Nuclear Facts And Fables
Many misconceptions have entered the nuclear folklore in recent decades. Major fables propagated by opponents of nuclear power are summarized here, and countered with facts. These facts are based on studies and data published by professional societies, representing some 250,000 diploma-ed engineers from around the world. Factual statements are backed up by data in later chapters. Fable 1 Nuclear reactors are like nuclear bombs. Fact This half-truth is frequently suggested by newspaper...
Amounts And Forms Of Energy Consumed By Man
According to statistics supplied by the US Census Bureau and Department of Energy DOE , there were 281,422,000 people living in the USA in 2000, who consumed a total of 1.18 x 1011 GJ y of heat-equivalent energy from the primary energy sources listed in Brief 2A. The U.S. consumption rate was thus 419 GJ y or 4.4kW e per person. This compares with a total world consumption of 4.01 x 1011 GJ y of heat energy by 6,157,401,000 people, or 67GJ y 0.71 kW e per person. These per-capita consumption...
Abstract
The importance of uranium-generated nuclear power is discussed. The review forecasts severe shortages of oil and natural gas in 25 years, and their depletion in 40 years. With a moratorium on burning coal to prevent global warming, it is shown that uranium-produced electricity and heat is essential for large-scale future productions of synfuels hydrogen, ammonia, hydrazine, and alcohol made from air, water, and sunshine to replace the portable petro-fuels presently propelling our vast...
Brief Isotope Enrichment Schemes For Gaseous Uranium Hexafluoride 1
streams can be separated by intercept of the free jet flow with a skimmer that sucks up the core of the jet but excludes the rim gases, which are pumped out separately. The DIF technique requires hundreds of stages to enrich 0.7 U-235-enriched UF6 to 3 , while a UCF plant can do this in tens of steps and MLIS in two to three stages. Brief 17 illustrates DIF, UCF, and MLIS unit separators. Besides a desirable high enrichment factor per stage which determines the number of stages, high throughput...
The Uranium Fuel Cycle And Environmental Impacts
Uranium mining, enrichment, fuel fabrication, and radiowaste disposal make up the elements of the so-called 'Uranium Fuel Cycle', which we shall briefly examine in what follows. Briefs 15 and 16 illustrate the sequence of processes that uranium must undergo before it is ready as reactor fuel. Since the beginning of the atomic age, great care was taken to safeguard and assure uranium accountability. Concomitantly with the exception of some early WW-II military operations , environmental caution...
Chemical Symbols Of Selected Elements And Isotopes
Boron Z 5 B-10 Boron M 10, Z 5 , B-11 Boron M Carbon Z 6 C-12 Carbon M 12, Z 6 , C-13 Carbon M Hydrogen Z 1 H-1 M 1, Z 1 Helium Z 2 He-4 Helium M 4, Z 2 , He-3 Helium M Potassium or Kalium Z 19 K-39 M 39, Z 19 , K-40 M 40, Z Lithium Z 3 Li-6 Lithium M 6, Z 3 , Li-7 Lithium M Nitrogen M 14, Z 7 , N-15 M 15, Z 7 Oxygen M 16, Z 8 0-18 M 18, Z 8 Uranium m 233, Z 92 U-235 Uranium M 235, Z 92 Iodine M 127, Z 53 I-126 M 126, Z 53 Cesium M 133, Z 55 Cs-137 M 137, Z 55 Strontium M 88, Z 38 Sr-90...
Brief Diagram Of The Chernobyl Rbmk Reactor 1
given immediately to all people living under along the path of the atmospheric fall-out cloud over at least a distance of 60 km. The Chernobyl disaster has caused Russian reactor designers to completely overhaul and substantially improve reactor safety features. Prior to Chernobyl these had been deemed inadequate and insufficient by US and WestEuropean standards. A Chernobyl-like reactor accident with atmospheric release of fission products could never happen with US or West-European reactors,...
Biological Effects Of Nuclear Radiation
Many people are unaware that nuclear radiation is also emitted by nature and is all around us. It comes from the heavens cosmic radiation and from naturally radioactive minerals on the earth surface that emit it. Life on earth has evolved in this radiation climate for eons, and all bio-organisms have learned to tolerate or make use of it. When a gamma, xray, or ultraviolet photon strikes a bio-organic molecule in skin or in an internal organ, it will knock off an electron, that is it 'ionizes'...
Brief Flywheel Battery Components 1
D 2R 16 cm. Such an outer diameter is reasonable for cylinders that must fit under the hood of an automobile. This result is independent of torus or disc mass. A lower rpm will increase the value of D if Vm is fixed. With a torus of 8 cm outer radius and a torus body cross-section of S cm2, the torus body volume equals Qtorus 2 RS 50.27 S cm3. Thus if each torus mass is 46 kg 46,000 gm, the density of the fiber-encapsulated material would have to be p 46,000 Qtorus 915 S gm cm3. Using depleted...
Brief Illustration Of The Uranium Fuel Cycle 1
of a hazard than the routine shipment of some hazardous chemicals. Although the caskets are built to stay intact in a train crash, even in case they are penetrated by an armor-piercing mortar, little radioactive material could escape since the fission products are embedded in solid material. A statistical analysis for nuclear waste shipments from all one hundred US nuclear reactors, predicts two deaths per century attributable to radioactivity in worst-case casket transport accidents. This risk...
Brief Typical Layout Of A Nuclear Power Plant 1
reactor construction company to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission NRC . This report is carefully examined by the NRC which usually takes over a year to insure all required safety features are incorporated in the reactor design before it is approved. After construction, NRC representatives inspect the reactor for compliance. Because only 0.7 of natural uranium is directly fissionable U-235, and 99.3 is the less fissionable U-238 isotope, large amounts of uranium would be wasted unless the U-238...
Short Biography Of The Author
Jeff W. Eerkens is an adjunct research professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia. He has a doctorate in Engineering Science 1960 and a masters degree in Nuclear Engineering 1957 from the University of California at Berkeley, and is a registered nuclear engineer in the State of California. His doctoral dissertation was a study of the chemical effects in fluids produced by fission fragments of uranium. His Ph.D. work included graduate studies in biochemistry and the origin of life. Dr....
Nuclear Power Reactors
The first nuclear reactor was assembled in 1942 by Enrico Fermi and collaborators at the University of Chicago. Fermi who had left his native Italy for the US in 1939 when Mussolini's fascists took over, was one of a few pioneers in the 1930's who tried to understand the workings of atomic nuclei by bombarding them with newly discovered neutrons see Section 3.4 . After he learned in 1939 that his German colleagues Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassman had shown that uranium could...
Brief Electric Power Generation By A Steam Turbine 1
uranium fission produces 2.5 neutrons on average for each 1 that induces fission, there are losses due to neutron absorption by materials of construction zirconium and steel , and due to escapes of neutrons from the reactor core region. The 1.5 neutrons that are left, while not needed to maintain the chain reaction, must be conserved as much as possible. In breeder reactors, absorption by uranium-238 of 1 of the 1.5 'left-over' neutrons is required to make new fuel. Neutron escapes are...
Mishaps And Malfunctions In Reactor Operations
Nuclear reactor power plant operations, like all other human undertakings, occasionally experience a malfunction or other disturbance that leads to an accident. Many people ask if reactor accidents are tolerable and reasonable when compared to other human endeavours. We shall show that the risk of running a nuclear plant is no different and probably less than that of an oil-, natgas-, or coal-fired power plant or chemical industry. Can reactors be operated safely The answer is a definite yes....
Portable Energy Sources
a Natural Non-Renewable Fuels Compressed Natgas Methane, Ethane, Propane, Butane CH4, C2H6, b Manufactured Energy Carriers Synfuels and Batteries Hydrogen H2 , from Water H2O Electricity or Heat. Ammonia NH3 and Hydrazine N2H4 , from Water H2O Air 80 N2 Electricity or Heat Syn-Petrols and Methane CmHn Ok , CH4 , from Water H2O Coal C Electricity or Heat Methanol CH3OH , Ethanol C2H5OH , from Biomass Corn Sunshine Electricity Rechargeable Electric Storage Batteries Rechargeable Mechanical...
Radiation Dose Measurements And Tolerable Exposures
To determine what radiation levels are safe, one must first define a unit of radiation dosage. This unit is the 'rad' which is defined as 100 ergs 10-5 joules of ionization energy transferred per gram of effected body tissue by radiation particles. In formula form 6.1 1rad 100ergs 10-5J of deposited ionization energy per gram This definition still does not mean much without a comparison or reference as to how much or how little damage a rad does to man and how one measures it. This is discussed...
Electric Power Generation Technology
Historically the first electric power plants delivering large quantities of electric energy were hydro-electric. In 1895, Westinghouse built the first AC electric power generator in Niagara Falls by passing waterflow from the Falls through a turbine that induced electric currents in copper windings. General Electric built high-power grid lines that took the 1.1MW e of electricity to Buffalo, New York, where it lighted the city's streetlights and powered streetcars. The technical brains behind...