your evaluation? Personally I would not want a sodium-moderated plant near me for two reasons:
Hot alkali metals are corrosive, not to mention explosion hazards if water is involved.
You could use lead or a lead-bismuth alloy as a coolant instead, and get a nice inert liquid which gives you a gamma-ray shield in the bargain.
Three days worth of diesel fuel on site for diesel pumps, and then, a "guaranteed" contract with a local fuel supplier? yeah, that'll work in a war-situation, or severe earthquake.
If the roads won't work, there are always helicopters. Three days is enough to get a cargo-lifter to California from anywhere in the USA. This is far less of a problem, even in the worst of circumstances, than you seem to think.
But current plants require continued effort to keep the cores cooled after they're shut down. And that's all reliant on the existence of a modern supply infrastructure, which can all disappear in a disaster or a war.
The reactor containment buildings can survive a direct hit by an airliner, and inland US areas haven't been hit by enemy action during a war in the last century. I can't imagine the kind of disaster which would produce the kind of problem you're postulating, but
a.) Most of us would have much bigger problems than the core cooling systems, and
b.) a nuclear plant's toughness might make it one of the safest places to be!
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One would expect that robots sent in to perform this work would be rad-hardened to some degree, and if we can chill a Pentium to -50 C to make it easier to overclock I don't see how difficult it could be to keep the inside of a lead box down to 50 C or so.
The heat has also decreased quite a bit in the intervening time; the short-lived isotopes which produce the high wattages of after-heat decay away quickly. Spent PWR fuel is cool enough to be stored in air after about ten years, and it's been 14 years since Chernobyl. We should be able to take care of this now. It would also be a terrific employment opportunity for the area, and the last thing we want is for certain Ukrainians to go job-hunting in places like Iran.
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Slashdot Mirror
I have not bothered to see if this is feasible because I don't have enough confidence that it will work to believe it's worth the money to consult a copyright lawyer, but if enough people think it might be worth getting together and doing it as a group effort (dividing the cost) - hey, might be fun. ;)
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
No mirror is perfectly reflective even at low power levels, and sufficiently high power levels will rip electrons free of the surface no matter what it's made of. This leaves two methods for destroying missiles, mirrored or not:
- Throw enough energy at them to thermally damage them with whatever fraction is absorbed.
- Throw the energy in short enough pulses, focussed on small enough areas, that the surface explodes into a high-pressure plasma and acts like a bomb going off against the skin.
The first requires a highly reflective, well-cooled mirror (to avoid overloading the optics before killing the target), the second requires very precise optics and a large mirror area to keep the transmitter well below the power/area limits while achieving the critical power/area at the target to flash the surface into plasma. The accounts did say that the laser was the easy part; I believe them!--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Your attitude amounts to "The system is perfect, it's the people who screwed up even if they were not personally to blame." But people made the system, how can it be perfect? How can anything that needs a registered letter to get any information about a so-called bad debt be called anything but deliberately obstructive?
You need an attitude adjustment.
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I think it's much worse than that. How do you construct the engine in the first place? You can't start with any sizeable chunks of material, because if a foil is a critical configuration then a chunk would be well beyond supercritical (BOOM!). It appears to me that you might have to carry the Am-242m as a fine dust in a neutron-absorbing matrix, then use something like a plasma-spray process to form it into a foil in place when you want to start your engine. To shut down the engine you have to make it back into a sub-critical configuration. I could see scraping it off with robotic X-acto knives and putting the shavings back in your boron/cadmium casings, or just vaporizing the film off the back with a laser and starting over with new material for the next trip.
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The thing I find most interesting, and which is not addressed in the article (dammit), is whether Am-242m emits its fission/decay products in any particular direction relative to the spin axis of the nucleus. If the nucleus can be aligned with a magnetic field so that the fission products go backwards, that would be a tremendous advantage for propulsion. One more thing to look up when I get home, if it's even mentioned in my table of the isotopes...
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Love the idea for the Tesla turbine. Sounds like it would make a really cool science-fair project.
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What water? Ceramic pebble-beds typically use carbide fuel layered with graphite (which becomes the moderator as well as the cladding). You can't use water with graphite, because it reacts to produce CO and H2. All pebble-bed designs I've ever seen are designed for gas cooling (which lets them run a lot hotter than water-cooled reactors can, and achieves higher thermal efficiencies in the bargain).
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Don't just take my word for it. You can look up the distribution of fission products in any number of handbooks, and look at their half-lives and decay chains. Isotopes like Sr-90 are good as gone in less than 1000 years; if the Romans had produced a metric ton of Sr-90 for Caesar, in the 71 half-lives since all but a few million atoms of it would have decayed. (It decays to yttrium-90, which beta decays to zirconium-90 with a half-life of 64 hours.)
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It got canned by the Clinton administration, I think.
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That's a very small number. By way of comparison, the visible universe is composed of less than 10^100 elementary particles. So by this math, if there was one atom of Sr-90 for every elementary particle in the universe, in a million years you would only have one chance in 10^10650 of having one left.
Try a thousand years at the outside, not a million. It would make more sense to just get your water from elsewhere, but with ion-exchange techniques known since the 60's you could make Chernobyl water safe to drink if you had to. (There were studies done on detoxifying fallout-contaminated milk. I happened to read one of them that was in my school library. Fascinating and thought-provoking.)
Did you know that the exclusion area around Chernobyl has become home to all kinds of rare species? It seems they do well when humans aren't around. Chernobyl may be one of the biggest favors the Russians have done for biodiversity... not that I'd want it in my back yard either.
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- Among the longest-lived of the strong fission products is strontium-90. Its half-life is 28 years. If you stored it for 30 half-lives (840 years), there would be about one-billionth of the original amount left. We can consider that "gone". 840 years is about 1/6 the age of the oldest pyramid in Egypt.
- The long-lived products are mostly transuranics, which are valuable as nuclear fuel. Throwing them away as waste is technically stupid, but the Greenies who demand an end to nuclear power favor it because they don't want to see the neptunium, plutonium etc. go away both physically and as a political issue.
- The earth is full of toxic materials which will never disappear, like lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic. Coal plants may emit more toxins as mercury than are produced by a nuclear plant, and the nuclear plant's stuff will eventually disappear even if you do nothing.
- The toxicity of most trans-uranics is over-rated. A number of people contaminated with plutonium have lived long, healthy lives.
(What's this obsession people have with shooting things into the sun? Don't they know any orbital mechanics? This is many times as difficult as shooting it off to infinity, and we won't even get into the hazards of launch-vehicle failures. But I digress.) Given that the stuff can be reprocessed into something that becomes nearly harmless within a millenium, and that we can feed the rest back into the cycle and get rid of it, does that change your evaluation? Personally I would not want a sodium-moderated plant near me for two reasons:- Hot alkali metals are corrosive, not to mention explosion hazards if water is involved.
- You could use lead or a lead-bismuth alloy as a coolant instead, and get a nice inert liquid which gives you a gamma-ray shield in the bargain.
If the roads won't work, there are always helicopters. Three days is enough to get a cargo-lifter to California from anywhere in the USA. This is far less of a problem, even in the worst of circumstances, than you seem to think. The reactor containment buildings can survive a direct hit by an airliner, and inland US areas haven't been hit by enemy action during a war in the last century. I can't imagine the kind of disaster which would produce the kind of problem you're postulating, buta.) Most of us would have much bigger problems than the core cooling systems, and
b.) a nuclear plant's toughness might make it one of the safest places to be!
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The heat has also decreased quite a bit in the intervening time; the short-lived isotopes which produce the high wattages of after-heat decay away quickly. Spent PWR fuel is cool enough to be stored in air after about ten years, and it's been 14 years since Chernobyl. We should be able to take care of this now. It would also be a terrific employment opportunity for the area, and the last thing we want is for certain Ukrainians to go job-hunting in places like Iran.
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