OT Nuclear material used as a power supply

Most people who recieve pacemakers have reached their half-life?

Only people living in a fantasyland imagine that their neighbours would be happy with a nuclear power plant in their backyard, or that nuclear power has zero greenhouse gas emissions.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

You hardly need that; PuO2 is a pretty reasonable refractory ceramic all its own. A suitably sized pellet is happy glowing red hot, in air, all day every day.

The layers of stuff they construct RTGs out of is pretty impressive. Also an impressive waste of weight and size, for something so critical... but there are certain advantages to optimizing properties other than pure electrical performance!

Wasn't it Cassini that has a whopping 87 pounds of the stuff (more like 50 by now?), and had something of a stir back when they launched it?

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs 
Electrical Engineering Consultation 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

A trifle more brilliant than claiming that there is no alternative to Pu-23

2. There may be no superior alternative, but there are bound to be alternative s that are good enough for a lot of applications. Ramping up Pu-238 product ion is one solution to the problem, but prudent people look for back-up sol utions. Not doing so would be a trifle moronic, as Fred Bloggs has pointed out - with his usual attention to diplomacy.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

OK Bill let me ask that another way, you have to live

50 miles away from a power plant. Would you rather that be nuclear or coal burning.

(I'd certainly take nuclear, much cleaner.)

George H.

ONS

be happy with a nuclear power plant in their backyard, or that nuclear pow er has zero greenhouse gas emissions.

Until the operators get careless or creative.

I'd actually opt for neither of the above, if I had a choice - solar power beats wind power, though a fifty mile buffer means that the noise from the wind-turbines isn't going to be perceptible.

Meanwhile, back in reality, I live in an inner suburb of Sydney, within fif ty miles of Australia's only active nuclear reactor, the research reactor a t Lucas Heights. There are two there - the original reactor, which first we nt critical in 1958, and was closed down in 2007, some six months after it' s replacement went critical in 2006. As far as I can see, all the coal- and gas-fired generating plants are further away, closer to the coal fields - the gas-turbines were mostly installed on existing coal-fired sites.

I don't lose any sleep about any of them.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

That open pool reactor with 20 MWth would be nice for district heating:-).

I would not have problems living close to a district heating reactor, which use quite low temperatures and pressures and are passive safe.

Electric producing reactors need high temperatures and pressures and an active emergency cooling system, which failed in Fukushima, due to the loss of emergency diesel generators.

And which killed nobody. And right next door, that was also affected by the tsunami, is the gazillion things that failed and killed 15,000 people.

But seriously. The tsunami kills 15,000 people and some people cannot see past the "Fukushima disaster".

If a huge meteorite slams into the earth sending it spiraling out of orbit, people will be screaming "The nuclear power plants are failing!"

Bill Sloman wrote in news:6f5b06f6-b989-4909-b26b-88b1f6413f29 googlegroups.com:

Betas are also easily stopped by thin metal, and are therefore no risk in a pacemaker.

I'd go for the nuclear power station - they usually leak far less radioactivity than coal power stations (although that varies slightly depending on the source of the coal).

15,000 people were killed by the tsunami, but the survivors were able to mo ve back into their homes - or at least start rebuilding them - once the wat er had receded.

The meltdown of the three nuclear reactors lead to the evacuation of everyb ody in a 20km radius, and - as far as I know - they haven't been allowed ba ck since.

It's unsurprising that the failures of the nuclear reactors have attracted persistent attention - they caused persisting damage.

Probably not. In part because the impact of a huge meteorite isn't going to send the earth spiraling out of it's orbit - the most it can do is change the earth's orbit into a differently shaped ellipse - and in part because t he impact of a really huge meteorite or small asteroid, like the one that c ause the K-T extinction some 65 million years ago, would leave the survivor s with more urgent worries than restricted areas of radio-active contaminat ion.

The planet "spiraling out of its orbit" wouldn't be one of them, as anybody not thoroughly ignorant of science would be aware, but a couple of years w ithout summers would be attention-getting.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

John Doe has yet to learn that top-posting gets you plonked.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Thanks, glad you agree. People should be fed up with this sky's-the-limit mentality within taxpayer funded programs. Maybe an extended unpaid furlough will give them the time they need to get creative.

Both were used. Initially Pu-238 (alpha) and then Pm-147 (beta). The promethium decay is quicker.

See

piglet

Hi John,

The convention is to place your response *underneath* the passage you're replying to; much like the way your mother can often be found underneath the UPS man.

Hope this helps.

I didn't know that, thanks.

They should've used body heat with a thermopile and an external heatsink. If you spilled your gin and tonic on it you'd get a boost, but you'd need to stay away from saunas.

Cheers

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Syd

The damage was caused by media hysteria about radioactivity, combined with almost total ignorance by politicians. Beyond about a kilometre away from the power station, the radioactivity is lower than the background radiation in many towns and cities around the world.

People were killed by the panic evacuation and inhumane treatment of the evacuees, not by radiation or contamination. Even for the emergency workers inside the power station, the health risk from the radiation was negligible.