Recent content by BHamilton

Yes. A Uranium fission yields something like 200ish MeV, whereas an individual fusion yields 17ish MeV (as noted above). Here's what you're missing that will make it more clear: the important figure is the binding energy released per nucleon in the reaction. The energy you gain per mass unit of...

I picked up Stacey 1st ed from the library for self-study. It's pretty well organized, and I'm happy with it thus far. Even thinking about buying myself a copy of the 2nd ed to hold on to. I'd recommend you also grab the errata if you go for this one. The other nice part is that the first half...

Steve Herman on twitter: looking for confirmation now EDIT: found it, http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110324e6.pdf

You seem to have mixed up the measurements and your model's predictions in your last post... With a model of I ~ I0 (x0/x)^2 exp(-mu*(x-x0)) and two points (100 meters, 4.13 mSv/hr, 300 meters, 87.7 mSv/hr) and one degree of freedom (mu), one can directly find the mu that fits the data (mu =...

Wow, that's some great fact checking there from the Daily Mail :rolleyes:

They aren't quite reversed processes. When a particle/antiparticle pair annihilate, photons always come out in pairs or threes because otherwise energy and momentum can't be conserved (a simple way to see it in this case is that the pair has some well-defined rest frame, whereas a single photon...

The effect you're talking about does contribute in positronium: in some sense it helps explain why positronium should live so long (0.1 ns). This is enormous in the sense that it is larger than the lifetime of some neutral mesons which can only decay through the weak force. (I'm thinking of the...

Nothing. If I have an antineutron here, and neutron there, they just kinda sit there and do their thing until you bring them together by some other means. It's just that a system of an electron and positron has its own mechanism to bring the two together. I'm not sure what you're asking here...

What's the status of main power at the station right now? Is there any hope of getting primary pumping going again? As I understand it, the decay heat dies off quite slowly, somewhat of a power law, so more water will need to be continually added to the pressure vessels for quite a while.

Units 1 and 2 were on standard fuel, and 3 was MOX.

Ah, here we go: the wikipedia article has a timeline, and it's in JST and its probably as accurate as anything you'll find in news sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_nuclear_accidents"

I don't have a simple link for that handy now, but the thing to remember is that JST is UTC+9, while EDT is UTC-4, so if you see times given in US Eastern, add 13 hours to get JST