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First US nukes in a generation approved.

shadron

Philosopher
shadron
Joined
Sep 2, 2005
Messages
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Good. But I thought the OP referred to bombs, I has a (distant) cousin in the trade and she needs the work.:)
 
Hey, a little ambiguity attracts the sharks.

I think resurrecting bomb tests is quite a lot larger bite to take, and a lot less justifiable.
 
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I hope this is followed by a corollary announcement, "EPA has voted 4 to 1 to delicense and decommission two 1000-MWe coal plants"
 
ehcks said:
Me too. I thought everyone thought "nuke" referred to bombs.

This is much better news than expected.
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We have many, many nuclear bombs. We don't need any more of them.

We need more clean nuclear power generating facilities, so this is a good step in the right direction.

V.
 
ben m said:
I hope this is followed by a corollary announcement, "EPA has voted 4 to 1 to delicense and decommission two 1000-MWe coal plants"
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That would be nice.

And that is the goal of supporting nuclear power.
 
Good to see Fukushima is not having the effect the anti-nuclear lobby hoped it would.
 
Stomatopoda said:
What's the shelf-life on those things, anyway?
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The tritium which is used in neutron initiators and injected into the pit in boosted fission weapons, has a half-life of 10 years. The problem is that the decay product, Helium-3 is a neutron poison (absorber), so the tritium has to be replaced fairly often to be of use. It takes 4 grams per warhead, and about 200 mg per year to maintain it.

The plutonium is also worrisome, as we don't know as much about it's metallurgy as we should. It tends to get brittle with age, and so older plutonium is going to react to explosive compression differently than newer stuff does. A lot of the current nuclear testing going on in Nevada (in a deep cave area called the LINER complex) is designed to correct that lack of knowlege, by sub-critically stressing samples with explosives and watching what happens. These tests are known as hydrodynamic nuclear tests, or hydronuclear tests.
 
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SezMe said:
There's no small contingent of 'Mericans suggesting we renew our testing program over Iran. :)
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Oh, agreed. There's a contingent of congress critters who want to start testing because they're afraid of the fore-mentioned problems with assuring the stockpile still works. And then of course there are the arms people and vested industrial interests. Atomic weapons aren't as great a money well as many think, but without them, also lost is a large amount of the reasons for other hardware, like rockets and missile submarines and bombers, which really are expensive.

But the understanding of nuclear medicine has advanced, and a greater understanding of the risks have been established in the "common folk". There is huge resistance to the bomb now, more than there ever has been before, not to speak of the international resistance. I can't think of any other issue that would be as polarizing as resuming underground testing, unless someone else wheels out their own bombs.

The dropping of bomb testing, along with the standing down of missiles and decrease in numbers of bombs on the ready line, is the one really large wave of hope that most people have felt since Armstrong landed on the moon. IMO.
 
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daenku32 said:
I posted in the econ/business section, highlighting the cost.
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Except that you did so as occurring in a vacuum, ignoring all other factors. You claimed nuclear has an install cost more than twice that of solar, ignoring the fact that nuclear produces three times as much energy on a sunny day and thousands of times as much on cloudy days.
 
Sword_Of_Truth said:
Except that you did so as occurring in a vacuum, ignoring all other factors. You claimed nuclear has an install cost more than twice that of solar, ignoring the fact that nuclear produces three times as much energy on a sunny day and thousands of times as much on cloudy days.
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Not to mention the fact that the footprint of a nuclear plant is vastly smaller than the footprint of a solar farm capable of generating a comparable amount of energy.
 
It is, after all, about time. Now we have to do on-site chemical fuel reprocessing so that we can actually use more than 5% of the fuel energy...
 
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