It's very important to find out what has happened to reactor number 3 as it is the one powered by Mox fuel and also has the cooling "pond" next to it. This video of Fukushima reactor 3 explosion shows some heavy components being thrown in the air so it would be good to get some exact data about what is going on there.
It is on the record that this reactor facility has concealed safety issues from regulatory authorities in 2004, if I remember correctly.
There has been nothing in the news about this and it sounds like the type of thing they would have picked up on. Care to offer some links to these personal blogs? Which amongst other things, how are they blogging?
You don't have to be a genius to work it out.There is simply not enough people to limit their exposure as the reports I hear is only 50-70. How soon they die is a matter of whether it is 10mSv/h or 400mSv/h we just don't know. But since we know that they have to put lead in the belly of the helicopters and they can't fly over the top to douse it with water says that it's pretty high.
When Carter was cleaning up Nuclear waste he was in a full radiation suit, ran into the affected area, shoveled radioactive material for 1minute and 29 seconds and then ran out. He received his full yearly dose in that time.
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
You are clearly, delusional.
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in... wait for it... containment chambers!
You are not in possession of all the facts.
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
"more modern and much, much safer design"
Pebble Bed, Thorium,. Molten Salt.
I think your post demonstrates you are not thinking any further than existing designs.
If you read my previous posts you'll see I've offered an opinion on not just reactors, but industry development. They proposes a method for spent fuel containment that includes a mechanism to develop Fast Neutron burner reactors. In a planned manner, with fissile ash containment and reactor core decommission, cool down and long term core containment designed in, is available to read.
Pebble Bed reactors have well documented failure and design issues so I guess you didn't even bother researching that did you?
The outputs of Thorium reactors is Thallium 233 and still needs proper spent fuel containment so the logical place to begin building new reactors is to design proper geologically stable fuel containment. Even if you implemented it tomorrow you *still* have to find a place to put 70,000 tons of plutonium and a lot more.
The reality is this: as long as the anti nuke people insist on throwing road blocks in front of every step of every new initiative, not only will old designs continue to stay in operation, but the newer and much, much safer designs won't even make to the drawing board.
I really think the type of thinking that you engage in is obsolete. Categorising the debate into "pro" or "anti" ignores the fact that there are real problems to solve *already*. You want reactors build cause your a "pro", the "anti" doesn't want a reactor built and I think the issue of spent fuel containment is one that has to be resolved before any new large scale reactor developments can be deployed.
The main concern is that there is no where to put all that spent fuel hanging out near to nuclear reactors. This problem is especially highlighted in these reactors as they had spent fuel *above* the reactors. Spent fuel containment in a permanent way is a known, large, engineering challenge that is also necessary. I think what you fail to understand is that these are engineering challenges so large that they will probably change the way the economy works if they are to be implemented in a way that includes nuclear power.
And that my be a bigger challenge than the entire nuclear industry itself.
But anti-nuke activists will consider this the worse tragedy and use it at every chance to fight against the building of more modern and much, much safer designs.
A Nuclear industry panel (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy, Northern States Power and Commonwealth Edison) proposed design recommendations specifically targeted at reducing the opportunities to sabotage a nuclear reactor installation and improve safety. The AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design. AP-1000 is a rehash of the Standard Westinghouse Nuclear Utility Power Plant (SNUPPs) examples of which are installed at Wolf Creek and Callaway, you will note in the picture the uncanny resemblence to the AP-1000 design (and similar capacity).
The design changes have been made for economic reasons, not to engineer the reactor installations so they are hardened, if anything they are more vulnerable to attack. The new design does not take the opportunity to implement design improvements that the industry *itself* recommended on the behest of the NRC. It's not best of breed, it's the whelp of the pack, the solid engineering improvements have not be put into the design. For accident mitigation the EPR design is better. Briefly the buildings that service the reactor are split into four (main) operational divisions (and the reactor containment). An accident, failure or maintenance in the other areas can be mitigated by the other divisions.
Consider TMI-2, it was designed with thicker containment than most other reactors so it was resistant to an aircraft crash. Even that suffered from voids that collapsed in the containment building. Aircraft attack on a Nuclear facility is a viable threat, and gravity cooling won't mitigate containment volume vs thermal power, containment is the last thing you want to loose in the event of an accident. Available evidence suggests process and design conducted in the Nuclear Industry are made to suit an economic outcome as opposed to solid engineering principles. Case in point, the design of the AP-1000 where the ratio of containment volume to thermal power is below that of today’s PWRs. That increases the risk of containment over-pressurization and failure in event of a severe accident.
I am not Pro-Nuclear - I do not believe what I am being told about Nuclear power and it's not hard to uncover what is going on.
I am not Anti-Nuclear - In the long term we may have to mitigate Nuclear industry transuranics into fissile ash when materials technology has advanced enough for a proper breeder program.
I think your preemptive statement plays on not one but three disasters in Japan and demonstrates you need to acquire more actual knowledge on the subject. The first and most obvious design improvement recommended was to build Nuclear reactors underground.
The reality is this "more modern and much, much safer design" for a commercial nuclear power reactor you speak of is simply to expensive to implement.
Everyone's getting excited over the nuclear plants, and ignoring the thousands that are still are dying due to just water. Why is radiation so much scarier? Water kills faster./rant.
It's not so much an issue of radiation but of radionuclide release into the environment. Radiation dissipates, radionuclides are a source of radiation that dissipate as they decay over many years.
There are a lot of *ifs* at the moment but the central concern is if the explosion was from the result of a core breaching into the atmosphere or an ancillary component. *If* there is a core breach and material from the core has made it out into the surrounding environment then you are looking at a situation where the exclusion zone of the surrounding area becomes permanent, much the way it has at Chernobyl, relative to the scale of the accident and rendering that area uninhabitable.
In reality there are two or three disasters here each with their own characteristics. An earthquake, a Tsunami and a reactor accident. A reactor accident has an initial burst of activity and then pans out slowly over many years and decades as escaped radionuclide do their damage in the populace. A flood event kills but it's over in a few weeks. Radionuclide contamination can go on killing for as long as they are radioactive and circulating in the environment.
You do know humans have radioactive isotopes in us without nuclear power or coal plants right?
You do know that 1 millionth of a gram of plutonium is a carcinogenic dose in the human body, it analogues iron when presented to a human metabolism, as high energy alpha emitter in the body it is extremely toxic. From World Nuclear Association's website on the Chernobyl disaster;
The resulting steam explosion and fires released at least 5% of the radioactive reactor core into the atmosphere and downwind.
5% of a 160 ton Nuclear reactor core that was about to be refueled - let's call it 100 tons, that's 5 tons of radioactive core into the atmosphere. At conservative estimates thats 5000,000,000,000 fatal doses. If we accept that an extremely conservative estimate of 1% of this makes it into the food chain via bio-accumulation and of that a conservative estimate of 1% of people are exposed and a conservative 1% of those exposed actually get some sort of fatal cancer that's 5,000,000 fatalities.
So please don't try to convince me that I can have pu-239 in me without a nuclear plant.
Radioactive decay has been occurring in humans since the first one was born in Africa.
Please don't be ridiculous, you know very well we are talking about radioactive isotope emissions from the nuclear industry. You focus on the reactors only instead of the entire industrial process over which radioactive isotope emission is inevitable. These are the types of radioactive isotopes that eventually end up bio-concentrating;
Mine tailing: radioactive mine tailings from open cut mining where ever it has occurred, radon 220, radium 226, thorium etc.
Enrichment: U-238 or DU. Used as weapon projectile, is pyrophoric and burns into a radioactive powder. Groundwater contamination from leaking Hexafluoride tanks
Reactor facility: tritium, iodine 131, xenon 141, 143, 144, cerium 141, 143, 144, tritium, tritium and tritium and Noble Gasses which decay Into more dangerous daughter products (Xenon 137, Krypton 90, rubidium 90, strontium 90, Xenon 135, xenon 133, krypton 85, Argon 39). Of course no epidemiological studies have been performed on the noble gas venting which are released hourly from *all* Nuclear reactors. 4000 gallons of primary coolant water PER DAY containing plutonium 238,239,241, technetium 99, iodine 129, carbon 14 and *ahem* tritium. That's just the authorised effluents not the accidents.
Reactor decommissioning: cobalt 60, iron 55, nickel 63.
Radioactive Waste: Plutonium, Strontium 90, Iodine 131, Cesium 137 and on and on
Those radioactive isotope emissions have been going on since the nuclear industry began, so which of them would you prefer to be decaying in your body.
Tens of thousands of humans die a year from natural Radon while deaths from nuclear accidents number in the single digits a year.
At TMI large amounts of contamination were released beyond Nuclear Industry assurances. The gamma radiation monitors on the top of the auxiliary building were not designed to measure such high concentrations and they went off the scale when the accident *began*, the release of contamination went on for several *days*. Estimates were based on thermoluscent dosimeters on the fence and Alpha and Beta emissions weren't even measured.
Because of the weather conditions it was known that emissions from TMI travelled a long way and were measured in Albany, NY. Joeseph Hendrie (former chairman of the NRC) was quoted (at the time) "We are operating almost totally in the in the blind, [Governor Thornburgh's] information is ambiguous, mine is non-existent and - I don't know - it's like a couple of blind men staggering aroun
Nothing that you have said changes the *facts*, a radionuclide that transmutes through a nuclear reaction is more radioactive than *anything* a coal plant puts out. Of course the meme is carefully crafted to refer to the reactor and not the rest of the nuclear industry. As if mine tailings don't leave toxic and radioactive matrerials behind, as if the enrichment process doesn't pump out more CFC114 than *all* other industries in the US and leave behind so much DU behind that it is used as munitions that will cause genetic mutations in Iraqi children for generations or that the problems of spent fuel containment still hasn't been resolved.
It just presumes everyone will remain ignorant to just how many vectors for the nuclear industry to release radioactive effluent into the environment and believe in the magic that somehow coal is worse
Coal releases Uranium, Thorium, Radium, Radon, and Polonium into the atmosphere, how are those less radioactive than what a nuclear powerplant generally doesn't release?
Of course this stupid meme has to be qualified by the phrase “In normal operation” to distance the nuclear industry from it's many 'incidents' where radioactive elements are released into the environment. Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and a plethora of 'accidents' that, because it's “an accident”, doesn't get included in the radiation released by nuclear power plants cause it's “not normal operations”. Beside Nuclear power plants release Noble gasses roughly every two weeks, which whilst benign when released, decay into deadlier elements, and thats NRC standard operating procedure for all nuclear plants.
Nuclear power plants leak radioactive elements into the environment, it has happened and it continues to happen. The peaceful use of nuclear power will *always* be attached to nuclear weapons because *it can be done*. I've never heard of a city being blown up by a coal bomb, or a solar plant going critical. The fact is Nuclear power will never be benign, because it isn't. Not that I'm an advocate of coal, but the worst case scenario I can expect from a coal power station is a fire, the worst case scenario from a nuclear power plant is the rendering of 3000 Sqkms of land uninhabitable and nuclear fallout over an entire continent. That is the reality of a nuclear power plants no matter how this stupid meme tries to spin it.
This looks like quite serious explosion, especially occurring on a nuclear power plant. It would be difficult to imagine that any sort of functioning cooling is operating on that reactor anymore.
Let's just hope that it was an ancillary building, structure or unit that suffered the explosion and not an actual core explosion. This is really the type of things that nightmares are made of, especially for the Japanese people. If this is an actual core breach then I'd be checking the prevailing wind if I was in the Northern hemisphere and pray for rain, which will limit the fallout.
Biggest Japanese earthquake in 1400 years just happened too, its not like nuclear reactors are running around killing people yearly.
Actually, yes they are. The reason they are is that once a radioactive isotope is released into the environment it bio-concentrates in the food chain. If it is eventually eaten by a human it will continue to be a radiation emitter inside the body. Where it ends up inside the body depend on the element it analogues. For example, caesium (138 - I think) looks like iodine to the body - so the body deposits it in the thyroid gland. As the radionuclide emits radiation in that part of the body cancer begins to gestate expressing itself as full blown cancer at the end of the incubation period.
DOn't forget it's not just reactors that release radioactive isotopes, but the whole process. Chernobyl, Windscale and TMI are still killing people today and will go one killing people whenever a radioactive isotope from those accidents is ingested. Once the person dies and decays (or worse is cremated) the isotope is freed from the body and the process begins all over again until the radionuclide decays into it's daughter product.
You know that coal puts out more radiation than nuclear power right?
People keep on saying this but the thing they seem to miss is that they are un-enriched isotopes, i.e they are at natural levels from the coal smoke. Radiation released for a nuclear power plant is far more radioactive, per microgram, because first they have been enriched to fissile levels and then they activated within a fission reaction.
I know it's not just you but it's a really misleading idea. The reality is that radioactive isotopes released from a reactor are vastly more varied and concentrated than anything a coal plant will *ever* release.
The only real saving grace is that this effort could actually be such a mirror for man kind, and accelerate our understanding of ourselves, if only slightly.
Maybe all we will discover is that if you have a *really* big network of interconnected nodes functioning in parallel and a good handling of metastable states you get a reasonable facsimile of intelligence. Maybe that's all intelligence is, after all, humans provide a pretty good facsimile of intelligence - but they aren't very logical.
The problem with predictions on costs, its that you have no idea how much the cable will cost, and hence estimated costs are literally just made up. There is simple no way to know what the cable will cost.
Well I think that you have to start somewhere and an estimate that is a ballpark figure is as good a place to start as anywhere. Hey by the time a S.E is implemented it may even be cheaper.
As for disruptive technology. Not really.Not nearly as disruptive as CNT... It would/will be a big deal.
Absolutely, CNT will certainly enable many things like multi kilometre high sky scrapers, super sonic railways under the ocean, lightweight passenger vehicles, breeder reactors that work, the list goes on and are not limited to just an S.E.
However such a material is so useful in so many different ways, that we don't need a space elevator as a reason to research it.
This is how i see it happening. First we finally get bulk CNT with +60GPa strength, but they are expensive(try buying 1kg of SWCNT today)....Note that there was little disruption in this case due to the high initial cost of the fibers.
Agree, I just wonder what the first industry to use it will be and how we can force government to get some emphasis on making it happen.
But even if the fibers are really cheap. Then it is *cheaper* to make rockets too, and fuel is cheap. This is left out of economic analysis from space elevator proponents. They assume the break trough can only be used for the elevator and leave launch costs of rockets where they are without the break trough.
The economic analysis conducted in the NIAC study focused on implementation cost of an S.E and it's out of scope for it to investigate anything else. I'm sure that CNT will bring significant advancement in launch technology perhaps space planes will become a reality but 1 million tons of payload is still a million tons of payload and I think to get that sort of bulk from earths gravity well will still take an S.E. Any economic analysis of moving cargo to and from space in bulk means that the cost per kilo has to be low and I'm not sure what other technology, that is practically within our grasp, will actually be able to do that.
We could build a railway bridge across the ocean. It would a lot more capacity compared to airports. But we don't. Because its just not economic. This is like that, in more ways than one. Airports are flexible with the routes they fly, while you have to make a bridge point to point. A space elevator is the same. Its useless for LEO access, and you still need rockets if you want to go anywhere where but ~GEO.
I'm not sure if you're referring to fountains of paradise and the bridge over the Atlantic but it might become economic with CNT. LEO may be available by having a vehicle that can drop of the cable at the right moment, I don't know. It just maybe a function of later versions of a S.E where stations are actually situated on the cable and hundreds of S.E's all over the world provide any nation with access to space via a grid around the earth as one of many ways to access space.
I agree with you that CNT won't be exclusively used for a S.E but it's a good bet that with CNT technology maturing a S.E won't be that far behind. I hope it does, we need to get of this rock.
Sanity in copyright law? Gosh, you look different. Haven't seen you for years. How's life? Must be horrible, you look like an abuse victim. You sure you're not taking drugs?
They call me Toot now. Sometimes I cut myself to relieve the pain...
60 is enough for carbon since the density is about 2000-3000kg m^-3. However its not a given that bulk cable will have even close to that strength. All materials have a bulk strength much lower than the "theoretical bond strength". Basically you are fighting entropy. A few mm of fiber without defects is easy. A few meters is harder, 50,000km.... good luck. There is already one paper that suggested that bulk CNT will not do the job since defects can "slip" just like in metals (more complex in CNT however).
Indeed, though can we expect that the manufacturing process will get better as it matures. It's not unreasonable to expect the production runs of the material to achieve a third, perhaps half of the theoretical bond strength. I would also expect that the first 10 production S.Es would be run well below their theoretical load capacity.
If you can get a bulk cable that is strong enough, you still have some very big obstacles. One that you just never see addressed is the massive amounts of energy that are stored in the strained fibers. At 63GPa, even 1mm of strain is 63MJ per m^2. When a micro meteorite hits some fibers that energy got to go somewhere, there is very real possibility that you just can't make "rip stop" CNT cable.
Very true, but micro meteorite hits, atomic oxygen, ribbon infall and a number of other issues were investigated in the Edwards paper because they were attempting to produce a defendable S.E design. There is little doubt though that the ribbon is the most technically challenging part of actually building a space elevator and it is appropriate to raise those concerns.
However as I said before. The biggest obstacle IMO is economic.
I've mentioned costs next but I suspect that the actual imperative to build a S.E is missing and perhaps, as it would certainly be a disruptive technology, not wanted. Considering that many traditional industries would be threatened creating a political incentive to build a S.E would be far more challenging than any technical challenge. As we saw with the space program once the political will exists all technical problems can be overcome.
Once you have 63GPa CNT bulk material, you can make rockets out of it, with pretty magical weight ratios. Or even launch loops or whatever. Its not a given that a space elevator will be the best investment.
The Edwards paper involved 20 institutions and some 50 participants. Whilst original estimates were that a S.E could not be operational for at least 300 years the NIAC paper *could* be operating in 15 years for an estimated cost of $15Billion (in 2003 dollars) with a realistic expectation of it operating between 15 to 50 years.
This doesn't mean that the S.E would be an exclusive access to space and things that you mention wouldn't also be done but what I am considering is the type of structure that can put 100,000 tons into orbit. I'm not expecting that to happen immediately but I'm not certain what other means would be available to do that without being science fiction.
When the concept of a S.E was first devised there were 15 technical challenges that had to be overcome, today one technical challenge remains and that is the ribbon. We're not laughing at the idea and saying it's impossible - we're discussing the technical challenges.
We have materials with tensile strength in the GPa range. Some very high strength steels even have that (~2GPa) and glass fiber does as well. Some carbon fiber is up in the 3-5GPa region. However a space elevator needs strength to weight *ratio* (steel is poor while carbon fiber is the best so far). Almost the whole structure is supporting itself.
I should have been more specific. According to Bradley C. Edwards, Ph.D the author of "The Space Elevator, NIAC Phase II Final Report" a S.E needs material with 100 GPa strength. He also reports that early testing of CNT have tensile strengths of 63 GPa and a theoretical strength of 300 GPa in the 10s of grams range.
Indeed. Focusing our effort on the last part of creating a space elevator, the long strand carbon nanotubes, would be a key part of a presence in space because it will also allow us to build larger and more massive structures in space. I'm sure there are plenty of innovative ways to build in space with our existing materials but as there is no magical shield technology, ice or regolith is more likely.
Having a building material with strength in the gigapascal range would certainly be a great starting point.
Backronyms are acronyms where the phrase was created such that it fits whatever the acronym they desired happened to be, instead of actually appropriately naming something and then figuring out what the acronym is.
What you're thinking of is a recursive acronym. You can also have recursive backronyms.
Slashdot Mirror
It's very important to find out what has happened to reactor number 3 as it is the one powered by Mox fuel and also has the cooling "pond" next to it. This video of Fukushima reactor 3 explosion shows some heavy components being thrown in the air so it would be good to get some exact data about what is going on there.
It is on the record that this reactor facility has concealed safety issues from regulatory authorities in 2004, if I remember correctly.
Maybe they are busy trying to stop a Nuclear reactor from melting down. Some things do have to take precedent over blogging.
I'm only being half facetious.
But completely insightful.
Uh, what?
There has been nothing in the news about this and it sounds like the type of thing they would have picked up on. Care to offer some links to these personal blogs? Which amongst other things, how are they blogging?
You don't have to be a genius to work it out.There is simply not enough people to limit their exposure as the reports I hear is only 50-70. How soon they die is a matter of whether it is 10mSv/h or 400mSv/h we just don't know. But since we know that they have to put lead in the belly of the helicopters and they can't fly over the top to douse it with water says that it's pretty high.
When Carter was cleaning up Nuclear waste he was in a full radiation suit, ran into the affected area, shoveled radioactive material for 1minute and 29 seconds and then ran out. He received his full yearly dose in that time.
it should be concerning that some locations were receiving exposure of up to 10 mSv/hr.
I've been hearing reports of up to 400mSv/hr at the plant.
You should head on over there and help out. You'd be fine, there is no danger. You could do some good.
Oh, but it has abundant stigma. Theres Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, The graceful Lake Karachay and now Fukushima!
You are clearly, delusional.
You are not in possession of all the facts.
Evidently, not enough.
"more modern and much, much safer design" Pebble Bed, Thorium,. Molten Salt.
I think your post demonstrates you are not thinking any further than existing designs.
If you read my previous posts you'll see I've offered an opinion on not just reactors, but industry development. They proposes a method for spent fuel containment that includes a mechanism to develop Fast Neutron burner reactors. In a planned manner, with fissile ash containment and reactor core decommission, cool down and long term core containment designed in, is available to read.
Pebble Bed reactors have well documented failure and design issues so I guess you didn't even bother researching that did you?
The outputs of Thorium reactors is Thallium 233 and still needs proper spent fuel containment so the logical place to begin building new reactors is to design proper geologically stable fuel containment. Even if you implemented it tomorrow you *still* have to find a place to put 70,000 tons of plutonium and a lot more.
The reality is this: as long as the anti nuke people insist on throwing road blocks in front of every step of every new initiative, not only will old designs continue to stay in operation, but the newer and much, much safer designs won't even make to the drawing board.
I really think the type of thinking that you engage in is obsolete. Categorising the debate into "pro" or "anti" ignores the fact that there are real problems to solve *already*. You want reactors build cause your a "pro", the "anti" doesn't want a reactor built and I think the issue of spent fuel containment is one that has to be resolved before any new large scale reactor developments can be deployed.
The main concern is that there is no where to put all that spent fuel hanging out near to nuclear reactors. This problem is especially highlighted in these reactors as they had spent fuel *above* the reactors. Spent fuel containment in a permanent way is a known, large, engineering challenge that is also necessary. I think what you fail to understand is that these are engineering challenges so large that they will probably change the way the economy works if they are to be implemented in a way that includes nuclear power.
And that my be a bigger challenge than the entire nuclear industry itself.
But anti-nuke activists will consider this the worse tragedy and use it at every chance to fight against the building of more modern and much, much safer designs.
A Nuclear industry panel (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy, Northern States Power and Commonwealth Edison) proposed design recommendations specifically targeted at reducing the opportunities to sabotage a nuclear reactor installation and improve safety. The AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design. AP-1000 is a rehash of the Standard Westinghouse Nuclear Utility Power Plant (SNUPPs) examples of which are installed at Wolf Creek and Callaway, you will note in the picture the uncanny resemblence to the AP-1000 design (and similar capacity).
The design changes have been made for economic reasons, not to engineer the reactor installations so they are hardened, if anything they are more vulnerable to attack. The new design does not take the opportunity to implement design improvements that the industry *itself* recommended on the behest of the NRC. It's not best of breed, it's the whelp of the pack, the solid engineering improvements have not be put into the design. For accident mitigation the EPR design is better. Briefly the buildings that service the reactor are split into four (main) operational divisions (and the reactor containment). An accident, failure or maintenance in the other areas can be mitigated by the other divisions.
Consider TMI-2, it was designed with thicker containment than most other reactors so it was resistant to an aircraft crash. Even that suffered from voids that collapsed in the containment building. Aircraft attack on a Nuclear facility is a viable threat, and gravity cooling won't mitigate containment volume vs thermal power, containment is the last thing you want to loose in the event of an accident. Available evidence suggests process and design conducted in the Nuclear Industry are made to suit an economic outcome as opposed to solid engineering principles. Case in point, the design of the AP-1000 where the ratio of containment volume to thermal power is below that of today’s PWRs. That increases the risk of containment over-pressurization and failure in event of a severe accident.
I am not Pro-Nuclear - I do not believe what I am being told about Nuclear power and it's not hard to uncover what is going on.
I am not Anti-Nuclear - In the long term we may have to mitigate Nuclear industry transuranics into fissile ash when materials technology has advanced enough for a proper breeder program.
I think your preemptive statement plays on not one but three disasters in Japan and demonstrates you need to acquire more actual knowledge on the subject. The first and most obvious design improvement recommended was to build Nuclear reactors underground.
The reality is this "more modern and much, much safer design" for a commercial nuclear power reactor you speak of is simply to expensive to implement.
Everyone's getting excited over the nuclear plants, and ignoring the thousands that are still are dying due to just water. Why is radiation so much scarier? Water kills faster. /rant.
It's not so much an issue of radiation but of radionuclide release into the environment. Radiation dissipates, radionuclides are a source of radiation that dissipate as they decay over many years.
There are a lot of *ifs* at the moment but the central concern is if the explosion was from the result of a core breaching into the atmosphere or an ancillary component. *If* there is a core breach and material from the core has made it out into the surrounding environment then you are looking at a situation where the exclusion zone of the surrounding area becomes permanent, much the way it has at Chernobyl, relative to the scale of the accident and rendering that area uninhabitable.
In reality there are two or three disasters here each with their own characteristics. An earthquake, a Tsunami and a reactor accident. A reactor accident has an initial burst of activity and then pans out slowly over many years and decades as escaped radionuclide do their damage in the populace. A flood event kills but it's over in a few weeks. Radionuclide contamination can go on killing for as long as they are radioactive and circulating in the environment.
You do know humans have radioactive isotopes in us without nuclear power or coal plants right?
You do know that 1 millionth of a gram of plutonium is a carcinogenic dose in the human body, it analogues iron when presented to a human metabolism, as high energy alpha emitter in the body it is extremely toxic. From World Nuclear Association's website on the Chernobyl disaster ;
5% of a 160 ton Nuclear reactor core that was about to be refueled - let's call it 100 tons, that's 5 tons of radioactive core into the atmosphere. At conservative estimates thats 5000,000,000,000 fatal doses. If we accept that an extremely conservative estimate of 1% of this makes it into the food chain via bio-accumulation and of that a conservative estimate of 1% of people are exposed and a conservative 1% of those exposed actually get some sort of fatal cancer that's 5,000,000 fatalities.
So please don't try to convince me that I can have pu-239 in me without a nuclear plant.
Radioactive decay has been occurring in humans since the first one was born in Africa.
Please don't be ridiculous, you know very well we are talking about radioactive isotope emissions from the nuclear industry. You focus on the reactors only instead of the entire industrial process over which radioactive isotope emission is inevitable. These are the types of radioactive isotopes that eventually end up bio-concentrating;
Mine tailing: radioactive mine tailings from open cut mining where ever it has occurred, radon 220, radium 226, thorium etc. Enrichment: U-238 or DU. Used as weapon projectile, is pyrophoric and burns into a radioactive powder. Groundwater contamination from leaking Hexafluoride tanks Reactor facility: tritium, iodine 131, xenon 141, 143, 144, cerium 141, 143, 144, tritium, tritium and tritium and Noble Gasses which decay Into more dangerous daughter products (Xenon 137, Krypton 90, rubidium 90, strontium 90, Xenon 135, xenon 133, krypton 85, Argon 39). Of course no epidemiological studies have been performed on the noble gas venting which are released hourly from *all* Nuclear reactors. 4000 gallons of primary coolant water PER DAY containing plutonium 238,239,241, technetium 99, iodine 129, carbon 14 and *ahem* tritium. That's just the authorised effluents not the accidents. Reactor decommissioning: cobalt 60, iron 55, nickel 63. Radioactive Waste: Plutonium, Strontium 90, Iodine 131, Cesium 137 and on and onThose radioactive isotope emissions have been going on since the nuclear industry began, so which of them would you prefer to be decaying in your body.
Tens of thousands of humans die a year from natural Radon while deaths from nuclear accidents number in the single digits a year.
At TMI large amounts of contamination were released beyond Nuclear Industry assurances. The gamma radiation monitors on the top of the auxiliary building were not designed to measure such high concentrations and they went off the scale when the accident *began*, the release of contamination went on for several *days*. Estimates were based on thermoluscent dosimeters on the fence and Alpha and Beta emissions weren't even measured.
Because of the weather conditions it was known that emissions from TMI travelled a long way and were measured in Albany, NY. Joeseph Hendrie (former chairman of the NRC) was quoted (at the time) "We are operating almost totally in the in the blind, [Governor Thornburgh's] information is ambiguous, mine is non-existent and - I don't know - it's like a couple of blind men staggering aroun
Have you even looked at du related birth defects in Iraq?, do they count as nuclear industry victims?
It just presumes everyone will remain ignorant to just how many vectors for the nuclear industry to release radioactive effluent into the environment and believe in the magic that somehow coal is worse
Coal releases Uranium, Thorium, Radium, Radon, and Polonium into the atmosphere, how are those less radioactive than what a nuclear powerplant generally doesn't release?
Of course this stupid meme has to be qualified by the phrase “In normal operation” to distance the nuclear industry from it's many 'incidents' where radioactive elements are released into the environment. Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and a plethora of 'accidents' that, because it's “an accident”, doesn't get included in the radiation released by nuclear power plants cause it's “not normal operations”. Beside Nuclear power plants release Noble gasses roughly every two weeks, which whilst benign when released, decay into deadlier elements, and thats NRC standard operating procedure for all nuclear plants.
Nuclear power plants leak radioactive elements into the environment, it has happened and it continues to happen. The peaceful use of nuclear power will *always* be attached to nuclear weapons because *it can be done*. I've never heard of a city being blown up by a coal bomb, or a solar plant going critical. The fact is Nuclear power will never be benign, because it isn't. Not that I'm an advocate of coal, but the worst case scenario I can expect from a coal power station is a fire, the worst case scenario from a nuclear power plant is the rendering of 3000 Sqkms of land uninhabitable and nuclear fallout over an entire continent. That is the reality of a nuclear power plants no matter how this stupid meme tries to spin it.
Please MOD PARENT UP.
This looks like quite serious explosion, especially occurring on a nuclear power plant. It would be difficult to imagine that any sort of functioning cooling is operating on that reactor anymore.
Let's just hope that it was an ancillary building, structure or unit that suffered the explosion and not an actual core explosion. This is really the type of things that nightmares are made of, especially for the Japanese people. If this is an actual core breach then I'd be checking the prevailing wind if I was in the Northern hemisphere and pray for rain, which will limit the fallout.
Biggest Japanese earthquake in 1400 years just happened too, its not like nuclear reactors are running around killing people yearly.
Actually, yes they are. The reason they are is that once a radioactive isotope is released into the environment it bio-concentrates in the food chain. If it is eventually eaten by a human it will continue to be a radiation emitter inside the body. Where it ends up inside the body depend on the element it analogues. For example, caesium (138 - I think) looks like iodine to the body - so the body deposits it in the thyroid gland. As the radionuclide emits radiation in that part of the body cancer begins to gestate expressing itself as full blown cancer at the end of the incubation period.
DOn't forget it's not just reactors that release radioactive isotopes, but the whole process. Chernobyl, Windscale and TMI are still killing people today and will go one killing people whenever a radioactive isotope from those accidents is ingested. Once the person dies and decays (or worse is cremated) the isotope is freed from the body and the process begins all over again until the radionuclide decays into it's daughter product.
You know that coal puts out more radiation than nuclear power right?
People keep on saying this but the thing they seem to miss is that they are un-enriched isotopes, i.e they are at natural levels from the coal smoke. Radiation released for a nuclear power plant is far more radioactive, per microgram, because first they have been enriched to fissile levels and then they activated within a fission reaction.
I know it's not just you but it's a really misleading idea. The reality is that radioactive isotopes released from a reactor are vastly more varied and concentrated than anything a coal plant will *ever* release.
The only real saving grace is that this effort could actually be such a mirror for man kind, and accelerate our understanding of ourselves, if only slightly.
Maybe all we will discover is that if you have a *really* big network of interconnected nodes functioning in parallel and a good handling of metastable states you get a reasonable facsimile of intelligence. Maybe that's all intelligence is, after all, humans provide a pretty good facsimile of intelligence - but they aren't very logical.
Its interesting that you think epistemology actually plays a part for the flipping computer.
Wellll that's only half the story. You'll get very little in the way of logic unless it's a flopping computer as well.
get-it, logic gates! flip flop!,,,bwahahahahaha
I'm sure there was a propagation delay before people got that one,,, da bom tish
The problem with predictions on costs, its that you have no idea how much the cable will cost, and hence estimated costs are literally just made up. There is simple no way to know what the cable will cost.
Well I think that you have to start somewhere and an estimate that is a ballpark figure is as good a place to start as anywhere. Hey by the time a S.E is implemented it may even be cheaper.
As for disruptive technology. Not really.Not nearly as disruptive as CNT... It would/will be a big deal.
Absolutely, CNT will certainly enable many things like multi kilometre high sky scrapers, super sonic railways under the ocean, lightweight passenger vehicles, breeder reactors that work, the list goes on and are not limited to just an S.E.
However such a material is so useful in so many different ways, that we don't need a space elevator as a reason to research it. This is how i see it happening. First we finally get bulk CNT with +60GPa strength, but they are expensive(try buying 1kg of SWCNT today). ...Note that there was little disruption in this case due to the high initial cost of the fibers.
Agree, I just wonder what the first industry to use it will be and how we can force government to get some emphasis on making it happen.
But even if the fibers are really cheap. Then it is *cheaper* to make rockets too, and fuel is cheap. This is left out of economic analysis from space elevator proponents. They assume the break trough can only be used for the elevator and leave launch costs of rockets where they are without the break trough.
The economic analysis conducted in the NIAC study focused on implementation cost of an S.E and it's out of scope for it to investigate anything else. I'm sure that CNT will bring significant advancement in launch technology perhaps space planes will become a reality but 1 million tons of payload is still a million tons of payload and I think to get that sort of bulk from earths gravity well will still take an S.E. Any economic analysis of moving cargo to and from space in bulk means that the cost per kilo has to be low and I'm not sure what other technology, that is practically within our grasp, will actually be able to do that.
We could build a railway bridge across the ocean. It would a lot more capacity compared to airports. But we don't. Because its just not economic. This is like that, in more ways than one. Airports are flexible with the routes they fly, while you have to make a bridge point to point. A space elevator is the same. Its useless for LEO access, and you still need rockets if you want to go anywhere where but ~GEO.
I'm not sure if you're referring to fountains of paradise and the bridge over the Atlantic but it might become economic with CNT. LEO may be available by having a vehicle that can drop of the cable at the right moment, I don't know. It just maybe a function of later versions of a S.E where stations are actually situated on the cable and hundreds of S.E's all over the world provide any nation with access to space via a grid around the earth as one of many ways to access space.
I agree with you that CNT won't be exclusively used for a S.E but it's a good bet that with CNT technology maturing a S.E won't be that far behind. I hope it does, we need to get of this rock.
Blood is mostly water. Urine is mostly water as well, so is vodka. Blood is not mostly vodka.
In Soviet Russia vodka waters you!
Most women will make poor decisions then throughout their whole life, since most of them suffer from TBS.
(Tiny Bladder Syndrome)
Maybe this is one of those times when it's appropriate to say Piss Off.
Sanity in copyright law? Gosh, you look different. Haven't seen you for years. How's life? Must be horrible, you look like an abuse victim. You sure you're not taking drugs?
They call me Toot now. Sometimes I cut myself to relieve the pain...
Thank you for such a thoughtful post.
Indeed, though can we expect that the manufacturing process will get better as it matures. It's not unreasonable to expect the production runs of the material to achieve a third, perhaps half of the theoretical bond strength. I would also expect that the first 10 production S.Es would be run well below their theoretical load capacity.
Very true, but micro meteorite hits, atomic oxygen, ribbon infall and a number of other issues were investigated in the Edwards paper because they were attempting to produce a defendable S.E design. There is little doubt though that the ribbon is the most technically challenging part of actually building a space elevator and it is appropriate to raise those concerns.
I've mentioned costs next but I suspect that the actual imperative to build a S.E is missing and perhaps, as it would certainly be a disruptive technology, not wanted. Considering that many traditional industries would be threatened creating a political incentive to build a S.E would be far more challenging than any technical challenge. As we saw with the space program once the political will exists all technical problems can be overcome.
The Edwards paper involved 20 institutions and some 50 participants. Whilst original estimates were that a S.E could not be operational for at least 300 years the NIAC paper *could* be operating in 15 years for an estimated cost of $15Billion (in 2003 dollars) with a realistic expectation of it operating between 15 to 50 years. This doesn't mean that the S.E would be an exclusive access to space and things that you mention wouldn't also be done but what I am considering is the type of structure that can put 100,000 tons into orbit. I'm not expecting that to happen immediately but I'm not certain what other means would be available to do that without being science fiction.
When the concept of a S.E was first devised there were 15 technical challenges that had to be overcome, today one technical challenge remains and that is the ribbon. We're not laughing at the idea and saying it's impossible - we're discussing the technical challenges.
We have materials with tensile strength in the GPa range. Some very high strength steels even have that (~2GPa) and glass fiber does as well. Some carbon fiber is up in the 3-5GPa region. However a space elevator needs strength to weight *ratio* (steel is poor while carbon fiber is the best so far). Almost the whole structure is supporting itself.
I should have been more specific. According to Bradley C. Edwards, Ph.D the author of "The Space Elevator, NIAC Phase II Final Report" a S.E needs material with 100 GPa strength. He also reports that early testing of CNT have tensile strengths of 63 GPa and a theoretical strength of 300 GPa in the 10s of grams range.
Two words: Space elevator.
Indeed. Focusing our effort on the last part of creating a space elevator, the long strand carbon nanotubes, would be a key part of a presence in space because it will also allow us to build larger and more massive structures in space. I'm sure there are plenty of innovative ways to build in space with our existing materials but as there is no magical shield technology, ice or regolith is more likely.
Having a building material with strength in the gigapascal range would certainly be a great starting point.
Backronyms are acronyms where the phrase was created such that it fits whatever the acronym they desired happened to be, instead of actually appropriately naming something and then figuring out what the acronym is.
What you're thinking of is a recursive acronym. You can also have recursive backronyms.
But can you have precursive backronyms?