Recent content by Morbius

kiskrof, You are correct! Since a G-M tube goes into saturation by design, it's not energy sensitive. It really only measures Becquerels. However, for an assumed source and assumed deposition medium; it can be "calibrated" to give dose. That is they make an assumption about the energy...

EXACTLY! Unfortunately, that's the problem; people can't put the risk in perspective. We have so many like Helen Caldicott preaching that any amount of radiation is deadly no matter how small; and in particular; no matter that natural exposure swamps the amount she is complaining about...

WRONG! France, UK, Russia and Japan have the facilities to do reprocessing. However, the all the other countries that have nuclear power plants, but don't have the reprocessing facilities; Sweden, for example; have one of the countries with reprocessing facilities reprocess their spent fuel...

As far as using U-233 as a weapon fuel; that was pretty much off the table. The unavoidable presence of U-232 makes U-233 a less than desireable weapons fuel. Because of that, there was never any serious consideration of using U-233 as a fuel; and the programs for producing U-235 at Oak...

Kutt, They don't! Roentgens and rads are units for two DIFFERENT quantities. It's like asking how do meters convert to kilograms and which unit is greater. Roentgens are a unit of of ionizing radiation; an amount that liberates one esu ( electro-static unit of charge ) per cubic...

That's really an apples and oranges comparison. If one reprocesses / recycles your uranium-fueled PWR spent fuel; then you don't have the plutonium isotopes in the waste stream; you only have fission products. In that case, your spent fuel storage requirements for thorium-cycle vs uranium-cycle...

An "advantage" that is made totally MOOT if one reprocesses / recycles. If the fuel cycle is closed via reprocessing / recycling, which everyone BUT the USA does; then one only has to deal with fission products; the longest lived of which is Cesium-137 with a half-life of 30 years.

QuantumPion, You do NOT need HEU to seed your thorium reactor. You just need a core that can go critical on LEU, and then you add a thorium blanket to that.

jim, The alphas are charged; doubly so. Each alpha has a charge of +2; so it feels the Coulomb ( electrostatic ) force from all the ions and all the electrons. That's why alpha radiation is so relatively short ranged; because the interaction is so strong. Prior to NIF, the lasers weren't as...

EulerFormula, I didn't say that the high foot work had anything to do with fast ignition. I was merely commenting that the most promising results of late have been coming from a different group, and not the ICF community. When I begin a new paragraph, then I'm beginning a new topic that not...

EulersFormula, Yes - during the past year, the approaches that the National Academy of Sciences recommended pursuing did NOT achieve ignition on NIF. Not achieving good energy coupling, and not achieving good symmetry can also be said for the schemes that were recommended by the National...

EulersFormula, Evidently you have a reading comprehension problem because I stated explicitly in the above post that what I was describing was a backlighting diagnostic. Evidently, you didn't understand the last paragraph where I ANALOGIZED the coordination of the backlighting technique to...

EulersForumula, I wouldn't say fast ignition "is pretty much dead", AT ALL!. As the_wolfman states, it is an ongoing area of research of the ICF research community. The research in fast ignition isn't at the experimental stage yet; but more in the theoretical and design phases as the details...

nikkom, In ICF, the fusion fuel is compressed by the X-rays from the laser drive. Is the time it takes the fuel to move so that it is compressed necesarily equal to the time that the drive acts on the fuel? Suppose I am playing baseball, and it takes 20 seconds for the ball that I hit to...

nikkom, I am not commenting on anything in the NWFAQ. I'm just saying that you aren't going to have some high-Z material stay opaque for 100 nanoseconds or more to provide your radiation "beam". In very short order, that is on very short time scales much, much less than your 100 nanoseconds (...