Uncle Albert's Cafe and Ǽ-Theory Bistro

Any Wagers??

Hands of the DoomsDay Clock will be Moved

Like I follow the Dow, TSX FTSE, I follow the Doomday Clock

I think it will go back one minute

You made excellent points. They are pretty hypocritical, outdated and trying to stay relevant... But I remember the early sixties.

Edit: I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. My mom had five dollars in her purse and she was concerned if she should go to the store and buy cans of soup.,in case we had to head for the basement. I think I was eight and it is burned in my memory. So I check in on these guys from time to time.

One Book. If I lose.. You receive one copy on' How to Teach Physics to Your Dog'.. It should help improve your excellent skills on answering questions on the Science form:-)

By the way.. It was with a bit of sarcasm that I follow the bulletin like I follow stock indices.

To this day. My Mom still says..'Keep it under your mattress':-)

As Danny DeVito said: Of course I've got lawyers. They are like nuclear weapons: I've got em coz everyone else has. But as soon as you use them they screw everything up.

This wisdom the US military knows.. There is no strategic or tactical advantage with nuclear weapons these days. As long as there is a certain degree of smart power and continuity between administrations, there will be a gradual reduction in nuclear weapons between the two antagonists that started this mess.

Yes the gene is out of the bottle. And I do not have any idea on how to control nuclear proliferation. I read somewhere that a strategy a long the lines on how nations react to public health issues like viruses spreading could be used to contain proliferation. The start, is convincing most nations that is in their best interest.

Reactors.. Uranium reactors are a lost cause.. There is an estimate there is about an 85 year supply of uranium left to be mined at current usage. Today, supplies of the stuff are tight. They produce toxic waste that nobody has come up with a cost effective and environmental solution to store the stuff. ( Who knows maybe be will go with with the Space 1999 solution and ship it to the moon:-))

I have been reading some on research on Liquid Metal Coolant Reactors. This technology has been around since the fifties. I read somewhere not officially but people who were in the loop that this promising technology was dropped for building fast breeders to supply the four horseman with fissile material.

What is the US going to do with that material I do not know. They refined it with borrowed dollars.. Hopefully they will bury it with their own dollars.

It's not often emphasised but activity is roughly inverse to half life - another way of saying that conservation of energy applies over all time scales. How quickly can one slide down a ladder? So a very long lived isotope doesn't do much every day, so to speak, while a short lived one is quite sparky.

I recall that in the 70's the criticism of Plutonium was continually stated as being due to it's million year plus persistence ( Pu242 ~ 3.8 million years ). Now while Plutonium is bloody dangerous, that is essentially because it is a readily aerolised/ingested/absorbed alpha emitter, regardless of half-life. But the talk was always the half life, by which ( sole ) criteria the Potassium in your house bricks would be devastating by comparison ( K40 ~ 13 billion years, but note it is a beta emitter ). So a handful of Actinium is way off scale in terms of immediate danger ( longest lived isotope Ac227 ~ 212 years, most a matter of seconds to days ) compared to U237 ( half-life decades ). If you like : I'd be 'happier' in a room full of tons of HEU compared to a teaspoon of Actinium.

The traditional 'natural' decay chain of Uranium is roughly Uranium ( U235 emit alpha ) -> Thorium ( Th231 emit beta )-> Protactinium ( Pa231 emit alpha ) -> Actinium ( Ac227 emit beta ) -> Thorium ( Th227 emit alpha ) -> Radium ( Ra 223 emit alpha ) -> Radon ( Rd219 emit alpha ) -> Polonium ( Po215 emit alpha ) -> Lead ( Pb211 ).

[ You go down two protons ie. two spots on the periodic table and down four in weight with alpha decays. With beta decay you go up one spot in the periodic table and ~ no weight change. ]

Of course reactors change all that by improving the odds on other 'lesser' reactions simply because you are kicking around a lot more energy in a small volume - hence the products and evolution of the fuel composition depends on excruciating detail ( geometry, time lines, suppression, moderators .... ). I think the point of Thorium is that you can burn down quicker to Lead - so the reactor 'ash' is far less dangerous. The prior 'fast breeders' would yield weapons grade Plutonium - the design manipulated the situation to enhance that.

Other sensible design ideas stem from the the dead-man switch paradigm - if all else fails the fuel arrangement will cool and shut down by default. So you site quenching rods above the hot core, then by chopping a rope so to speak they will fall in. As opposed to raising the rods from below by an active device. Or fuel rods are shaped so that they expand when heated thus reducing their cross-section for neutron capture. So it's from the mind of what Mr Murphy would come up with had he been a nuclear technician. If only the Cold War Paranoia had been fully applied to reactor designs .....

Cheers, Mike.