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 [...]
Quick note – I haven’t exhausted the topic of thorium, and I am incredibly gratified at the number of comments my last two postings have attracted and the thought that’s gone into them. But I wanted to take a short break from thorium since I know that not everyone is completely enamored of that particular [...]
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 used to fly quite a bit – for a decade I flew at least 50,000 miles a year, and was at more than 75,000 for nearly half that time. Every time I fly this means that cosmic rays are falling on me like rain, and continue to do so until we land. In fact, [...]
Although this may sound odd coming from a writer and blogger, words are cheap. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing if we consider all the times we’ve heard people vent about what they’d like to do – or what they plan to do – to someone who’s just upset them. Think about what our [...]
A kiloton is an abstract concept. Let’s face it – most of us have no direct understanding of what a kilogram of TNT can accomplish, let alone a million times that amount. A kiloton is just a number – like the national debt – that we know intellectually to be huge, but without a [...]
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 [...]
With the week interrupted by both the Fourth of July and a heat wave it seems a good time to serve up a few light snacks rather than a full-blown posting. So here are a few stories in the news recently – none have received a lot of attention yet; we’ll have to see what [...]