Posts by Fireice 7 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Sep 2010
@AC
Please join a long line of people pulling stats from their rear. [http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system/all]
Do you want to tell us about your new application that dwarfs the number of web servers?
Please, to post something intelligent in this topic you need at least a basic understanding of nuclear physics. Enriched uranuim (or any uranium isotope at all) would be the wost material to make a drity bomb apart from lead.
You are still confused about criticality as well. Criticality simply means that enough neutrons cause fission events to sustain the reaction. Any working reactor stack is critical. A bomb is super-critical because it doesn't need thermal neutrons (more complicated stuff).
Oh, yes, the dirty bomb scare pops up once again.... I thought we got over it after the Bush years considering that the only people who wrote articles about it were government spin doctors and not scientists.
Regarding the reprocessing, I think you answered your own question. They are upset about reprocessing (namely extracting Pu-239 from the fuel, which is how India and Pakistan got the bomb btw) and not the reactor bit. And, no, you can't do that in your garage.
Given the amount of thinking that you put into your post I can't believe that you missed the biggest point (others posting here are excused). Everybody can name two major nuclear power station accidents (the are no sea based power plants unless you use the other sense of the word or include some crazy on-the-spot Russian projects). Hardly anybody has heard about numerous maritime reactor accidents. Why? Comparing one to the other is like comparing a coal fired power plant to your grandma's stove.
I admire your faith in accuracy of wikipedia. I wonder why then capacity of fast breeder reactors is less than 1% of all nuclear power generation? As usual wiki is correct, but they haven't mentioned that monetary cost of enabling safe access to a live reactor far outweighs any benefits. Since we are not going to run out of U-235 in this millennium this is a pretty sensible decision in my opinion.
A nuclear bomb and a nuclear power plant are two completely different physical processes. For starters bomb uses fast neutrons and a power plant needs thermal. Worst that can happen in a plant is a meltdown, which stops the chain reaction but leaves behind extremely radioactive lava followed by a conventional explosion (most probably steam, as was the case in Chernobyl). Rest is just Hollywood stuff, I'm afraid.
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