Strange link..

mogster

knutm :-)

Weedpacket

I remember meeting someone who had done some work around Chernobyl post-'86; he said that when he was there he'd measure his dosage in "packets per day" - i.e., how much he'd have to smoke to have the same risk of cancer. I think I remember him saying that his dosage varied between 0.5 and 1.5ppd.

mogster

Yeah, they really got it, especially the ones extinguishing the fire in the reactor.

I spent some time googling about this yesterday, and found the attached pic on some website dedicated to cleaning up the mess.
It shows a pile of highly radioactive material from the melted core in a small room beneath the reactor itself.

Imagine this is one of the most dangerous places on earth...

knutm :-)

AdamBrill

Hmm... I wonder if there is enough left to build a bomb... 😉 It would have to be enriched, but considering that they would have a bomb afterward, that's not that big of a barrier. 🙂

They better make sure that terrorists don't get in there if there is enough left. 😃

Weedpacket

The solution about it being one of the most dangerous places on Earth (compared to, say, the caldera of Mauna Kea?) is "don't go there, then" (the person I mentioned didn't; he just travelled around the countryside looking at the local biology, and frankly, I think 1.5ppd is pretty good compared to some city smog). Me, I'm advocating a nuclear power station in New Zealand.

piersk

Isn't nuclear power one of the cleanest sources of energy (when the stations are run safely, of course)?

mogster

Well, my point wasn't to debate the pros and cons of nuclear energy here 😃
Each country must find the solution to it's energy problems, and I'm not gonna tell them what to do.

That said, the Chernobyl accident had regional consequences as well as local. Due to a weather pattern with northern winds that night, Scandinavia received a lot of the fallout. Which made us acutely aware of all the other reactors of this type built during the Soviet era, some of them more than 30 ys old.

The danger lies in lack of maintenance and skills, and in the construction of reactors of this type. Chernobyl had the old graphite reactor, where purified graphite functioned as the wessel for the fuel rods, contrary to modern reactor design, which uses water.
Graphite burns very well when the airflow is good, and the reason Chernobyl had such severe consequences was partly because they spent ten days putting out that fire.

The events that led to the disaster also shows that every rule was broken during the test that caused the breakdown.

So this accident is really not a good argument against modern nuclear energy 😉
Waste disposal is, I suppose - but then oil, coal or gas isn't exactly clean energy either.

knutm :-)

Weedpacket

Originally posted by piersk
Isn't nuclear power one of the cleanest sources of energy (when the stations are run safely, of course)?

They're certainly smaller, cleaner, more reliable and less hazardous than, say, a hydroelectric station of equivalent power. And if you aren't going to bother with weapons development or "reprocessing" as well you can leave out all those fancy "enhancements" (read: extra potential failure modes) that made messes in places like Three Mile Island, Windscale, and Chernobyl.

And as for coal-fired stations? Well, plutonium may last for thousands of years, but cadmium is forever. (And background radiation levels outside a typical nuclear power plant are lower than outside a typical coal-fired station: coal-fired power station builds don't bother with radiation safety measures.)

On the subject of that photo, I was just curious about how it was taken. If I recall rightly, one of the reasons the station controllers had to press-gang people from outside to shovel waste was because the robots that were supposed to do the job failed as their electronics were fried. Film recorded in Kiev the next day was also damaged as high-energy particles streaked through the emulsion.

mogster

I don't know how the picture was taken, but would guess this little fellow was involved.

The radiation inside the housing is far to high for humans to endure, so they sent a robot instead. Interesting it is that this technology is now in use on the Mars explorers.

knutm :-)

mogster

BTW:

Here's a screendump from the software that runs the Mars explorers.

They probably score some cred-points on using xml for the ini-files? 😃

knutm :-)

piersk

Is that from the NASA or the ill-fated Beagle mission?

mogster

The picture is from Nasa, the software probably runs on Sun HW. Much used by those guys, I believe.

Wonder what happened to Beagle?
That, and the shuttle disaster, shows that there's still some time before space exploration is really predictable.
If it is ever gonna be 😉

knutm :-)

piersk

Beagle 2 was LIA...

I have a friend who works for the team and they have now given up hope. I think it was something to do with the fact that they mis-judged the density of the atmosphere and it landed to quickly.

Maybe one day if man goes to Mars, we may find out what actually happened.

mogster

Yeah, maybe we will.
What's LIA, btw?

I liked the professor in charge - PROMINENT sideburners 😃

Used to work in a company responsible for rocket launch from the sea in the 90's, but it never took off...eh..figuratively speaking.

knutm :-)

piersk

Lost In Action... army term... apparently

mogster

Oh, of course... :p

knutm :-)

Weedpacket

You'll notice that NASA has gone back to its earlier policy of twinned missions. Fingers crossed for Cassini/Huygens in July, yeah?

mogster

Aw, I've missed that. Is it a shuttle-mission?

knutm :-)

Weedpacket

It arrives in July; if you recall a few years back the greenies were whining about it because it's nuclear powered.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/current/cassini.html

Cassini itself has already done some work; when it passed Jupiter it did some tag-teaming with Galileo. So I'm actually more concerned about the Huygens lander.