Recent content by Azael

In Sweden there is also Chalmers university. http://www.nephy.chalmers.se/ In the Netherlands there is a nuclear engineering program at Tu Delft http://www.rrr.tudelft.nl/en/about-faculty/departments/radiation-radionuclides-reactors/

It is very hard to speculate since all information is filtered through media and both TEPCO and the Japanese authorities are quite silent. Restoring power to the site would most probably be very beneficial, if the plants own pumps are still in operational condition after the explosions at...

Normally that is true, when one reloads a core one only ever put spent fuel into the fuel pool at BWR's. The case is special with reactor number 4 though, because reactor number 4 was shut down for some kind of maintenance and they moved all the core inventory into the spent fuel pool. That...

Im doing my PhD on thorium fuel cycles in the HTR-PM. You can check the publication lists from the university I am at (TU-Delft), plenty of nice thesis and publications regarding HTR's. Where are mostly looking at reactor physics though, but a previous PhD has done some stress analysis on...

Curious about that aswell, especialy the IFR estimate. The russians claim they can build BN fast reactors for only 25% higher capital costs than LWR's. Saying a IFR would cost tripple a LWR makes no sense. The acctual reactor is a small part of the total power plant costs. From "Economic...

ExternE is a nice study of the external effects of electricity generation. http://www.externe.info/results.html The give the results in costs, but you can dig through the study to find the loss of life per produced kWh for the different energy sources.

There is no real clear cut border betwen what is a x-ray and what is a gamma ray. The convention is to use the word x-ray when talking abouyt high energy photons produced in interactions with electrons, for instance bremsstrahlung or by knocking out a electron from a inner orbital. The word...

WIPP is also a dry repository. I honestly don't understand why americans even bother with Yucca mountain when they already have WIPP running? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPP The main advantage with the deep ocean sediment deposits if I understood it right was also that the maximum...

Well there is a big difference betwen building a 1,5MW wind power plant and a car, plenty of on site construction needs to be done. But I don't doubt it would be possible if america decided to do it. But the needed rate of constructing new nuclear power has been demonstrated so there is no doubt...

But you need atleast 3000GW installed wind capacity(assuming a optimistic 30+% capacity factor) to supply on avarage 1000GW. Thats not even touching the intermittency issue which would require another 1000GW of reliable non wind capacity that can easily load follow. So we are rather looking...

Its probably because its almost impossible to produce u-233 without u-232 contamination and u-232 has a very nasty gamma daughter in its decay chain. http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/pdf/9_1kang.pdf Didnt the US blow up a few u-233 bombs though?

I would venture to guess that the design was declassified because its very easy to design a crude plutonium producing reactor. You won't prevent any state from producing plutonium by trying to keep reactor designs secret. How hard it is to make a working bomb only those that design bombs...

Im beginning to feel horribly repetitive. But let's sum up what I have been saying. There are two paths to nuclear weapons. 1. Very difficult uranium enrichment resulting in material that is easy to make weapons off. 2. Very easy plutonium production resulting in material that is hard...

Do you have any reason to assume they would not take the plutonium route to bombs instead if Khan hadnt spread enrichment technology? North koreas bomb was suposedly a plutonium bomb(hence why it fizzled). North koreas magnox reactors are fueled by natural uranium, they did pursue enrichment...

Yes but producing plutonium is much simpler than enrichening uranium and a plutonium producing reactor can be more easily hidden than a enrichment plant. Well take sweden as a perfect example. We more or less had all the infrastructur needed in the 60's to make plutonium based nuclear...