A Nuclear Renaissance?

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Tuesday, March 30, 2004 | VIJAY V. VAITHEESWARAN

[July 4th]

Cool tour. Thanks.

[MrB]

Though technically, Chernobyl was a nuclear reactor, it really wasn't designed to be a power plant, according to my Nuke Engineering prof (who worked on THE project).

Chernobyl was designed as a weapons grade enrichment facility, which made it a lot more dangerous.

[Petronski]

"...you're down into the attocurie per cubic gigaparsec concentration range..."

Pretending for a moment that some of us are not scientists, that's a very low range, I take it?

[MrB]

Yes, hippies are probably the main reason that nuke power isn't being used.

Pure ignorance on their part, anyway. In operation, a nuke plant releases less radiation into the environment than a coal fired plant, and it's perfectly clean while in operation.

Some genius will figure out the waste problem. And if we weren't following the Amy Carter school of nuke waste disposal, we could recycle and reduce the problem by orders of magnitude.

[Carry_Okie]

Chernobyl was a graphite pile reactor, not much more sophisticated in concept than the one Fermi built under the bleachers in Chicago.

[chimera]

Yeah, what is it that Rushkie likes to say, illustrating absurdity by being absurd...

A cubic gigaparsec is a BIG volume.

[FreedomPoster]

>>(Thread Highjack) Check this site out for a tour of Chernobyl today:

That is an awesome web site, highly recommended to all. Let's repost it, and see if it "linkifies".

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

[Peter J. Huss]

Indeed. It is the best poorly constructed web site I have visited in years. Admit it.... you are in love with Elena!!!

[Calvin Locke]

The US had only two of the graphite reactors at the time of Chernobyl. Hanford, Washington was one. Can't recall the other.

I don't know the status of either, either.

[FreedomPoster]

Drat, busted!

[chimera]

The US had only two of the graphite reactors at the time of Chernobyl. Hanford, Washington was one. Can't recall the other.

I don't know the status of either, either.

The Hanford N-Reactor went out of the plutonium/electricity production business in 1987. I think they welded the doors to the facility closed in 1998. There is currently no capability for large-scale production of plutonium in the U.S., which will have implications for the weapons stockpile in the future (and no, not 24,000 years in the future, but relatively soon, because of the buildup of decay progeny).

The other graphite-moderated system was the Fort St. Vrain HTGR, which went out of business in the early 1980s.

[Calvin Locke]

which will have implications for the weapons stockpile in the future

So, you're saying the real reason we went in to Iraq was for their plutonium???? (-;