Posted on 11/23/2004 4:11:14 PM PST by LibWhacker
Very interesting post. Thank you.
And you can, of course, extract energy from steam as well. Interesting story. Thanks for posting.
Does this sound backwards to you as it does to me?
If it stopped absorbing Neutrons as water was deminished that would SPEED UP the reaction.
In water moderated reactors, like this one. Water temperature has an inverse coefficient of reactivity.
at least that is how it was explained to me in school. Which is why nuke boats run a little better with cold primary coolant.
Nothing that wasn't studied in beginning Nuclear Engineering classes decades ago.
Yep, sounds backward to me, too. And I can't pretend to understand it. Thought it was fascinating, though, that there was a natural fission reactor on Earth that ran safely, unattended for 150 million years!
You are absolutely correct. More later.
What a bunch of crap! I safely stored the waste products for 2 BILLION years! Guess that was enough time for them to decay to NOTHING! We in the nucular (spelling intentional) have alway said that the Romans had nuclear power because they solidified their waste (mostly Co-60) in concrete drums (like we do today), then the drums rusted away. Now we call them columns. (and yes, I'm kidding)
As for "and storing its own waste in a safe manner.", others I've read (ages ago) have hypothesized the site as one of the main drivers of the initial diversification of life through the halo of higher than normal radiation induced mutation around the structure...
Depends on the type of reactor the dynamics of the natural core. Funny thing is, natural cores act have a tendency to act the opposite of what was just described, i.e, + void coefficient of reactivity. Some have the opposite effect.
The thing seems to have stopped seriously radiating waaaayy before humans evolved.
I'm not sure, but if the water absorbs an atoms neutrons, it destabilizes the atomic weight of the atom losing the neutron and that then creates the reaction with another atom. That's why as it steams out, the reaction settles don.
DOH! Burned by spellcheck!
How do we know it ran safely? Like, who was monitoring it? No animals died from its radiation? No fish suffered cancer?
This is (pun intended) a very old story, but to use it as evidence of anything is kind of silly.
Wow!! The Creator is amazing. Theres nothing new under the sun. Everything man does God has already done.
Interesting article, however, not new information. This mode of operation, to my knowledge, has been assumed since the discovery of the site.
With regard to commercial applications, the measure of the effect of water density on criticality is called Alpha T. A negative Alpha T implies that a decrease in water density promotes shutdown (as described here). A positive Alpha T implies the opposite. All US and Western commercial reactors have always, by law, been required to have a negative Alpha T. The Soviet RBMK reactor (think Chernobyl) OTOH had a positive Alpha T.
The principle described therefore has always been a bedrock of Western commercial reactor design.
Nuclear waste is radioactive in terms of being very harmful to human health for 100,000 years. It doesn't return to the background radiation that natural uranium has for upwards of 1,000,000 years.
If we dispose of it in Yucca mountain for example, who will be able to read the operations manual in 100,000?
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