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Phyzzle posted:So how do fresh fuel rods get to the power plant in the first place? The cost & complexity packing and shipping would surely be a fraction of that of the for spent fuel, which is much less hot. spent fuel is definitely not less hot than fresh fuel fresh fuel can be handled and loaded by hand, spent fuel will kill you when it's discharged and still isn't exactly a barrel of laughs after it's had its time in a cooling pool edit: rereading it several times i am left unsure if that's what you meant to say; that's a doozy of a sentence right there BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 13:30 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 13:25
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Phyzzle posted:So how do fresh fuel rods get to the power plant in the first place? The cost & complexity packing and shipping would surely be a fraction of that of the for spent fuel, which is much less hot. Fresh fuel is made at a factory, usually by the vendor that designed the reactor (Westinghouse, GE, Areva, etc), and the trucked out to the reactor. Before the fuel goes into the reactor it's not considered radioactive material, so you just ship it in wooden boxes around a steel container to make sure that nothing gets broken along the way. It's possible, but unlikely, that you've driven near some on the highway if you live in the US. Once fresh fuel spends ten minutes in the reactor it reaches the point where you have to do everything remotely with a lot of shielding. There's almost no cost or complexity to shipping fresh fuel, and it's not at all hot from either a radioactive or thermal perspective. They're just room temperature metal rods, no radioactivity to speak of because the cladding shields what little there is. If you want a little reading because you are SUPER bored, here is a link to a shipping container license application by Babcock and Wilcox for shipping fresh fuel assemblies: http://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0236/ML023610205.pdf If you do read that, pay attention to section 2.3.1 to see what sort of over engineering happens in this industry. Also this is an 84 page document for licensing a steel box. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 20:54 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 20:50
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Olothreutes posted:Fresh fuel is made at a factory, usually by the vendor that designed the reactor (Westinghouse, GE, Areva, etc), and the trucked out to the reactor. Before the fuel goes into the reactor it's not considered radioactive material, so you just ship it in wooden boxes around a steel container to make sure that nothing gets broken along the way. It's possible, but unlikely, that you've driven near some on the highway if you live in the US. Once fresh fuel spends ten minutes in the reactor it reaches the point where you have to do everything remotely with a lot of shielding. There's almost no cost or complexity to shipping fresh fuel, and it's not at all hot from either a radioactive or thermal perspective. They're just room temperature metal rods, no radioactivity to speak of because the cladding shields what little there is. I'm sure there are probably more of them, but there's a Westinghouse facility that produces this sort of stuff not too far from me on the outskirts of Columbia. A friend of mine retired from there after 20-something years. Didn't know that the before-version wasn't radioactive and can be shipped around in crates. Interesting
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May 5, 2016 21:21
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Mortimer posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY This no poo poo loving terrifies me
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May 5, 2016 21:34
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Angry Birds Suicide posted:This no poo poo loving terrifies me The Demon core was a mean fucker. 10 goddamn Gray, 1.4 additionally from neutron. 11.4 loving Grays. As for what he did in the last nine days? Wished he had a gun to kill himself, no doubt. Over the next nine days, Slotin suffered an "agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas", including severe diarrhea, reduced urine output, swollen hands, erythema, "massive blisters on his hands and forearms", intestinal paralysis, gangrene, and ultimately "a total disintegration of bodily functions" Kilo147 fucked around with this message at 21:59 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 21:54
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Angry Birds Suicide posted:This no poo poo loving terrifies me Oh you sweet summer child, google "process criticality accident" and look at what soviet workers can do with fissionable liquids and unfavorably shaped buckets. shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 22:13 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 22:10
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Ooh I do love to read these reports https://www.orau.org/ptp/Library/accidents/la-13638.pdf
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May 6, 2016 00:13
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shame on an IGA posted:Oh you sweet summer child, google "process criticality accident" and look at what soviet workers can do with fissionable liquids and unfavorably shaped buckets. Dangerous geometry!
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May 6, 2016 02:56
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Guys I'm having a real hard time understanding why fresh fuel is no big deal and used fuel is so dangerous.
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May 6, 2016 03:03
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bertolt rekt posted:Guys I'm having a real hard time understanding why fresh fuel is no big deal and used fuel is so dangerous. Fresh fuel contains only three things, u-238, u-235, and oxygen (99.762% of natural oxygen is o-16). The oxygen isn't radioactive, and the uranium has half lives in the range of hundreds of millions to billions of years. Additionally, the uranium decays via alpha emission which is well shielded by basically anything. Paper, a few inches of air, the cladding around the fuel, the fuel itself unless the decay is on the very edge, and basically anything else. There isn't much that won't stop an alpha. Spent fuel contains the same oxygen, but now it contains some u-238 and u-235 and a whole pile of other junk. The junk is stuff like cesium, strontium, yttrium, ruthenium, iodine, barium, technetium, cerium, promethium, tritium, plutonium, americium, maybe some neptunium, and a bunch more. The majority of these are radioactive and have beta/gamma decay paths instead of alpha decay as well as much, much shorter half lives than the uranium. These decays produce lots of heat, lots of gamma rays, and make everything much more complicated.
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May 6, 2016 03:20
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Japan goon checking in from the Tokyo area. Following the earthquake when Fukushima news reached the "oh poo poo this is actually happening point," I got online and looked up iodine content in seaweed. If I remember right, hijiki or kombu is what you want. I managed to get my hands mostly on dried konbu, and I got sick and tired of eating it over the next three weeks. This has been an enjoyable thread, thanks op and effort posters.
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May 6, 2016 03:44
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frogge posted:You get a dose from sleeping next to someone? Ha! Containers of bananas contain enough potassium radiation to detect.  Olothreutes posted:Opsec notice: I'm not in the Navy, nor have I ever been, and I have not worked for any of their contractors. Everything in this post is information that you can find on Wikipedia and other public sources. Please don't come arrest me. A lot of the nuclear secrets can be found on the internet, but referring to specifically the nuclear stuff in specifically the nuclear submarines constitutes a breach of national security. But it all eventually can be found elsewhere. OPSEC is serious business though  There's a reason why military folk just shut the hell up when you ask them about anything specific. Ask about your diesel truck engine? They'll tell you about it piece by piece. Ask about a diesel engine on a naval vessel? Not a goddamned word. Same as with anything engineering, technology, and so on. Half the reason they don't want to violate OPSEC though is probably because they'd have another hundred hours of OPSEC briefings to sit through.
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May 6, 2016 04:00
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Sometimes stuff isn't secret and military people just like to talk things up to sound cool. Sometimes they also just outright make poo poo up to sound cool. I got into an argument one time with a former nuclear tech (or whatever an enlisted man who babysits a naval reactor would be called) who claimed that Chernobyl burned a several-kilometer hole into the ground and it's classified and only military personnel know about it. I questioned why an American military man would know this (as opposed to a Soviet/Russian/Ukranian one since they were the ones it actually happened to), and also how in the hell low-enriched uranium could be energetic enough to melt through bedrock and he just told me to shut up because I'm a dumb civvie edit: I mean I may be a dumb civvie but lol at the idea that any aspect of nuclear physics, and nuclear engineering as it pertains to civilian power generation, has been a secret; weapons and naval propulsion maybe but not electrical power generation BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 04:13 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 04:05
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shame on an IGA posted:Oh you sweet summer child, google "process criticality accident" and look at what soviet workers can do with fissionable liquids and unfavorably shaped buckets. Beyond the Soviet love of non-Euclidean containers, it's also Not A Good Idea to try and cover up the incident by pouring the aforementioned fissionable liquids down the drain because you're afraid of getting fired/gulag'd.
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May 6, 2016 04:09
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Thanks for the explanation! this is a good thread thank you all very much
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May 6, 2016 04:12
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BattleMaster posted:Sometimes stuff isn't secret and military people just like to talk things up to sound cool. Sometimes they also just outright make poo poo up to sound cool. I got into an argument one time with a former nuclear tech (or whatever an enlisted man who babysits a naval reactor would be called) who claimed that Chernobyl burned a several-kilometer hole into the ground and it's classified and only military personnel know about it. I questioned why an American military man would know this (as opposed to a Soviet/Russian/Ukranian one since they were the ones it actually happened to), and also how in the hell low-enriched uranium could be energetic enough to melt through bedrock and he just told me to shut up because I'm a dumb civvie Yeah there's dumb assholes no matter where you go or who you talk to. Mistle posted:Containers of bananas contain enough potassium radiation to detect. There's also getting prosecuted and thrown under a military prison to worry about there. JacksAngryBiome posted:This has been an enjoyable thread, thanks op and effort posters. Thanks man, I love hearing this poo poo. There's a lot of good nuke goons in here that know a lot more than me and if it weren't for all them guys this thread would be forever buried under dumb parody threads and Dare's insanity. Ask more questions man, ask all the questions. I'm glad this thread has gone far beyond my blue-collar experience and I'm learning an absolute shitload about all this stuff. As for the fresh fuel v. spent fuel thing, you gotta remember that once the reactor kicks on, and even before then, that fresh fuel is bombarded by radiation from things like the radioactive-as-hell vessel which causes the fresh fuel to turn into all the materials that the other guys in here are saying. It may be a couple of slightly radioactive uranium isotopes going in, but once it gets a buncha radiation it turns into all the highly radioactive stuff like strontium, ruthenium, cesium, etc. that Olo was talking about. Basically once radiation knocks a few different subatomic particles off of the uranium isotopes it becomes a much more dangerous material, if I'm not mistaken.
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May 6, 2016 04:16
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May 6, 2016 06:44
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For an explanation http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Core/Physical_Chemistry/Atomic_Theory/The_Atom/Sub-Atomic_Particles With pictures! One of my coworkers has been going to college for a while to jump into the medical profession. Just found out tonight he chose radiology. It's been fun talking this stuff over. SocketWrench fucked around with this message at 06:58 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 06:53
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gently caress yeah, Garfield High!
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May 6, 2016 06:54
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No new posts in a week, you guys all on some sort of top-secret nucular operation?
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May 12, 2016 20:28
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ncumbered_by_idgits posted:No new posts in a week, you guys all on some sort of top-secret nucular operation? Nah I'm still watching but nothing has really come up. There's only so many stories a grunt like me can tell about farting on people and how radioactive something I'm humping is. Likewise I'm not one of those guys in here that knows shitloads aboit reactor theory and engineering. Don't get me wrong man, it's been a great ride but there's not much left I can think to contribute that wouldn't just be me posting walls of words about the boring poo poo.
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May 12, 2016 23:47
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I'll put together an effort post about a something in the next little while, but it may not be until Saturday night/Sunday. I'd at least like to cover the massive issues with the disposal of spent fuel in the US. And everywhere else too, but largely in the US because I'm most familiar with it. If anyone has anything they want to know about, ask away.
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May 13, 2016 00:54
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looks like the half-life of this thread is about 25 days 
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May 13, 2016 01:16
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So, what's up with the people that build little fusion reactors in their basements? I'm assuming there's about a thousand ways that can kill you?
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May 13, 2016 01:37
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Kilo147 posted:So, what's up with the people that build little fusion reactors in their basements? I'm assuming there's about a thousand ways that can kill you? Generally those are fusors, unless someone is being SUPER industrious and builds something more complicated. Fusion isn't actually super hard to do, it's just very very hard to get more energy out than you put into making it happen. It's not useful as an energy solution to get one MW out if you have to put three MW in to make it. With small scale fusors like that the fusion yield is very small, and thus the total amount of radiation produced is very small. Can you potentially do yourself harm? Yeah, probably. You could sit there with your balls on it for days on end and you might see some effects later in life beyond your power bill being astronomical.
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May 13, 2016 01:47
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Cherenkov Radiation is so loving cool it's my new phone wallpaper. And mobile phones are probably a bit radioactive so it fits.
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May 13, 2016 01:56
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ANIME IS BLOOD posted:looks like the half-life of this thread is about 25 days Lol drat I wish I had made this joke. 
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May 13, 2016 04:46
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Michaellaneous posted:Cherenkov Radiation is so loving cool it's my new phone wallpaper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LIu7bhRDXE
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May 13, 2016 07:59
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Weatherman posted:Can you guys please take your shitposting elsewhere so as to not contaminate this thread, kthx Hey you, the guy with the autism. I think you mistook a joke for true belief.
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May 13, 2016 15:13
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Incoming effort post! So let’s talk about spent nuclear fuel. Spent fuel has been in a reactor for probably about five years, give or take, by the time it’s all done. The first stop after coming out of the core is the cooling pool. Spent fuel still produces a rather large amount of heat and radiation that needs to be handled. In the short term many of the very active fission products will decay away, producing a lot that heat and radiation. So into the pool they go because water is a good coolant and also a good shield once you have enough of it. Water circulates through the pool to remove the heat and there are a number of systems in place to prevent a criticality incident. The largest single method is by adding a neutron absorber to the water, probably boron in the form of boric acid. Another method that is coming into prominence now is something called a flux trap. All of the assemblies are placed in a steel grid to keep them in place. These grids are designed to be occupied to a certain level and also include spacing in order to ensure that there can’t be any criticality events. Some of the new grids come with large plates between the grid sections, usually every 2-3 assemblies worth, that are full of a neutron absorber. These are the flux traps. All of these things are designed such that any one of them is sufficient to keep any criticality events from happening, and you layer two or three of them into a pool to keep things 300% safe. The fuel spends five to ten years in a spent fuel pool. The original design was for them to then move to a repository, but that isn’t happening for reasons I’ll talk about in a moment. So right now we pack the assemblies that are cool enough into giant storage casks and put them out back by the parking lot or whatever. The casks are robust against attack, corrosion, radiation damage, thermal stress, and weigh like 150 tons for the big ones. They aren’t immune to those things though. They cost upwards of a million dollars each. Because of the expense, and because they aren’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future, the utility companies have a strong motivation to pack as many assemblies in a single container as they can get licensed. Right now that number is 37 assemblies per cask, which is a lot. The surface temperatures on the casks can be over 100°F. So what was the plan? The initial plan, as set forth in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, was for the federal government to build a deep geologic repository and take ownership of the fuel no later than 1999. The costs associated with the storage would be paid by a small tax on the ratepayers who received any power from a nuclear reactor. Basically it amounted to about a penny on your electric bill, but this was recently removed for reasons we’ll talk about. Clearly this isn’t what’s happening now, as the fuel is just sitting in storage at the power plants and the federal government isn’t doing anything about it. Why is that, you ask? They can’t. Here’s the totally hosed up part about all this. Part of the NWPA said that the Department of Energy would select a site for the repository and would build it in the best spot. So shortly after the act was passed the DOE went looking for sites in which to bury thousands of tons of nuclear waste. They selected something like ten sites, then did some more review and narrowed it to five sites, then to three sites. These sites were in eastern Washington, Texas, and Nevada. The Nevada location was Yucca Mountain, and it was looking a lot like Yucca Mountain would be the site that the DOE would eventually select. But this wasn’t quite good enough for the congressmen/women from Washington and Texas. So in 1987 they proposed an amendment to the NWPA that said the DOE would only consider Yucca Mountain and nowhere else until Yucca Mountain is filled. Only then can the DOE go looking for another place to put spent fuel. Well in 1986 Harry Reid ran for and was elected to the senate in Nevada, taking office in 1987. It is my personal opinion, and the opinion of several other people I know but certainly not the opinion of any agency, that Harry got a little butthurt about the fact that these other senators basically railroaded his state into being the nuclear waste dump of the US. Never mind the fact that even on a random decision Nevada had a 1/3 chance of getting it anyway, or that the DOE was leaning heavily towards Yucca Mountain. So Harry was, perhaps understandably, a little hurt (in my opinion). So he spent the next ~30 years blocking Yucca Mountain from opening. The US spent some eight billion dollars to build the Yucca Mountain facility, it’s ready to go and in the opinion of the NRC is both qualified for licensing and “politically untenable” I think is the phrase they used. So the DOE, and by extension the taxpayer, has spent billions of dollars on a facility that we aren’t using. Harry Reid is finally retiring from congress so we might see some movement on this, but we might not. There is a chance that his successor will take up the baton and continue the fight against Yucca Mountain. But wait, the story gets better. So remember how the law says the DOE has to take ownership of the fuel in 1999? That part never got changed, and the federal government is in violation of that part of the law. So every year the utility companies that currently have ownership of spent fuel sue the US government for breach of contract, and without fail they win. Every year. So they get loads of money in settlements. Where does this money come from? Not from the spent fuel fund that we paid 25 billion dollars into, no. That would make sense. Instead the money comes from a special place called the Department of Justice Judgment Fund. This is a limitless pool of money that doesn’t exist in the federal budget, it’s just there without a cap for the DOJ to pay out of. And we pay the utility companies out of it every year because we aren’t using Yucca Mountain, but we are also legally barred from looking for a new place to put spent fuel. Whoops. This is why we don't have the nuclear waste fund tax anymore, because it clearly isn't doing anything. So until we reach the point where either:
 In another post I’ll cover the technical challenges and requirements of storing nuclear waste, but I feel like the policy issues are what people really need to be aware of.
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May 15, 2016 20:53
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 Seeing this video, how do you know which fuel rod is spent? Or do you just remember which one you put where and switch it out after a certain amount of time?
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May 15, 2016 20:59
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Michaellaneous posted:
You keep very good records about which one is which. There isn't any physical sign like a turkey timer that pops out when they are fully cooked or whatever. They are changed after set amounts of time. That video is super neat and you can see both the core layout, how large the core/assemblies are, and the spent fuel pool. I love that. As a note those are BWR assemblies, which have larger rods than PWRs, probably about as big around as your thumb as long as you aren't Andre the Giant, and only 8 rods by 8 rods instead of the 17x17 in a PWR. They also have the shroud that you see on the outside of the assembly which is the flat metal sheet that prevents you from seeing the individual rods themselves as you would in a PWR bundle. BWRs have big blades that slide between the bundles instead of control rods like in PWRs, and they come in from the bottom instead of the top.
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May 15, 2016 21:05
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Olothreutes posted:Just what the gently caress You know, given Nevada was the testing grounds for a lot of this poo poo it seems only natural they should be a repository for it too. Like it'd ever be more of a blackish eye than "Welcome to the Nevada test range where you can cook a steak on a rock"
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May 16, 2016 05:24
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SocketWrench posted:You know, given Nevada was the testing grounds for a lot of this poo poo it seems only natural they should be a repository for it too. Like it'd ever be more of a blackish eye than "Welcome to the Nevada test range where you can cook a steak on a rock" One day something is going to happen, a cask will go missing, get dropped or just crack open and there will be a scandal because all this spent nuclear fuel is just sitting around. And no-one is going to point the finger at Harry Reid, it will be someone else that gets flayed alive for this situation.
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May 16, 2016 06:12
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Godamn it, Nevada. You can blame Harry Reid, but in the end fuckin' Nevadans said "Nope gently caress Yucca Mountain" and kept electing that prick.
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May 16, 2016 07:52
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Ivor Biggun posted:One day something is going to happen, a cask will go missing, get dropped or just crack open and there will be a scandal because all this spent nuclear fuel is just sitting around. And no-one is going to point the finger at Harry Reid, it will be someone else that gets flayed alive for this situation. Oh you bet. It never falls back to the rear end in a top hat politicians, they manage to weasel out of that poo poo all the time. Honky Dong Country posted:Godamn it, Nevada. You can blame Harry Reid, but in the end fuckin' Nevadans said "Nope gently caress Yucca Mountain" and kept electing that prick. Well, to be truthful, if you're a rep or senator it's kinda hard to get booted out unless you gently caress poo poo up so bad people can't bear the thought to vote for you. When you hit that level you're basically in it for the long haul and will most likely retire or die of natural causes before getting a boot.
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May 16, 2016 11:56
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As a citizen of Las Vegas I would greatly prefer that crap be stored in Yucca Mountain, a purpose-designed facility, instead of in whatever temp storage facility it is in now.
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May 16, 2016 15:55
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I've heard people say, "You can't give Candu reactors to middle-eastern countries because you can just refuel them whenever and nonproliferation treaties will be violated!" And since your job involves fueling reactors and poo poo, I was wondering if some of that sentiment was bullshit. How different would your job be if you worked in Candu reactors instead of whatever other kind of reactor it is you use?
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May 16, 2016 21:18
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I don't know much about nuclear power (although, I feel like I know a lot more after reading this really awesome thread), but were we to build a commercial IFR like EBR-2, couldn't it be fueled by all that waste that's currently sitting around (and that the government is paying large amounts of money to companies for not storing it)?
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May 17, 2016 00:36
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SouthLAnd posted:I don't know much about nuclear power (although, I feel like I know a lot more after reading this really awesome thread), but were we to build a commercial IFR like EBR-2, couldn't it be fueled by all that waste that's currently sitting around (and that the government is paying large amounts of money to companies for not storing it)? After a fashion, yes. That was part of the point of the IFR, it would continue to burn fuel long after conventional reactors would be unable to do so and would therefore have a much smaller waste stream. A central part of the IFR technology in this regard was a reprocessing facility, to recondition the fuel to be used again. Reprocessing is illegal in the US right now, and was banned in the 1977 by Jimmy Carter, who I have a great respect for as a president and diplomat and also some disdain for as he stopped or prevented a great deal of work in the nuclear industry. Existing fuel would need to be reprocessed before we could put it into a fast reactor, and at this point there are no plans to do so and no legal path to make it happen.
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May 17, 2016 00:42
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