A portable solution for global warming.

[mixedgas]

[quote=Pangolin;88398]Hehe. The best solution for Global Warming is a good sense of skepticism on the part of the American people (and then people of the world after that).

Bill, I'll agree warming is a farce, but I remember paying 4.05 a gallon a while back. If a array of say 48 nukes cuts our oil demand 10% I'm all for it.

Besides, you need a diesel or coal to start the nuke, current civil PWRs DO NOT come up from the cold start, they run the coolent pumps to warm the moderator, before pulling the rods, and those are big pumps, So you will always need at least one coal plant to restart the world.

Steve

[mixedgas]

They used very small reactors to keep weather stations and such locations in remote areas going. It is the same type of reactor used in satellites if I remember correctly.

Those are isotope decay sources, they use waste heat from the radioactive decay to drive big TE coolers in reverse. Not a reactor with criticality and neutron multiplication, by a long ways.

US versions were known as SNAP, you can google that.

The locals in the former USSR have had incidents untrained of removing the material from its shielding , with bad, but strictly localized, results. Strontium 90 was their material of choice for the USSR radioisotope power supplies.


They do have a spaced based reactor, the TOPAZ series, and a few of them are still in orbit, mainly for BIG spaced based radars.

Steve

[mixedgas]

size of a medium sized safe, all fell ill with radiation sickness and then died. Killed about 6 i think.
end quote.

yeah, cracked it open and used it as a strontium 90 "campfire".
A UN IAEA team got sent in to clean it up.
It should be mentioned that most if not all of the loggers involved could not read!

I have no problem with the above ground storage at the plant 90 miles from me. Toured the place once while one was running and two was under construction. Now that we have Homeland Security , tours dont happen. I'd have more problems with a generic chemical plant being built then a new nuke.

Steve

[300EVIL]

yeah, they also use radioactive decay supplies in some pacemakers. Pretty wild stuff.

[Lexat8]

Hehe. The best solution for Global Warming is a good sense of skepticism on the part of the American people (and then people of the world after that).

I used to be bought into the whole Global Warming thing, but as I do more and more learning myself, I become ever more skeptical.

There's a good piece called The Great Global Warming Swindle which tends to shed some light on it. Part of it can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzSzItt6h-s

By the way, there are some major inaccuracies in "An Inconvenient Truth", including the statement that the hottest year on record in recent time was 2004.

Bill

Interesting, just watched it all Having been metal trader for 20 years, xxx,xxx tonnes metal, carbon neutral maybe. hehehe
reveiw:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gre...arming_Swindle

cheers
lex

PS
Still recycling!

[buffo]

Just now getting caught up on some of the backlogged threads, and I found this jem! That mobile reactor has "SL-1 Incident" written all over it. No containment, small size (which means high reactivity), and probably no shielding either. In other words - typical for Soviet designs of the cold war era.

As for the Global Warming issue - I think skepticism is warranted. I haven't watched the video that Bill linked to yet, but I have done some research on my own, and I've already found a few real problems with the idea of man-made global warming. For one - even if the temperature is rising, who says that a stable climate is the norm? (Hint: it's not! Our climate has been changing throughout our planet's history.) Also, if CO2 is the sole contributing factor to the purported temperature rise, then why are there periods in our earth's history where the atmospheric levels of CO2 were ten times higher than they are now, yet we were in the middle of an ice age? And finally, even if you buy into the whole enchilada, it is very likely that it will still be cheaper to manage the effects of temperature change rather than spending the money to replace coal and oil.

Bottom line: more science is needed before I'm willing to sell my car and start riding a bike to work every day...

The idea of building more nuclear power plants has merit completely outside of the Global Warming debate, however. The most compelling reason is that it has the ability to wean us off foreign oil. This is good for economic and political reasons.

And if you put Navy Nuc's in charge of these new plants, I firmly believe things will be safer. For one, you'll have a limited control panel that shows you the essential information only, rather than a room full of indicators that one person can't easily scan to detect a problem. (This was one of the contributing factors in the 3 mile island accident.)

Furthermore, if you vitrify the waste into a ceramic, then you can literally bury the stuff in my yard and I won't complain one bit. But first we've got to close the fuel cycle. We're wasting 95% of the energy in the fuel the way we're doing it now. If we run it through a breeder, we'll capture the rest of that energy and also reduce the half-life of the resulting waste by several orders of magnitude.

Adam