Re: Yet another new battery breakthrough

On Wed, 26 Dec 2007 14:36:04 -0800, cs_posting wrote:

On Dec 19, 3:48 am, Robert Latest <boblat...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"The [...] reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and
totally automatic and will not overheat."

The design I heard about a few years back was a telephone pole sized
core to be dropped, encapsulated, in a hole in the ground. The
composition and fuel density of the core was such that a reaction was
not possible. To make a reaction go, a sliding reflector had to be in
place around the outside of the core. With the reflector in place, the
core would run, but not so fast that the containment would fail even if
coolant were to be lost (it may be that coolant was also needed as a
moderator, don't remember). Eventually, the fuel in the region covered
by the reflector would be spent, and the reaction would stop. To keep
it going, the reflector was designed to very slows slide down the core
over the life of the unit. If it stopped sliding, the reaction stops.
If it slides to fast, it simply gets to the bottom too soon and the life
is shortened.

The idea is that they designed out any risks they could think of.

The question is what risks they didn't think of.

These days, I don't think anybody's really paranoid about those things
any more - just look at Japan and Europe - they've been using nuclear
safely for decades. So have we, now that I mention it. (Yes, TMI, but
we learned a lot there.)

What they're paranoid about is somebody stealing it up and turning
it into a bomb.

Of course, these are the people that got their science education from
Saturday matinee "B" sci-fi movies, like "Them" and "Plan 9 from Outer
Space". ;-)

Cheers!
Rich

.

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