Ask X about Nuclear Power

[Exsubmariner]

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What's the going rate for plutonium on the black market?

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I'd ask about $50K per kilo.

[Exsubmariner]

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OP,

Do you like the simpsons?

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I do. In fact, I had the same job as Homer, once.

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Did you have a dental plan?

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The best the submarine tender could offer. Pretty good by some standards, actually. The trick was, that you actually had to go take advantage of it. Many did not and had rotten teeth. The hygenist who took care of me told me a story once about a chief who hadn't had a checkup in 17 years. He ended up with a mouth full of false teeth. The motto on the wall of the office was "pay me now or pay me later."

[Exsubmariner]

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OP,

Do you like the simpsons?

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I do. In fact, I had the same job as Homer, once.

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cool. what kind of education programme did you enroll in to become a nuclear ..."technician"?

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The Navy Nuclear Power Pipeline. I had to score really high on a couple of tests to get in. ASVAB and then the Nuke test. Both were overrated, in my opinion. The school was about 1400 hours total of college level mathematics, physics, calculus, mechanical theory, metallurgy theory, electronics and electrical theory, a tad of biology, courses in digital electronics, radar, communications, basic electronics, partical physics, reactor theory, design, the list goes on. This all took about a year and change to complete. Then, there was the practical school, where you actually qualified to be an operator. That was about 600 hours I think. All in all, I think I got 150 college credits out of all the Navy schools I went through (which were many, even after NNPS). Equivalent of a masters degree. Not all applied, to later education, of course.

link

NNPS

[Exsubmariner]

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The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated was in the USSR. It was something like 155 Megatons and was a hydrogen bomb.

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Not quite that big but The Tsar Bomb at 50-57 megatons was pretty impressive as you can see in this video clip.

~ Rick

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That's right. The Tsar Bomb was a scaled down version of a much bigger design, which couldn't be put on a rocket or airplane because it was way too heavy.

In theory, though, a nuclear bomb (the hydrogen kind) could be built to a unlimited size.

[Exsubmariner]

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BTW, I understated the damage/day from cosmic rays. It's about 10k/day per cell, not per organism.

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Per cell? Are you sure? I'd be interested in reading that research if you have a link.

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I got this from a professor here at the University of Rochester who works on DNA damage from ionizing radiation. It's also in line with the wiki article on DNA Damage. He works on hole formation (in the semiconductor sense of a hole) in DNA due to radiation. The good news is that about 90% of those 10k DNA damage events that occur per cell per day are resolved w/o your cellular machinery having to do anything. The free electron that got kicked out by the radiation, leaving the hole, usually finds its way back and fills in the hole without any adverse effects. If it stays away too long, that the 10% of time, you can end up with base excision or a single strand break due to downstream chemical reactions.

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OK, you're talking free radicals. Even then, however, cell damage doesn't necessarily take place, and if it does, the cell wall might be weakened, or something very minor like that. This is not quite my area of expertise. The material I was taught went over the various interactions with radiation directly damaging the DNA strand, which is a far more rare occurance than a free radical formation inside of a cell.

In any event, the topic is really open for debate at this point as we know a lot of things, but far from enough to come close to a definative answer on the subject.

[Exsubmariner]

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Exsub,

This question isn't really about nuclear power, but about cleanup of contamination. My question is how is Iran going to clean up the contamination after Israel uses a couple tactical nukes on their nuclear weapons development sites? I presume that they won't be able to use an airburst attack that produces no fallout, and that there thus will be a lot of fallout contamination, though of course not over as wide an area as with a larger bomb. Will they just bulldoze it all under and concrete it over and hope it doesn't contaminate the ground water? I guess this question could also be applied to how the Japanese cleaned up Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As a side question, I wonder how big/widespread an EMP surge such a smaller tac nuke would cause, and thus how much damage to electronics outside the actual blast zone? It would be a bad time to be in a plane nearby.

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Well, "cleanup" is really a tough proposition. The answer is that the Japanese haven't really "cleaned" Hiroshima or Nagasaki to this day. When I was in Nagasaki, they were still finding hot spots when new construction was taking place. You can't really destroy contamination, it has to decay. Plus, the majority of the contamination was in the glass/concrete/metal slag in and around ground zero. It would be a very nasty proposition to take a jack hammer to that material to break it up just to "decontaminate."

All you can do is simply gather it up and move it around. Then, you have to put it somewhere. Burying it is often the most practical solution. It involves a lot of Man-Rem and may actually do more harm to the people doing the cleanup than it saves. The best cleaning mechanisms are actually the wind and rain, which will difuse and dilute contamination over time to safe levels.

About the best you can do is to recover what is left of the core of the nuclear weapon. Both the bombs from WWII had the majority of their cores recovered and refined again into later weapons.

EMP is a function of the size of the weapon and how far above the ground it is detonated. The Soviet Union did studies on how to most effectively destroy everything in the US with an EMP before a full on strike. There was also accidental EMP damage done during tests at the Nevada test range. The answer is that a small 10-15 KT tactical weapon would not do much EMP damage. The planes delivering the weapons would be unharmed.

[Exsubmariner]

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I've heard that nuclear subs have a top speed underwater of about 45 knots, is this correct?

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X probably knows more than me but what matters isn't classified.

The Soviets developed the Alpa class submarine which was reputed to be the fastest every developed.

One problem with the this class is that an Alpha with the peddle to the metal could be heard by our sonar two oceans away. IOW, top speed really doesn't matter. What matters is the maximum speed where the sub can hear (using passive sonar) without generating so much hull noise where it can easily be detected by the enemy.

In what matters all throughout the cold war we held a significant edge.

~ Rick

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Yeah, we used to say that Russian boats sounded like two skeletens [censored] inside a metal garbage can.

You are correct, Rick. That particular arena of warfare is very complicated and the Russians spent a lot of time and money and wasted a lot of good lives on trying to get edges which didn't really make much difference at all.

[Acein8ter]

I have seen statistics that the worldwide U308 production is less than the amount that is mined by primarily by Canada and Australia. (Although the US, Russia, kazakhstan and a few other countries are producers)

Do you see a deficit of U308 going forward?

Also, do you think the US will drop the burning of Fossil fuels (Coal/Oil) and start producing Uranium reactors in the near future due to Global Warming?

Doesn't the US bury the U308 waste somewhere in Nevada? If the world produces a lot of waste going forward, do you think that they can dump it in a orbiting container?

[AndysDaddy]

This may be related to Ace's question above, but I've heard that fission as an energy source is no long term solution to our energy dependence problems because most of the material we would need is found in other countries, many of whom are not considered "friendly" to US interests. Wouldn't we just be substituting one foreign policy problem for another?

[Acein8ter]

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I have seen statistics that the worldwide U308 production is less than the amount that is mined by primarily by Canada and Australia.

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I wanted to say: I have seen statistics indicating that worldwide U308 production mined by primarily by Canada and Australia is less than the amount that is currently consumed by world. (For Nuclear reactors)