Every so often we hear something in the news about nuclear reactors fueled with highly enriched uranium (HEU); usually with regards to nuclear weapons proliferation. Back in the good old days both the US and USSR constructed over a hundred small HEU-fueled reactors and shipped them all over the world – Uruguay had one, there were some in [...]
In that relatively dead news time between Christmas and New Years the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that 8 sailors from the USS Ronald Reagan were suing the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) on the grounds that TEPCO had covered up the severity of the Fukushima accident and that, as a result, the sailors had been [...]
As I discussed in a past posting on uranium enrichment, the uranium we dig out of the ground is unable to sustain a nuclear chain reaction without a lot of coaxing – it has to be immersed in heavy water or surrounded by graphite as opposed to natural (light) water. This is why we enrich [...]
As I mentioned in my first posting on thorium reactors, this is a huge topic that deserves a careful discussion – even four postings isn’t enough to do justice to the topic, but it’s a good start. So this will be my last posting on thorium reactors for now, but I might come back to [...]
At one point John Kennedy predicted there might be over 20 nuclear powers by the mid-1970s – one of the triumphs of the Non-Proliferation Treaty is the fact that, as of the year 2000, there were fewer than 10 and only North Korea was added to the total since then. But we know that the [...]
Last week I wrote a little bit about how fertile thorium can be turned into reactor fuel. A discussion of how a thorium reactor might differ from a uranium reactor seems a reasonable follow-up topic. The reactors I worked with in the Navy were light-water pressurized water reactors. Like virtually every reactor we have on [...]
Nearly two decades ago I took a short class on nuclear criticality safety – basically a class on how to work safely with things like enriched uranium. When we were reviewing the nuclear properties of U-235 (the isotope of uranium that fissions) I happened to notice that U-233 seemed to have a lot of advantages [...]
I was stationed on an old submarine – at the time we took it into the shipyard for decommissioning it was one of the half-dozen oldest nuclear submarines in the world. It was creaky, things stuck or broke, it was sometimes temperamental – come to think of it, pretty much the way my body is [...]
Fissile materials have been in the news a lot in recent years – Iran’s uranium enrichment program, North Korea’s continuing nuclear weapons program, the on-going nuclear security summit, and so forth. Given all of this attention this seems like a good time to talk about what fissile materials are and how they’re produced – and [...]
Growing up intermittently Catholic, I was taught about Limbo – a sort of antechamber to heaven that holds the souls of those who were never baptized by who had not committed a sin of their own. Those souls in Limbo aren’t admitted to Heaven, but neither are they sent to Hell – they are simply [...]