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guidoanselmi posted:I do high energy physics and spent several years as a nuclear systems engineer. Fun stuff that I miss doing. Feel free to chip in, bud. There's a lot of the scientific/engineering poo poo I don't know and I've no doubt there's gonna be some technical questions in here. If you want to know about nuclear workers being assholes to each other and screwing around while doing dangerous mechanical work, I'm your guy, but I'm better you'd be a much better fit for the more technical poo poo than I will be. Thread for all is good thread.
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Apr 18, 2016 08:00
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What is the most ball-retractingly harrowing nuclear mishap or near-miss you're free to share? Be it one guy getting crapped up in an idiotic way or a near plant-wide catastrophe.
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Apr 18, 2016 08:03
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Otisburg posted:What is the most ball-retractingly harrowing nuclear mishap or near-miss you're free to share? Be it one guy getting crapped up in an idiotic way or a near plant-wide catastrophe. Never seen a big near miss, but after the lower internals mod the cavity was so hosed up it looked like there was mud in it. Took decon like two days before HP would even let us down there, and like eight guys got crapped up during reassembly of the reactor. One guy got it internally and had to poo poo and piss in a bag for like four days before he passed it. That loving moron was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cavity and blatantly wiping his face and poo poo. Because of him we had to wear respirators after that and hated him like no other for making our lives miserable. I also almost had a piece of reactor insulation slam into my head twice. But really I haven't seen anything heinous. If everything goes well, nobody gets hurt and worst case some guys get crapped up. But one fall, one piece of equipment failing, a tool dropped 50+ feet can be very bad. Especially since in critical FME areas you don't wear a hardhat. So that dropped deckplate I mentioned earlier? If that had hit a guy he'd be dead, no doubt about it because you don't wear hardhats down in the cavity. That deckplate was a big loving deal.
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Apr 18, 2016 08:10
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what do you mean by "crapped up"?
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Apr 18, 2016 08:13
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Serious Frolicking posted:what do you mean by "crapped up"? Contaminated. Means you got a particle of radioactive material on you. Most of the time you can't even see it and even with good radiological practices it can happen. But "crapped up" is what a lot of radworkers call it. "That motherfucker got himself crapped up down in the cavity so now those loving HP nerds are gonna make us wear PAPH." "Son of a bitch, if anybody else get scrapped up those assholes will have us wearing plastics thanks to that cocksucker!" We're nice people. E: fffff 3:30A. I'm going to sleep for a few hours. Honky Dong Country fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 08:17
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One small thing I can reference is that you can make reactors about the size of small paper bin but the support system is quite a bit larger. http://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/ssbsite/documents/webpage/ssb_059559.pdf One of the most important things to realize is that the energy density of nuclear material is orders of magnitude higher than other fuel sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
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Apr 18, 2016 08:18
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I remember that about 10-15 years ago the big noise was about Korean/Japanese conglomerates (Kyocera? LG? not sure but you get the gist) building small reactors that could just get buried in the ground in a village, pump cold water down and steam comes out for 20 years or whatever. Did that market ever take off?
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Apr 18, 2016 08:53
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Amazing thread so far, thanks for posting it! Nuclear energy fascinates me, and I'm mad my dumb gay country is too afraid to use it more. Any idiot who played Sim City knows nuclear is the best Also, wasn't Fukushima as bad as it was because it was built on a fault line?
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Apr 18, 2016 08:57
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Jonny 290 posted:I remember that about 10-15 years ago the big noise was about Korean/Japanese conglomerates (Kyocera? LG? not sure but you get the gist) building small reactors that could just get buried in the ground in a village, pump cold water down and steam comes out for 20 years or whatever. Did that market ever take off? holy jesus, I don't even want to think about the implications of letting village idiots just have a whole bunch of critical material like that.
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Apr 18, 2016 09:11
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Code Jockey posted:Also, wasn't Fukushima as bad as it was because it was built on a fault line? Fukushima wasn't as bad as the media told you. Other reactors weathered the earthquake and tsunami just fine (Fukushima Dai-ni, Onagawa, Tōkai), although they were shut down as a precaution.
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Apr 18, 2016 09:13
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Honky Dong Country posted:
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Apr 18, 2016 09:13
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Code Jockey posted:Amazing thread so far, thanks for posting it! Nuclear energy fascinates me, and I'm mad my dumb gay country is too afraid to use it more. Any idiot who played Sim City knows nuclear is the best Fukushima was as bad as it was because the power supply of the internal generators got nailed by a motherfucking tsunami and failed as a result. Virtually every safety feature of the reactors functioned as intended - the problem was in the fact that the safety design didn't take into account the idea that outside power supply may be interrupted by say, a huge goddamn tidal wave. Ironically, most of the major contamination came from stored spent fuel, not the actual reactors themselves failing.
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Apr 18, 2016 09:14
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMaEjEWL6PU ^^a nice little overview of that accident. The reactor design is very common in French reactors, but none of these kind of reactors have been built in America.
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Apr 18, 2016 09:16
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A White Guy posted:holy jesus, I don't even want to think about the implications of letting village idiots just have a whole bunch of critical material like that. IIRC this is all pebble bed poo poo, not weapons friendly and by nature they self-moderate and can't go crit or something like that. Also buried 120 feet down. I smell what you're steppin' in but i think they engineered around a lot of that stuff.
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Apr 18, 2016 09:54
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How are facilities of the future being built to be drone ready? I think it is highly likely that we will probably incorporate piloted drones into contingency plans if we already don't have some form of pilotable robots already in place.
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Apr 18, 2016 10:16
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A: I'm certain that's an opsec type thing and you won't get any good answers, B: what new reactors lol
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Apr 18, 2016 10:30
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Microwaves Mom posted:How are facilities of the future being built to be drone ready? I think it is highly likely that we will probably incorporate piloted drones into contingency plans if we already don't have some form of pilotable robots already in place. I don't know if there have been advances in shielding robotics in the last 30 years but historically the robots working to clean up after Chernobyl died a lot faster than the humans did and weren't much use.
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Apr 18, 2016 10:31
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Ivor Biggun posted:I don't know if there have been advances in shielding robotics in the last 30 years but historically the robots working to clean up after Chernobyl died a lot faster than the humans did and weren't much use. true enough but i'd imagine robotics on the whole has improved greatly in the last 30 years tech wise. Shielding maybe. maybe not. I'd imagine it'd be cool to fly some disposable drones around chernobyl though.
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Apr 18, 2016 10:34
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa0Fmcv83nw Awesome. 35000 Megawatts in 7 milisecounds.... GG And just because: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktvTqknDobU
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Apr 18, 2016 10:42
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Ivor Biggun posted:I don't know if there have been advances in shielding robotics in the last 30 years but historically the robots working to clean up after Chernobyl died a lot faster than the humans did and weren't much use. Real remedial question here: How does nuclear radiation kill humans and how does it kill robots or other mechanical things?
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Apr 18, 2016 10:46
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For humans, I think the rad particles just break down cell walls as they radiate outward.
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Apr 18, 2016 11:26
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A White Guy posted:Fukushima was as bad as it was because the power supply of the internal generators got nailed by a motherfucking tsunami and failed as a result. Virtually every safety feature of the reactors functioned as intended - the problem was in the fact that the safety design didn't take into account the idea that outside power supply may be interrupted by say, a huge goddamn tidal wave. Note: there was a pipe connecting the generator room to the outside without any means to shut down inflow (such as from a tsunami flooding the outlet and pushing water back down), so the generators drowned 
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Apr 18, 2016 11:58
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Honky Dong Country posted:If you're looking for Simpsons stuff/jokes you'll prolly have better luck here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3772573 Yup this is more my style op
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Apr 18, 2016 12:08
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OP I need you to hijack the nukes and fire them at the whales
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Apr 18, 2016 12:39
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Wicker Man posted:For humans, I think the rad particles just break down cell walls as they radiate outward. Radiation damages your DNA. Small amounts of DNA damage can be repaired or maybe that cell will just self destruct if the damage is too significant to repair and others will replace it, no big deal. Unfortunately every time a cell's DNA is damaged it's possible it'll be damaged in juuuuuust the right way that the self-replication controls will get broken and that cell and its progeny will continue to divide forever ignoring instructions to stop and and that's what we call cancer. DNA damage can happen lots of ways including random chance (very low rate) or carcinogens (much higher rate) or radiation(rate varies dramatically according to dose). If you were to somehow suffer a really massive dose of radiation you'd be essentially shredding all of your DNA at once. Every cell in your body would no longer have the information required to do ANYTHING and you'd die pretty shortly afterward since your cells would no longer be able to divide and repair the constant damage your body suffers from day to day use. Not to mention they couldn't make all the proteins your body needs to do all manner of things to continue to live. Radiation burns are essentially that happening but on a smaller scale. Those cells are structurally fine but they've gone full retard and no longer know how to do anything so they just die. Maybe the rest of your body is working well enough to recover or at least hang on for awhile. Whereas regular heat burns actually cause proteins to unfold and cells to burst or to actually be combusted. Unfortunately you can't grow a tentacle or get cool superpowers from radiation exposure because any mutations(damage) will only be in the individual cell that received them and any cell that divides from it. So at best you'll have a teeny clump of tissue with the gene for eye lasers or whatever. However if your sperm or eggs or newly formed embryo gets blasted and gets a mutation then that baby would have that mutation in its entire body since every one of its cells came from that one initial cell formed by the sperm and egg combining. That's why plants are so relatively easy to genetically modify, because a full adult plant can be fairly easily grown from any individual cell that's found to have a mutation you might want. my kinda ape fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 13:53
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I know you're probably loving sick already of disaster questions, but I watched a documentary on Chernobyl, and in it Gorby says that if the melted reactor had managed to hit the water table that was beneath the plant, all of Europe would be a radiated wasteland for centuries. I wondered how true this was, but couldn't find a good source for that exact situation.
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Apr 18, 2016 14:04
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I'd figure something like that would not only contaminate the groundwater long-term, but if you have that much heat hitting a lot of water, you're going to get a steam flash explosion which would have been pretty fallout-y
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Apr 18, 2016 14:33
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No way a core is going to china syndrome its way into the ground water, but they had a pool right below the core. Three divers died draining the pool and saved a big chunk of Europe.
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Apr 18, 2016 14:36
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nuclear meltdowns are an inevitable consequence of nuclear power and as such there needs to be a global moratorium on it. no more fukushimas
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Apr 18, 2016 14:36
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paul_soccer10 posted:nuclear meltdowns are an inevitable consequence of nuclear power and as such there needs to be a global moratorium on it. no more fukushimas shut up cave man
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Apr 18, 2016 14:57
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Have you ever been approached by guys who want you to steal plutonium for them and did you?
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Apr 18, 2016 15:10
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Jonny 290 posted:I remember that about 10-15 years ago the big noise was about Korean/Japanese conglomerates (Kyocera? LG? not sure but you get the gist) building small reactors that could just get buried in the ground in a village, pump cold water down and steam comes out for 20 years or whatever. Did that market ever take off? There are lots of possible designs for small nuclear reactors that would be much safer than big ones. Hell, plenty of universities have research reactors (which don't generate any power at all) which are pretty much 100% safe. The problem with them is that when it comes to generating electricity, big turbines are far more efficient than small ones. So if you were putting micro-reactors all over the place you'd need a lot more total fuel in use. Then you have a bigger waste problem, cause I don't think you'd want to just leave those things buried when they were out of fuel. related crazy thing: the soviet union was also at one point thinking about something along those lines, but not an actual reactor. Instead, they were gonna take hot nuclear waste and use it for central hot water heating for small towns. Hot radioactive water straight to your home! This was back in the 50s or something when they had an incredibly casual attitude to radioactive poo poo. Domus posted:I know you're probably loving sick already of disaster questions, but I watched a documentary on Chernobyl, and in it Gorby says that if the melted reactor had managed to hit the water table that was beneath the plant, all of Europe would be a radiated wasteland for centuries. I wondered how true this was, but couldn't find a good source for that exact situation. Bullshit. Groundwater would spread the contamination and make things a lot worse by contaminating the drinking water for other cities (possibly including Kiev). And it would have made cleanup much, much more difficult. But underground water in the Ukraine does not flow all the way across Europe. 1 reactor would not make all of europe into a Fallout-style wasteland.
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Apr 18, 2016 15:27
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What's it like at reactors as far as hiring eligibility? Do you need security clearance like you need on the research side of things e.g. if you work for a DOE lab? Do they only hire US citizens?
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Apr 18, 2016 15:44
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Microwaves Mom posted:How are facilities of the future being built to be drone ready? I think it is highly likely that we will probably incorporate piloted drones into contingency plans if we already don't have some form of pilotable robots already in place. Jonny 290 posted:A: I'm certain that's an opsec type thing and you won't get any good answers, B: what new reactors lol Yeah what little I do know about plant security isn't a good idea to talk about. I will just say that attacking a nuclear plant would be a very bad idea. They're armed to the teeth and most of the security is full of ex-cops, soldiers, marines, etc. whose biggest excitement is a force-on-force training exercise. Plus most plants are labyrinthine in nature and would likely require inside help to navigate. Re: other robotchat, we do use a remotely controlled minisub in the cavity when it's flooded so I imagine there's plenty of poo poo out there that can operate in extremely radioactive conditions. chaosbreather posted:Have you ever been approached by guys who want you to steal plutonium for them and did you? No and no. If somebody seriously approached me about that I'd bring the feds down on them. Something something terrism something something are freedums. Honky Dong Country fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 15:52
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paul_soccer10 posted:nuclear meltdowns are an inevitable consequence of nuclear power and as such there needs to be a global moratorium on it. no more fukushimas Nuclear disasters are a very unlikely event that usually stems from poor design on site. Fukushima would not happen in the US. And I'd that weren't enough we did a lot of extra poo poo to our systems anyway to make them even safer in the wake of that event. Murphy Brownback posted:What's it like at reactors as far as hiring eligibility? Do you need security clearance like you need on the research side of things e.g. if you work for a DOE lab? Do they only hire US citizens? I posted on the first page about getting in, which I really don't know much about because I got in through connections in the industry. But I will say that I've never met anybody who had a security clearance except for the fact that a good portion of the civilian nuclear world is ex-Navy nukes who naturally tend to have clearances. Far as I know, it's not required. Absolutely everybody on site has had a pretty good background check done on them though. I haven't met anybody who's not a US citizen, but it does happen. Areva is a French company and if something is a big enough deal they'll send their guys over from Europe, but they employ a lot of contractors from here. I do know a few contractors that are naturalized foreign nationals though. Those guys loving own, because they got stories from living outside the country and often make some killer food for everybody during downtime. There's a lot of potluck style eating at outages I've done and it becomes very easy to become a lardass. Can't count how many times I had to stick my lunch in the fridge because somebody brought in a fuckload of food, bonus points if it's one of the foreign guys lol
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Apr 18, 2016 16:21
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Why haven't you done more to advance research into cold fusion?
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Apr 18, 2016 16:28
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Assuming the plant was about to meltdown, what would the workers do to prevent it? How many switches would they flip and buttons would they press like a chimp on speed? Talking like a BEEEP. BEEEP. siren and the whole plant gets a healthy shade of blood-red lighting scenario here.
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Apr 18, 2016 16:31
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EorayMel posted:Assuming the plant was about to meltdown, what would the workers do to prevent it? How many switches would they flip and buttons would they press like a chimp on speed? Talking like a BEEEP. BEEEP. siren and the whole plant gets a healthy shade of blood-red lighting scenario here. The control panel only has a single button that pulls the neutron regulators out a bit and then they slowly slide back in with the force of gravity. Keeping the core at the correct temperature is just a big game of flappy bird. If you're at risk of meltdown stop pressing the button. Whatever you do don't keep pressing the button.
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Apr 18, 2016 16:36
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notZaar posted:Why haven't you done more to advance research into cold fusion? The OP? It's not his job. People in general? Because it's bullshit.
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Apr 18, 2016 16:37
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A few years back a new cold fusion scam showed up for a Hydrogen + Nickel -> Copper reaction. In terms of nuclear physics that would require a mechanism that we don't actually know anything about, and they wouldn't let anyone take independent measurements so lol.
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Apr 18, 2016 16:43
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