Green Nukes
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/
Join Elena as she speeds through Chernobyl illustrating just how many orders of magnitude seperate Chernobyl from Pennsylvania…Posted by Elvula
02/01/2010 at 05:14 PM
My only Q at this point is:If it was doable back in the 50s and we had a functioning unit then, Why is it not readily avaliable as a shovel ready technology? Or did those evil big oil guys buy that tech too and burn all the notes.Just wonderin.
As for Odumbass, if we have to wait him out 3 more years to get this rolling Im OK with that.More fuel for the fire for the good guys to pound his sorry ass with.
If this is available, if this can be exploited, this is the green energy. But you know the purpose of this government is to break us down, to make us dependent. Once we’re completely dependent on the government, then they’ll release it as the salvation of Earth.
I thought that nukes were stopped by the greens??? I guess that the tech is green as long as the dems impliment it?
Posted by Chris Edwards
02/01/2010 at 07:41 PM
Only the BAD nukes Chris. This is the GOOD nukes. You can’t make bombs with the stuff, the dangerous half-life breaks down after only 500 years (actually the really deadly part breaks down after only a day) instead of 10,000, and you can use these reactors to eat up all the radioactive waste from the other older nuke plants. Yes, you get uranium out the other end, but U233, which is not usable for bombs. It’s also a much simpler design, and it can work in small scale systems as well as large ones.
I’m all for running the whole country on electricity. Save the petroleum for making plastic.
Of course, any exothermic chemical reaction gives off heat by definition, so the warmists will have to be muzzled.The technology is not yet perfected. There are a couple of hurdles to overcome, but they may not be game killers. This could be the solution we’ve been looking for. Read the links, search for more, and form your own opinions. I’ve only known of it’s existence for a couple weeks now. And it isn’t shovel ready because the concept was set aside back in the day. And nearly forgotten about. In those days we wanted bombs as much or more than we wanted cheap electricity, so reactors that output fissionable uranium and plutonium were the ones chosen then. We don’t need any new bombs. We’ve still got far more than enough, even after getting rid of thousands of them.
I made the point that the left seems to have a greater awareness of this than the right because “earth issues” are big with them. There is no reason that there can not be Conservative Greenies. R&D has been going on for the past decade I think, so the initiative hopefully exists outside of politics. As if, but you gotta hope.
Robert Heinlein used a thorium reactor to power the spaceship in “Rocket Ship Galileo”, published in 1947. No kidding, this isn’t new technology.
Um ,No one ever said conservatives werent green on the inside. We just know it takes brains and sweat and not tears and fears to make progress happen.Nice job of doing a cram on the knowledge curve on this drew,Its just so you as I should have known.
Drew, I have watched this for a long time, in the UK any use of the term “atomic” produced a knee-jerk reaction in the left, like most things there is no thought involved just atomic will kill us all, it is a reactor so call in the ban the bomb beatnics.I am sure the media has a large guilt here, it is not in the left’s intrest in letting us have a cheap and reliable source of power, no where to attach green taxes for a start.I remember in the early 1980s talking to a boffin in Aldermaston about a reactor that uses spent and dangerous fuel and consumes most of it, allmost produces power as a by product, I had to drive through a large crowd of sub human ban the bomb idiot protestors to get in to do my job (computer terminal tech)
Posted by Chris Edwards
02/02/2010 at 06:54 AM
Elvula’s link is worth following; I may be off by several orders of magnitude (meaning that the Chernobyl accident was probably a million to ten million times worse than the Three Mile Island incident). The pictures at that web site go on for two dozen pages and show a level of devastation the West never knew or has forgotten. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people died, though this is all rumor; less than 50 actual deaths according to the UN’s WHO. But this accident took place during Soviet days, and the truth of things - the pravda - could be adjusted at will. So we will never know. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of square miles of Belorussia and Ukraine are uninhabitable. Ghost towns slowly turning back into poisoned forest.
Contrast this with Three Mile Island, which was a partial melt down but a contained one. According to the government,
That’s a bit less than half an X-ray. No deaths, no higher amounts of cancer in the years after, no glowing hole burning it’s way to China.Several independent studies have also been conducted. Estimates are that the average dose to about 2 million people in the area was only about 1 millirem.
If TMI had had a couple more sensors that allowed the staff to better understand what was going on, the problem would have been a lot less. Had ONE small valve not stuck open there would never have been any radiation released at all. As it was, the system worked as designed, and very little radiation got out.
The last thing I want to remind people of is that Chernobyl wasn’t totally an accident. It was the result of stupid people doing something stupid in a poorly designed infrastructure. To quote Elena:
On the Friday evening of April 25, 1986, the reactor crew at Chernobyl-4, prepared to run a test the next day to see how long the turbines would keep spinning and producing power if the electrical power supply went off line. This was a dangerous test, but it had been done before. As a part of the preparation, they disabled some critical control systems - including the automatic shutdown safety mechanisms.
Shortly after 1:00 AM on April 26, the flow of coolant water dropped and the power began to increase.
At 1:23 AM, the operator moved to shut down the reactor in its low power mode and a domino effect of previous errors caused an sharp power surge, triggering a tremendous steam explosion which blew the 1000 ton cap on the nuclear containment vessel to smithereens.
Some of the 211 control rods melted and then a second explosion, whose cause is still the subject of disagreement among experts, threw out fragments of the burning radioactive fuel core and allowed air to rush in - igniting several tons of graphite insulating blocks.
Once graphite starts to burn, its almost impossible to extinguish. It took 9 days and 5000 tons of sand, boron, dolomite, clay and lead dropped from helicopters to put it out. The radiation was so intense that many of those brave pilots died.
It was this graphite fire that released most of the radiation into the atmosphere and troubling spikes in atmospheric radiation were measured as far away as Sweden - thousands of miles away.
The causes of the accident are described as a fateful combination of human error and imperfect technology.
Thanks Drew. Elena’s ride was in 2004. She said then that the concrete sarcophagus around the crippled reactor was decomposing. Sounds like a question that Putin should answer. Elena’s website hasn’t had any additions in quite sometime, years in fact, but the host is still going. Amazing how many suspect agendas orbit around this…
Posted by Elvula
02/02/2010 at 11:54 AM
Greenies don’t want ANYTHING with the word ‘nuclear’ in the title.
Doesn’t matter how safe you make it, how cheap you make it,
how well you explain the science behind it or whatever.
Period.Posted by TimO
02/03/2010 at 03:53 PM
