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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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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…
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Running Out of Gas
Nuclear power plants can run a very long time without needing more fuel, but not forever. That would make it a perpetual motion machine, and if you figure that one out you are now a billionaire, so congrats. Every 2 years or so, they have to shut down and replace some of the fuel so…
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Grid Nightmares
Today, the FBI Director warned Congress that Chinese hackers are preparing to wreak havoc on US critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure is just what it sounds like. Things like water treatment plants and power stations, banks and refineries, communications and emergency services. In a nutshell, the lifeblood of modernity. Without these functions, we are back to…
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Grid Operations
First, a disclosure. I am NOT a grid expert in the same way I am a nuclear power expert. I know quite a bit about the grid and how it works, but I have never operated it nor have I been trained to do so. It’s a highly complex system and takes a lot of…
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Sitting in the Dark.
Winter Storm Finn is hammering the East Coast. We lost power at my house almost as soon as the wind kicked up. The NWS is calling for 40 mph winds with 60 mph gusts, so it’s going to be a long night. This got me thinking about how a nuclear plant handles power outages. First…
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A Day in the Life of a Nuclear Operator
I spent 2 years of my life being trained to become a Senior Reactor Operator (SRO). Hundreds of hours in the classroom, hundreds of hours in the simulator, and at the end, a 2 week long exam given by the NRC. For what? What exactly do nuclear operators do that requires all that training? As…