nuclear power

Chris Knight's avatar

Look!  A wild George Lucas sighting!

“Nuclear Waste: Fission Products & Transuranics from Thorium & Uranium” is sincerely fascinating in its own right.  A short documentary about the valuable materials often left in used-up fuel rods from nuclear reactors and how they might be extracted.  Very interesting if you’re at all into nuclear engineering and chemistry in general.

But let’s face it: most people are going to want to see the creator of Star Wars stumbling into view on a Chicago street as research scientist Bruce Hoglund explains pyroprocessing (using molten salt and electrochemistry to pull out the desired substances).

You can choose to watch it all, OR you can fast-forward (I recommend moving it to 13:00 to get the full effect):


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Chris Knight's avatar

There’s a chap named Richard Handl in southern Sweden who is right curious about things like physics and nuclear chemistry. So he, ummmm… attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his flat’s kitchen.

But it can’t honestly be said that he had any nefarious motives, because Richard has a blog set up chronicling all the steps that he’s taken on his lil’ adventure into the world of fissionable atoms. He even documented a nuclear meltdown in his kitchen’s oven.

Turns out though that splitting atoms at home is the sort of thing that the local constabulary (not to mention the Swedish Radiation Authority) tends to frown upon. Richard Handl was arrested several days ago. He’s since been released from jail but his reactor equipment has been confiscated (and probably buried under several tons of concrete by now), but Handl is determined to continue his research at “the ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

It was twenty-five years ago today, on the morning of April 26th 1986, that the Chernobyl disaster – the very worst nuclear accident in history – happened.

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located at Pripyat in Ukraine, suffered a severe meltdown in Reactor No. 4 following an attempted experiment. The town of Pripyat was evacuated and thousands of firefighters and other workers died either during the immediate crisis or in the following weeks from radiation poisoning. The reactor ended up entombed within a “sarcophagus” and the entire area rendered a wasteland. It’ll take several thousands of more years yet before human resettlement within what has come to be known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone will be possible again. The years since have seen some very tragic results, such as birth defects and an increase in cancer rates of those who were most in the path of the radioactive cloud (which ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Like many people, I’ve been watching the developments in Japan since last week’s earthquake (now measured at being 9 or possibly even 9.1 on the Richter scale) with keen interest. Especially with the drama unfolding at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukishima: the one that has had a number of its reactor buildings violently explode (NOT “nuclear explosion” as I heard one CNN reporter claim but rather the result of too much of a build-up of steam).

And like many who are old enough to remember it, I’m led to reflect upon what happened even here in the southeast United States following the Chernobyl disaster twenty-five years ago next month. A week after that catastrophic meltdown there were slightly elevated levels of radiation measured in these parts. There was a sudden rush on potassium iodide tablets (as is happening now). A week and a half after the accident ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Sounds like a Fifties B-movie, or maybe the genesis of a new Spider-Man villain: the country’s most contaminated nuclear waste site has provided building material for swarms of wasps building their nests and now the nests themselves are loaded with radioactive isotopes of cesium and cobalt. The Hanford nuclear reservation near Yakima, Washington is currently being cleaned up and workers are having to deal with the nests, which fortunately have already been abandoned by the wasps.

I must admit: ‘twould have been a pretty awesome sight to see the skies of Yakima filled with giant glowing wasps 😛...

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Three times today I’ve been sent or otherwise directed to the following from Investor’s Business Daily…

“Hear about the 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq? No? Why should you? It doesn’t fit the media’s neat story line that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed no nuclear threat when we invaded in 2003. It’s a little known fact that, after invading Iraq in 2003, the U.S. found massive amounts of uranium yellowcake, the stuff that can be refined into nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel, at a facility in Tuwaitha outside of Baghdad. In recent weeks, the U.S. secretly has helped the Iraqi government ship it all to Canada, where it was bought by a Canadian company for further processing into nuclear fuel — thus keeping it from potential use by terrorists or unsavory regimes in the region. This has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media. Yet, as the AP

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Oddly enough this is the second story in the past few days involving Boy Scouts and hazardous materials (here’s a link to the first). Curious, that…

Anyway, last week David Hahn was sentenced to 90 days in jail for stealing smoke detectors from an apartment complex. After being caught taking one, police found 15 other smoke detectors in his apartment.

Years ago David Hahn achieved quite a bit of notoriety as “the Radioactive Boy Scout”. It was as a 15-year old kid in Michigan working on achieving his Eagle Scout that Hahn, having already earned the Atomic Energy merit badge, set out to build a full-blown nuclear breeder reactor (a reactor that not only generates energy but creates new fuel) in his parents’ shed. The entire weird story was later turned into a book. When Hahn was 17 the authorities finally caught wind of what he ...

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