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Why, in the year 2023, would I start a blog?
Once upon a time, I had a decent following on the site formerly known as Twitter. Since Elon decided to turn it into an alt-right chat room, I left that hellhole and migrated to BlueSky. BlueSky has a few advantages over Twitter, the biggest being the lack of neo-Nazis. It does not, however, thread long…
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Small Modular Reactors
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-reactors-smrs Tech giants are signing deals with nuclear power companies to supply energy to their data centers. Many of these deals revolve around unproven Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). This is a relatively new term for most people, so I figured it as worth it to dig in a little to help it make sense. First…
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Three Mile Island Restart
Constellation Energy (full disclosure – I work for them) announced plans to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 after a power purchase deal was signed with Microsoft. This deal is intended to power data centers to support Microsoft’s AI push. The internet reacted with the expected doom and gloom whenever nuclear power is mentioned, with…
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Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant 8/11/24
In the news today, there is a fire at the Zaporizhzhia NPP in Ukraine. https://kyivindependent.com/russian-forces-start-fire-at-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-ukraine-says/ From the looks of it, the fire is located in one of the cooling towers. Let me start by saying that the cooling towers are NOT part of the radioactive loop of the nuclear power plants. The water that is…
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There’s good boiling in a reactor and then there is this.
The Idaho National Lab released a video a while ago that shows something called Departure From Nucleate Boiling (DNB). In high pressure, high temperature environments, water can go from nucleate boiling, which is good, to DNB, in an instant. DNB is about as bad a condition as you can have inside a pressurized water reactor…
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Enriched Uranium
Iran has been in the news quite a lot lately. Depending on which news organization is scaring you at that particular point in time, they are anywhere from a few months to a few weeks from having enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-can-make-fissile-material-bomb-in-about-12-days-us-official-2023-02-28/ So, what exactly is enriched uranium and why is…
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Chornobyl, or How to Blow Up a Nuclear Reactor
Nuclear reactors aren’t supposed to explode. The engineers who design them go to great lengths to make sure they can’t. So, how exactly did the people at the Vladimir Lenin Power Station mange to do so? First off, I want to get some pedantry out of the way. The explosion at Chornobyl was NOT technically…
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Fission Product Barriers
Reuters is reporting that a Ukrainian attack hit the reactor dome of reactor #6 at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). The article is very clear that radiation levels at the plant are stable. This is exactly what I would expect of any attack short of a bunker-buster style bomb. The containment structure is engineered to…
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Space Weather
We now go live to Ollie Williams for the weather. What’s the weather looking like today, Ollie? So, this is only tangentially connected to nuclear power, but space weather is a thing and can impact the power grid. Earlier today, the earth was hit by a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with an X class…
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Why So Many SCRAMs?
I was reviewing the NRC event reports for the last few months and noticed several reactor trips. The normal average is one trip every two years or so. I did not go back and see if in this recent spate of trips any of the units involved were exceeding that rate, it just seemed like…
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How Much Radiation is Too Much?
Thanks to @nuclearanthro.bsky.social (check out his blog https://deusexatomica.wordpress.com/), we know that a contractor at Los Alamos National Lab accidentally exposed 4 colleagues to radiation while conducting an experiment with Cf-252. The dose ranged between 132 mrem and 195 mrem. As with so much of life, those numbers are meaningless without context. To start, the measure…
Sleepy Neutron's Nuclear Knowledge 