Tag Archives: nuclear

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Nuclear in China

chinese_workerContracts have been signed for the building of the first batch of Sanmen AP1000 nuclear reactors in China:

An engineering contract was signed last week towards building the Sanmen AP1000s. Real construction work should begin within one month on the nuclear power reactors.

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The result will be the first Westinghouse-designed AP1000 pressurized water reactors in the world, ahead of the others at Haiyang in Shandong province and more expected in the UK and the USA.

The Chinese government is also helpfully developing pebble bed nuclear reactors as well.

[via Next Big Future][image from Saad.Akhtar on flickr]

Interviews

ESSAY: JAMES MORROW on why he wrote Shambling Towards Hiroshima

James Morrow - Shambling Toward HiroshimaJames Morrow is a novelist with a reputation for satirising organised religion, but his new book Shambling Towards Hiroshima mashes up the original Godzilla movies with the nuclear attacks on Japan which ended the Second World War.

Given the opportunity to ask the man some questions, the first thing that leapt to my mind was to enquire as to why Morrow had decided to write about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and why he’d choose to mix in monster movies as a subtheme – despite the potential risk of being accused of irreverence or outright frivolity, or of resurrecting dead issues. It is Futurismic‘s very great privilege to play post to his response.

How I Shambled Towards Hiroshima

by James Morrow

Saint Thomas Aquinas famously remarked, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” The same principle applies to classic American and Japanese monster movies. To one who loves this sort of cinema, no explanation is necessary. To one who does not, no explanation is possible.

As a school-age kid living in a sterile Philadelphia suburb in the late fifties, the culture of old horror films spoke to me in much the same way that God speaks to the theistically inclined. Thanks to my parents’ crummy little black-and-white television, plus my subscription to Forrest J Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland, I routinely enjoyed revelations from that wondrous and exotic celluloid realm. To see a chopped-up, truncated print of King Kong revived on late-afternoon TV was an authentically religious experience for me, and any broadcast of the 1956 Godzilla wasn’t far behind. Continue reading ESSAY: JAMES MORROW on why he wrote Shambling Towards Hiroshima →

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Hybrid fusion-fission energy generation a possibility

danceWe haven’t had too much luck creating energy-producing fusion reactors, but according to researchers at the University of Texas there is a possibility of creating hybrid between a traditional nuclear fission and a fusion reactor, a sort of fusion of the two ideas, to ameliorate the problems of fission:

“Most people cite nuclear waste as the main reason they oppose nuclear fission as a source of power,” says Swadesh Mahajan, senior research scientist.

The scientists propose destroying the waste using a fusion-fission hybrid reactor, the centerpiece of which is a high power Compact Fusion Neutron Source (CFNS) made possible by a crucial invention.

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One hybrid would be needed to destroy the waste produced by 10 to 15 LWRs.

99% of the really dangerous transuranic waste from the first part of the cycle is consumed in the following part, so that overall the output is less harmful and remains so for less time.

[from Physorg][image from tanakawho on flickr]

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Missing: one nuclear bomb

Following the crash of a chrome-dome B52 bomber near a Greenland air-base in 1963 one of the aircraft’s complement of four nuclear bombs could not be found amidst the wreckage:

…declassified documents obtained by the BBC under the US Freedom of Information Act, parts of which remain classified, reveal a much darker story, which has been confirmed by individuals involved in the clear-up and those who have had access to details since.

The documents make clear that within weeks of the incident, investigators piecing together the fragments realised that only three of the weapons could be accounted for.

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As well as the fact they contained uranium and plutonium, the abandoned weapons parts were highly sensitive because of the way in which the design, shape and amount of uranium revealed classified elements of nuclear warhead design.

[story at the BBC, via Slashdot][image from TMWolf on flickr]

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Your backyard nuclear plant will be ready in five years

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Energy crisis? What energy crisis? You’ll be laughing all night in your floodlit garden under the gaze of your jealous fossil-fuel using neighbours once you’ve got Hyperion’s clean, safe and portable[1] backyard nuclear reactor up and running!

Hyperion Power Generation - backyard nuclear reactor

Yes indeed; using good clean water as both moderator and coolant, the Hyperion reactor simply cannot become a runaway reaction, and the uranium hydride fuel is useless for making weapons with – so you’ll not get any politically-motivated sanctions imposed on you by coalitions of powerful nation-states!

The Hyperion reactor will start shipping in the summer of 2013, so start saving now! Or alternatively take out a loan based on the projected amount of energy you’ll be able to sell back to an increasingly desperate and expensive national grid – provided you can find a bank that’s guaranteed not to collapse[2], or a cooperative government administration to bail you out when the worst happens.

[ 1 – 2.5m tall concrete unit can be transported by most commercially-available heavy plant machinery. ]

[ 2 – You may want to consider researching financial institutions based in China or other Asian nations. ]

[Story originally found at grinding.be; image from Hyperion’s website, and there’s an interview with surprisingly lucid and woo-free Hyperion CEO; please note snarky tone of post is a form of gallows humour after an hour of wading through the day’s news.]