Sunday, September 2, 2012

Nuclear Experimentation Killed Free Power

Death, brought to you by...
Ethan Indigo Smith
Activist Post

This article contains information you might want to ignore. California was nuked in the fifties. The Matrix of Four types of information explained in relation to the enhanced entropy of nuclear experimentation. How nuclear experimentation killed ocean current power, and possibly is preventing us from understanding the god particle/the Higgs Boson counter-wave.

The first (known) meltdown of a nuclear power generator in the U.S.A. occurred in July of 1959 at the Santa Susana Field Laboratories in Simi Valley, CA. Since this accident pre-dated any regulation of the nuclear industry, no one will ever know how much radioactivity was strewn around as a result. Reasonable people guess the released amount was comparable to what happened at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, but much less than the ongoing disaster at Fukushima.

The Simi Valley reactor was an experimental “fast-breeder” type, bizarrely cooled by liquefied metallic Sodium, a substance which will explode when doused with water, and burst into flame when exposed to air. Thousands of pounds of this laboratory curiosity remain unaccounted for. Obviously it has all long since oxidized, and remains in the biosphere as Sodium ions, the familiar Sodium part of Sodium Chloride, table salt. Except, of course, for such Sodium as absorbed a fast-moving neutron from the fast-breeder, turning into radioactive Sodium 24, which in view of a half-life measured in hours, has long since decayed to the radio stable Magnesium 24.

The point is, this was an experiment that only a national government had sufficient resources to undertake, and has already had disastrous results.

And all this is exemplary of the “atomic cowboy” culture of the Santa Susana Laboratories, in which flammable materials, placed in barrels would be dropped into a pit and then ignited by being shot with rifles, a practice which continued, at least sporadically, into 1994.


The point is all commercial nuclear industries are also experimental. Whether it is nuclear power generation or nuclear detonation, all nuclear industry is experimental. I refuse to go along with the status quo of painted euphemisms and call such a thing that can kill all life on the planet, a plant. No nuclear facility is a plant, they are all experiments.

Will top management of utility companies - people whose focus seldom reaches beyond the balance sheets of current quarter and perhaps one subsequent quarter - exercise an appropriate level of control on wastes that will be dangerously radioactive for dozens of thousands of years? Will the American nucpublic remain gullible enough to allow this nuclear experimentation, with all of us as subjects? And, if so, for what fraction of those dozens of thousands of years? It’s all part of the experiment.

For these reasons and myriad others, nuclear power and the nuclear industry are hereinafter referenced as nuclear experimentation and should be labeled nuclear experimentation by the scientific community and any analytical minds who might think accurate language is good and decent.

Every time a new discovery is made concerning nuclear experimentation it is found that it is an even less sustainable business practice than ever portrayed. It becomes increasingly obvious that nuclear experimentation is more dangerous, more insidious than ever portrayed; that the whole industry is based on lying about how costly it all is economically, environmentally, and for that matter, ethically. With hindsight, it is also undeniable that the nuclear experimentation industry is based on lying about how costly it all is. If they can, they will obfuscate truth entirely. The works at Santa Susana laboratories didn’t even tell their families downwind there might be something problematic in the air. Major fires went unreported as did the 1959 meltdown. Only after a similar meltdown at Three Mile Island was the extent of the Santa Susana experiment revealed. (Source)

Already nuclear experimentation has resulted in the destruction of a significant portion of Japan and a region in Europe through accidents alone at what is euphemistically called ‘plants.’ The Fukushima inevitability of nuclear power generation has permanently altered the planet, some areas drastically.

 There have been two thousand nuclear detonations above and below ground, in the air and in the water; nowhere on the planet is untainted, while some areas have been devastated more than others. You are in an experiment. (Source)

Even without further war and without further mechanical complication of nuclear power generation experiments, the process of containment of materials is actually impossible. Hanford, Washington is a leaking disaster zone simply because the radioactive materials cannot be handled and contained safely. The materials for the first nuclear detonations were developed there. Nuclear experimentation promises devastating consequences to future stability of life on the planet. If nuclear experimentation is not ceased, it could cease all life as we know it. This is not wild deduction, but actual fact. Nuclear experimentation promises devastating consequences for the future of all life on this planet. The gross amount of toxicity already constitutes an existential threat.

 In 1964, the Santa Susana laboratories launched SNAP-9A, which, “Failed to achieve orbit,” and burned up while falling back into the atmosphere. Its plutonium reactor released toxins and poisoned life on the planet, poisoned us all, and added another little enhancement to the toxicity and carcinogenicity to our global environment. Several years ago, NASA launched a space vehicle that depended on a “slingshot maneuver” using the Earth’s gravity to carry it deeper into space. It contained enough Plutonium to kill all of us or at least to give almost everyone a really bad case of cancer.

The time, energy and resources that have been invested into nuclear experimentation are likely incalculable. It is an industry of inhuman lies and practices, one which voids all consideration of clean air, clean water and healthy food. Where humanity would be today without nuclear experimentation is impossible to say, but without it surely the planet would be less toxic and polluted.

I submit that, simply because necessity is mother of invention, if it were not for nuclear experimentation humanity could already have free, or for all extents and purposes endless and harmless, power sources. Because we have nuclear power, because we have been induced to believe it is modern technology and not totally experimental and deadly, there has not been the impetus for the last sixty-seven years to search out less deadly energy sources. Moreover, because of the oligarchical collectivism exhibited in the nuclear experimentation industry, from the subsidization of the Price Anderson Act onward, it’s not so wild to suggest that energy alternatives are suppressed, since these subsidies of nuclear experimentation necessarily also act to suppress more desirable alternatives.

And I’m not talking about the conspiracies of suppression of solar power capability and suppression of electric vehicles; it’s much bigger than that. There are ocean currents, not far offshore of the East Coast which could spin underwater ‘windmills’ and turbines to generate enormous amounts of power, without dangerous repercussions. This power facility would indeed be ‘too cheap to meter’, a slogan from the early days of nuclear experimentation. And harnessing energy from currents is just scratching the surface. But, hell, why bother when you got nuclear power? Wind, wave, solar and water power sources belittle nuclear experimentation, for they are safe and endless. Any source of power is better than nuclear experimentation, however none is as oligarchical.

The dangers of nuclear experimentation have always been belittled, while the benefits of nuclear experimentation have always been exaggerated. It is an industry of truth omission. It is the industry which most frequently states “there is no immediate danger to the public” and it is the one which most frequently lies about the public dangers it poses, to all life on Earth.

When it comes to any subject, especially one as dynamic as nuclear experimentation, there are things we know and things we don’t know. As explained in the Matrix of Four, the Philosophy of the Duality of Polarity there are four types of information, as elaborated on by the likes of Socrates and hinted at by Donald Rumsfeld. And as empirically obvious, the more dynamic and serious the subject the more likely people will ignore all information pertaining to it.

 The subject of global environmental destruction is such an extreme subject and is ignored totally to the point society continues to argue over the human effect on temperature rather than change our toxic ways, with no reasoning but oligarchical rewards.

The four types of information are the known knowns and the unknown unknowns. There are also known unknowns and finally, unknown knowns. The fourth part is the most difficult to quantify; these are intuitive or instinctual things and secrets. Donald didn’t mention this fourth part, for he likely operated through secrets and the unknown knowns.

The knowns of nuclear experimentation and its negative consequences to life, its economic and societal costs, is enough to demand we cease it everywhere. And what of the unknown unknowns? What implications for the Earth does promotion of global nuclear experimentation have? What unknown knowns does the nuclear experimentation industry possess that they are not sharing?

One interesting known known is that the EPA turned off public access to the radiation detection equipment on the west coast after the Fukushima meltdowns. It is known that the nuclear industry all over the world lies and omits the truth for each other, Japan and TEPCO, refused to admit there was any danger to the public, before disclosing there was an accident, then admitting there were partial meltdowns, later that there were meltdowns and ultimately admitting that multiple complete melt throughs had occurred. The E.P.A. turned off the radiation detection equipment. (here and here)

Safety of nuclear power has always been lied about and the danger has never been and could never be exaggerated. It is obvious that the oligarchical collectivism of the nuclear experimentation industry has indirectly eliminated alternative power systems to the extraction of and concoction of dangerous minerals. It has done so simply through its existence as well as through diabolical influence and outright subversion of systems less oligarchical.

It is a fact that nuclear power generation experiments distort the magnetics of whatever locality they may be built. Consideration of the local magnetic field is one of many things they have to consider when constructing these experiments. The chain reaction and the electric production is so intense the machine effects the magnetics of the given area. A single nuclear detonation disrupts the magnetic field sending out an electromagnetic pulse powerful enough to disable the electrical infrastructure of a given region. These are known. Now consider unknowns of global nuclear experimentation. What does one nuclear power generation experiment do to the magnetic field of the planet? What does the combination of approximately four hundred and thirty, plus nuclear reactor submarines do to the magnetic field of the planet? These are assumedly known unknowns, we know that we don’t know.

Now consider the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle. I am no damned nuclear scientist and I am not a physicist either, thankfully though information is easily obtainable and anyone with a moment and curiosity can learn nuclear experimentation is a rabbit hole of death and learn a little about quantum physics. In laymen’s terms, discovery of the Higgs Boson particle essentially means that of hundreds of different given particles there is only one that has any mass and weight. It’s another counterintuitive fact in quantum physics, just like the fact that there are particles and waves and the odd thing is that particles behave as waves, a lot. Now if there is just one particle among many which has mass and weight, that behaves like a wave at any given time, theoretically if one is able to produce some sort of counter-wave one could tap into the glue of the universe and make extremely heavy objects as light as air, and further one could tap into this power and harness a power flow so intense as to be only limited by how much is required.

There are four forms of power in the universe and my ignorant guess would be that the counter-wave is of the electro-magnetic variety. I have a one in four chance of being right. What if nuclear experimentation causes unknown destruction and disruption of the magnetic field of Earth resulting in conditions where implementation of the counter-wave is impossible? What if nuclear experimentation is, literally, physically preventing tapping into the glue of the universe and understanding the counter-wave of what is called the god-particle? Originally it was labeled the god damned particle for it could not be found. What if nuclear experimentation is preventing our understanding and finding the counter-wave?


Such a wave is not so outlandish of an idea. Such questions are absolutely relevant amidst the planet-altering, life-ending known potentials of nuclear experimentation. In fact use of such a counter-wave is perhaps how one could explain the transportation of massive stones and the erection of massive stone objects that ancients all around the world seemed able to do and that modern man can not duplicate. In fact, how else could some of these structures and stones be explained? The known knowns of nuclear experimentation is enough to demand its elimination and what of the known unknowns or worse the unknown knowns, the secrets some in the industry have that they are keeping from us?

I hear the following political reference being used to call to question certain circumstances, some applicable to the hyperbole and most, not so much. In respect to nuclear experimentation, it is completely valid to say. Question nuclear experimentation, for the children. The biggest issue on the Earth is that of nuclear experimentation. Stop nuclear experimentation, for the children.

Ethan Indigo Smith is the author of The Terraist Letters and The Matrix of Four.

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29 comments:

poorrichard said...

I really liked this one..

Roland.T.Flakfizer said...

I am no damned nuclear scientist and I am not a physicist either, thankfully though information is easily obtainable and anyone with a moment and curiosity can learn nuclear experimentation is a rabbit hole of death and learn a little about quantum physics.

I see. So you don't know anything about the subject matter, but you can learn "a little" and then come to conclusions?

Funny, MOST people would realize they don't know what they are talking about and therefore refrain from giving an uninformed opinion.

"Umm, excuse me mister master carpenter. I don't know anything about wood, but I did once sit in a chair, so I have an idea on how you are building that house wrong."

Anonymous said...

In reply to Roland T Flakfizer:

What is with the constant ad hominem attacks whenever someone posts an argument counter to the mainstream?

If you don't like what the article said, then say why. Post a counter argument. Just posting a venomous attack on the credibility of the author, without saying anything else, isn't credible.

For it really isn't necessary to be nuclear physicist to see that "nuclear experimentation is a rabbit hole of death..." I mean c'mon...

Anonymous said...

lunatic talk

Anonymous said...

To make matters worse, there is apparently a safe, clean way to produce nuclear energy using a thorium reactor, but the U.S. government wanted to continue to use uranium reactors in order to make bomb-grade plutonium.

Thanks to the promotion of “uranium reactors” and the ensuing history of disastrous "nuclear accidents" with uranium reactors, it would be almost impossible to make most people believe that any technology exists that could produce safe nuclear energy.

http://thoriumremix.com/2011/

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gordonmcdowell/thorium-remix-2012-feature-film-to-propagate-hard

[quote]Until 1974, the United States government funded research into THORIUM as an energy resource, in a radically different type of nuclear reactor. Despite incredible progress (on a meager budget), the project was cancelled due to political power favoring the inferior reactors we see today.[/quote]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/china-thorium-power/

[quote]In the 1960s and 70s, the United States carried out extensive research on thorium and MSRs at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That work was abandoned partly, believe many, because uranium reactors generated bomb-grade plutonium as a byproduct. Today, with nuclear weapons less in demand and cheap oil’s twilight approaching, several countries — including India, France and Norway — are pursuing thorium-based nuclear-fuel cycles.[/quote]

Anonymous said...

roland the flakfizer is a nuke troll! Look at his metaphor! It's nuke talk!

Anonymous said...

Nuclear experimentation and the concentration of materials that interfere with Life processes is nothing but the rabbit hole of death.
All the Big Power Boys wanted was Profit, the Almighty God of the Uncompassionate Sociopath, and they don't give a hoot how they get it.
Once asked how he justified the environmental degradation and pollution costs of the oils his company processed, an executive confided, "If you were on the Titanic, wouldn't you like a nice berth"?
This doom and gloom hopelessness inspires a "dog eat dog" mentality in many, but as many or more see centralization of energy distribution through a poisonous and deadly process a curse more than a blessing.
Are we so hopelessly unimaginative that we serve the Here And Now at the cost of all the future?
Are we so callous as to disregard the sacred Web of Life that the Earth represents? Do we think of this Web as a wrapper on a bon bon to be discarded when the bon bon is eaten? Are we suicidal enough to serve our own at the expense of the entire Web of Life?
Thank God many of us think differently and see nuclear and oil for what they are, Poisons to Life. End their use and save the planet and every being that lives on it. Nuclear, especially, is nothing but, the Rabbit Hole of Death.

Anonymous said...

I am medical doctor and I agree with this analyse - yes, FREE ENERGY could be if we builded a consent on it!
LET US CLAIM free food, free space, free land, free minerals... to all 7 billion people!
Life is a GIFT -let everything be a GIFT

google/youtube: gift economy

Anonymous said...

"the released amount was comparable to what happened at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl" Excuse me, but there is a SLIGHT order of magnitude difference between these two radiation releases!

Anonymous said...

Nuclear power plants are used to case harden the metal that is used as 'bunker busters'. The spent fuel rods are used to make the metal of spent uranium munitions. Watch the documentary, Beyond Treason. And, no, smoking tobacco does not cause cancer, but radiation from nuclear powers plants does. Yet that is something the government ruled doctors who are ruled by the AMA can't tell you. The best way to deflect the blame from yourself is to start a campaign against someone or something else. And the tobacco industry was paid handsomely to accept the blame. By the way - and in case any of you think the world is going to continue on as it always has - there is radiation stored up for the last days.

Anonymous said...

Brilliant!!! I am going to quote from this article in my next article for Activist Post.

Richard Wilcox

PS ignore the trolls and sayanim, they have nothing better to do with their worthless time...

Anonymous said...

No, I think thorium is more crap we don't need, sorry.

http://www.simplyinfo.org/?p=3101

somitcw said...

We should distinguish the difference between what is "possible" from what is "humanly possible".
I believe that it is possible to build a safe nuclear facility and devise ways to eliminate waste from it.
Government and industry prove over and over that building a safe nuclear facility and deposing of its waste is beyond their capability.

Tom Bedlam said...

So, looking at several articles here, I'm guessing one doesn't need even a modicum of understanding or insight about the subjects one writes about? This article's not quite the worst, but it's certainly close.

Perhaps I should write about golf, or Limoges china collections - don't have a clue about either. Sort of like this writer and nuclear energy. Or a few of the commenters, for that matter.

Anonymous said...

Tom Bedlam you obviously don't understand how to make a point. All you did was say that the people weren't experts and you think they should stay quiet. Let the experts decide -- like they did in Soviet Russia.

To condemn the writer as a person that should not be writing on a subject you should point out inaccuracies or deficient knowledge.

You CAN write on golf with out being an expert. Write about how boring it is to watch or play, how it is elitist or expensive. You can have opinions to share about the china you mentioned.

Why did you read the article and why to you want to silence those you disagree with. You don't have to understand the word intolerant to be a totalitarian... but then again I am no expert.

Tom Bedlam said...

"Tom Bedlam you obviously don't understand how to make a point. All you did was say that the people weren't experts and you think they should stay quiet."

More like - if one's writing articles, one might try actually understanding at least SOMETHING about the topic, most especially if it's something technical. That's not to say you have to be a design engineer or physicist.

"To condemn the writer as a person that should not be writing on a subject you should point out inaccuracies or deficient knowledge."

Then you'll say I'm a spook/shill/disinfo agent. :D

"You CAN write on golf with out being an expert."

But not very well - as you say, I can speak on it tangentially but if I try to address what I perceive to be evils of a sport and I have no working knowledge *at all* it often just seems odd. For example - some years back when I had more spare time than I do now, I used to compete in sporting clay shooting, sort of like skeet. A sadly uninformed young lady in town saw a t-shirt I was wearing from the event and gave me a loud, opinionated dressing down in public about the evils of me murdering hundreds of poor defenseless pigeons as a "blood sport". If you've got an opinion about something, fine! It might carry a bit more weight with the sane if you know the "pigeons" are little clay disks...

"Why did you read the article and why to you want to silence those you disagree with."

Not seeing the attempt to silence anyone here. Wandering non-sequiturs and gross factual errors don't speak well for whatever point's trying to be made, though.

Anonymous said...

To tom B. U still make no point and make much less sense than the author. What are the gross factual errors? On what does the author make pigeon and clay mixups? If we waited for experts to write about nuclear experimentation they would argue nukes don't cause dangerous genetic mutations -because of lacking proof. You're not a spook, you just support whatever the authorities tell you, what you know nothing about, you're worse than a spook, you're a tolerant tag along.

Anonymous said...

tom, wake up...http://enenews.com/fukushima-plant-keep-contaminating-pacific-ocean-rest-time-fuel-be-removed-good-solution-constantly-pump-water-buildings-video

Tom Bedlam said...

"What are the gross factual errors?"

I'll parse through it tomorrow - there are quite a few. Also a lot of "bees smell fear" sorts of non-sequiturs, breathless hyperbole and illogical jumps to conclusions. Here's one I found amusing - "It is a fact that nuclear power generation experiments distort the magnetics of whatever locality they may be built."

"If we waited for experts..."

Yet, genetic mutations were written about by experts right off the bat. Not so much by amateurs, although they were sort of encouraged to do some home experimentation.

"...you just support whatever the authorities tell you"

Well, that's a broad brush there. If the 'authorities' tell you that there's a commutative principle in addition, would that make it wrong? It's not brave, principled individualism to make up science 'facts' like the magnetism statement - it's generally just inaccurate. One might want to ask - 'what exactly IS an EMP, why does a high altitude detonation cause one, does that process happen in a breeder reactor' and the like, because then one of "the authorities", like Arthur Compton, might have some info to pass on to you, albeit posthumously.

Anonymous said...

Dear Tom Bedlam,

Yeah, it is true that if you want to nit pick you can find flaws in some of the writing and journalism around. I even agree that some parts of the article above, an article that I overall consider to be brutally accurate and highly insightful, could be better documented etc.

But read this if you are still a fan of the nuke:

Martin Cohen and Andrew McKillop, The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy, The World’s Most Dangerous Fuel (Palgrave, 2012, 242 pgs.)

Thank you, Richard Wilcox

Tom Bedlam said...

"Yeah, it is true that if you want to nit pick you can find flaws in some of the writing and journalism around. I even agree that some parts of the article above, an article that I overall consider to be brutally accurate and highly insightful, could be better documented etc."

Hi, Richard. I try not to nitpick - at least not at the grammar/spelling or small issues with wording sort of level.

However, really awful writing and/or factual errors I find to detract from the message trying to be put across. Heck, I can even sort of agree that it would be nice not to have power sources with somewhat questionably bad risk/reward ratios. I don't think that point is advanced by this sort of article.

The problem really is that there are NO power sources that are consequence-free. You have some that are close. The close ones generally are very low density or are not dependable 24/7, and aren't 100% useful for a technological civilization. Generally. You have some that are sort of rife with possible consequence, like 50's nuclear power. That gets better as you go along - we've learned a lot. It'll get better in the future.

Omitting the many technical mistakes, it's also a bit disingenuous to take a more than half-century old reactor design out of context and use it as an example of why nuclear power is bad as a genre.

Tom Bedlam said...

Part I:

Ok, let's parse through this pooch. I'm going to elide most of the source statements to reduce clutter, if you want to read the paragraph I'm responding to, scroll up.

"The first (known) meltdown...at Fukushima"


First, what happened at SRE wasn't really a meltdown. One generally saves that term for events where the majority of core material liquifies and ends up in the bottom of the reactor, where it continues to react in a generally uncontrolled fashion. Chernobyl sort of qualifies for this. Fukushima possibly does - a lot of the data I see shorn of its hype seems to indicate that it did, albeit a bit indirectly. We'll find out as time goes by. SRE - not so much.

What actually happened was more of a widespread core damage where about a third of the fuel elements failed due to overheating.

Any time you have a reactor where the coolant flow is compromised, especially if it's been running a while, you impede the flow of coolant and you'll end up with the fuel elements overheating. Most of the time that ends up with warping, cladding failure, rupture of some of the elements and shedding of some of the contents into the coolant or falling into the reactor in a solid state. You get melting within the element itself. Once the fuel heats to a certain point, you get solid-solid diffusion of iron from the stainless cladding and uranium from the fuel slugs. This forms what's called a eutectic melt - the resultant iron-uranium alloy melts at less than the temperature of either iron or uranium. So along the boundary of the cladding and uranium, you get a molten film of iron-uranium goop. That's the first stage of a meltdown, definitely. But you never got wholesale molten fuel at SRE.

With SRE (the Simi Valley reactor of the article), they were using a lubricant called tetralin which at the time was thought to be generally compatible with molten sodium. It wasn't. It ended up leaving residue stuck to some of the fuel bundles, which caused a couple of problems. It impaired heat transfer to the sodium, and in some elements it plugged some of the drain holes that the sodium flowed through altogether. This caused the subsequent wash cell explosion and the following core damage during run 14 (the so-called "meltdown"). Four elements had fuel damage with warping to the point the elements could not be immediately removed, with some localized partial melting and shedding of solid chunks of fuel and cladding into the bottom of the reactor, most of which apparently occurred during later removal of the fuel elements. About 1/3 of the fuel elements had some damage.

The reactor was shut down. There wasn't an explosion, nor a "meltdown" in a real sense. The reactor wasn't rendered unusable. No "boom". Nothing was "strewn around". It was a serious accident, though. You never want to see this sort of thing happen - any technical issue that ends up with fuel damage and release of radioactive material you weren't planning on is non-trivial. The issue here was like with TMI - how much radioactive gas was released when the cladding failed.

Tom Bedlam said...

Part II:

The subsequent cover-up obscured what actually happened. The data ends up being "what we actually measured at the time" from the reactor owners and "what we think maybe might have happened based on our worst case guesses" from the anti-nuclear activists, which ranges as you might expect from "none" to "omfg" depending on one's natural inclination.

If you believe Boeing/Rocketdyne, very little I-131 and CS-137 were released from the fuel bundles, and what little there was was caught by the building's vent gas system or plated into the sodium and stored for decay, later released over a long time as allowed by law, with only maybe 20 Curies of radioactive gas getting out. That doesn't agree with the data, and is probably not true.

If you believe Dr Makhijani, all the gas that could have theoretically been in the bundles was there, and all was released, none of it was caught, and it all went into the environment immediately. That doesn't really agree with the data collected, and is also probably not true. That's the "260 times TMI" number.

Subsequent studies put the release in the 20-1400 Curie point. Not insignificant, but not OMFG either. The problem is that you can't really put a firm number to it, so everyone believes the number that corresponds to their viewpoint.

Next, the last sentence - TMI is believed to have released about 20 Curies of I-131. SRE probably about 1400. Chernobyl probably released about 80 million Curies of I-131 so far. Fukushima about 6.4 million Curies of I-131. As another poster noted "there are several orders of magnitude difference". Saying that SRE was somewhere between TMI and Chernobyl but less than Fukushima is a bit like saying "a person walks with a speed somewhere between a slug and a scramjet, but less than a rifle bullet". You can't really compare SRE to Fukushima or Chernobyl, and the release so far from Fukushima is about a 10th of Chernobyl, not more.

Issues: No meltdown. No "strewn around". You can't reasonably compare even the worst case SRE numbers to Chernobyl or Fukushima, and Fukushima is, at least so far, not nearly as bad as Chernobyl in terms of total release, not worse as is implied.

Tom Bedlam said...

Part III:

"The Simi Valley reactor was an experimental “fast-breeder” type..."

No. No it wasn't. That's absolutely incorrect. SRE was a sodium-cooled, graphite moderated reactor. It wasn't a breeder at all. It certainly wasn't a fast neutron breeder - it was graphite moderated.

Mr Smith may be confused by the sodium cooling - many fast breeders are sodium cooled. But other reactors may be sodium cooled as well. In this case, SRE was a feasibility study for sodium cooling - remember that this was 1954, early days for nuclear power.

Breeders are often designed with sodium cooling because of sodium's low neutron cross-section - it *doesn't* really function as a moderator, and doesn't intercept many neutrons. That's a plus for breeder reactors for reasons I won't go into here.

But in the case of SRE, sodium is readily available, comparatively low cost, and has a low vapor pressure. That means that you don't need high pressure piping or containment for high-pressure steam release as you would in the case of a pressurized water reactor. At the time, it was debated whether the relative simplicity of a sodium cooled reactor outweighed the hazards of sodium handling.

None of the issues with SRE were directly related to the sodium in the end, other than the root cause of the problem was an incompatibility between a coolant/lubricant called tetralin and sodium that caused tetralin residue to coat the fuel elements and plug coolant channels. It was more a materials science/testing issue with the tetralin. Tetralin just wasn't a good material to use in this design.

Thus, SRE wasn't even close to being a fast breeder. Breeder reactors are quite different. It's also not "bizarre" to use sodium as a coolant. Various types of nuclear reactors also use air, water, helium, hydrogen, molten salt, or molten lead as coolants. You use what fits your design goals. Most commercial reactors use boiling or pressurized water as coolants because that's what was current when the current crop of reactors was designed. That doesn't mean it's the best thing in every circumstance.

Tom Bedlam said...

Part IV:

"Thousands of pounds of this laboratory curiosity remain unaccounted for"

Maybe - maybe not. It's not a laboratory curiosity, unless you're a high school chem student. Metallic sodium is a fairly common material in industry - the US alone uses something like 30,000 tons a year.The issue here is, how much sodium was in the primary loop to begin with? The "thousands of pounds" number assumes: the primary tank was actually exactly the size described in DOE-13403, that it was exactly full when the reactor was first filled, and that the recovered metallic sodium was all the sodium there was. Given that there were about 55,000 pounds of metallic sodium recovered, 1000 pounds would be about a 1.8% loss. However, there are a few confounders. One, the primary tank actual volume was never measured, just calculated. Two, no one knows how full it was. Thus the 1.8% loss is a max if the tank volume was correct. Three, the metallic sodium recovered isn't all the sodium there was in the primary loop.

The primary loop was disassembled and the sodium containing sections were cleaned of sodium residue using ethanol, which oxidizes it in a controlled fashion. The residual chemical slurry was stored as well. It is known that at least 1800 pounds of sodium was neutralized and stored this way. That amount is not included in the metallic sodium tally, and accounts for most of the "missing sodium".

"Obviously it has all long since oxidized..."

Actually, it was likely oxidized at the site during cleanup on purpose by ethanol washing - see above. However, even if it was oxidized and returned to the environment, it came from there originally. It's not like it was created by Frankenstein. As you stated, it doesn't tend to stay very radioactive for very long. The remaining activity was likely due to contaminants picked up from the fuel rods. The clean up assay for the sodium showed only low-level remaining activity.

Tom Bedlam said...

Part V:

"The point is, this was an experiment that only a national government had sufficient resources to undertake, and has already had disastrous results."

One can say that about many government projects, nuclear or not.

"...ignited by being shot with rifles, a practice which continued, at least sporadically, into 1994."

That's really not a horribly bad way of dealing with metallic sodium contamination, as long as the material isn't chemically or radiologically contaminated. Burning is a common method of disposal of trash.

"The point is all commercial nuclear industries are also experimental."

Well, no. I like the hype part about a single nuclear plant extinguishing all life on earth, too. Why not go all the way over the top when you do?

"...and any analytical minds who might think accurate language is good and decent."

Using a term in a new and somewhat inaccurate way such as this is often called a "neologism" - there's a certain group that tends to use neologism a lot.

"With hindsight, it is also undeniable that the nuclear experimentation industry is based on lying about how costly it all is. If they can, they will obfuscate truth entirely."

Now, THAT is one of the first accurate things I've seen in this article.

"There have been two thousand nuclear detonations above and below ground, in the air and in the water; nowhere on the planet is untainted, while some areas have been devastated more than others."

True - consider your argument here. If even one nuclear power plant, running with barely enriched material can extinguish all life on earth, why didn't 2,000 nuclear explosions cause total annihilation? How can people live in areas where they were used? Some of those weapons had quite a bit of fissionable material in them. Thousands of pounds, in some designs.

" If nuclear experimentation is not ceased, it could cease all life as we know it. This is not wild deduction, but actual fact."

Then show your work. How do you come to this conclusion? Numbers, please, not appeal to emotion.

"...or at least to give almost everyone a really bad case of cancer."

Not even close. However, I do concede that firing plutonium into orbit for spacecraft power is probably not safe, even when it's in the form of ceramics with redundant safety.

" Where humanity would be today without nuclear experimentation is impossible to say, but without it surely the planet would be less toxic and polluted."

I disagree. Without it, we'd surely have burned more coal. This statement is a sort of false dichotomy - without nuclear, surely cleanliness and unicorns, with nuclear, filth and toxicity. You can't know that - and furthermore, the most likely thing would have been simply the use of more of what we've got - coal and gas.

"I submit that, simply because necessity is mother of invention, if it were not for nuclear experimentation humanity could already have free, or for all extents and purposes endless and harmless, power sources. "

Another reiteration of the same thing. Same error. Worldwide, nuclear power accounts for about 10% of generated capacity. Without it, an increase of use of the other common forms of energy generation would cover the shortfall. There's no shortage of coal.

Tom Bedlam said...

Part VI:

"There are ocean currents, not far offshore of the East Coast which could spin underwater ‘windmills’ and turbines to generate enormous amounts of power, without dangerous repercussions..."

Surely you can discuss nuclear power without having to reach for Emmanuel Goldstein? Wind, wave, solar, ocean currents, all have their various environmental impacts as well. Trying to handwave them away and say that they're safe is a bit disingenuous. Every one of them affects the biome they are in. Every one of them requires resources to implement. Wind not only kills migratory birds, it affects wind patterns globally. Wave power is generally quite dilute, and affects shallow water fish habitats, and shore weathering. Solar requires massive fabrication of cells for photoelectric power, with a huge energy investment and chemical contamination. Not to mention the effect on the environment into which it's installed. You have to cover a huge amount of land mass to generate even our current level of use, and it's cyclical. Further, you have to replace it regularly. Tapping underwater currents affects global weather. You just can't pull the sort of energy we use out of the biosphere without some sort of repercussion.

Don't try to say that solar energy or deep current extraction can be done by Joe Sixpack in his garage, either, that's another governmental level problem.


"It is a fact that nuclear power generation experiments distort the magnetics of whatever locality they may be built."

No, it's not. EMP is a huge blurt of radio waves, not a static magnetic field. Basically, when you detonate a device at high altitude, the x-ray and gamma flux knocks electrons off of gas atoms in the ionosphere at high speeds (Compton effect). These circle in the Earth's magnetic field, giving up energy in the form of emitted radio waves (there's your EMP). As a secondary effect, there's a corresponding momentary deformation in the Earth's magnetic field which, when it "snaps back" causes what's known as a geomagnetic heave. Between the two effects, you get a fast influx of energy into electronics and distribution lines from the radio frequency component of the EMP, and a slower influx from the heave that primarily affects only long lines such as antennas or distribution networks.

This doesn't apply to nuclear power plants at all.

Tom Bedlam said...

Part VII:

Not only is there no Compton effect inducing an EMP, the power output levels from nuclear plants doesn't greatly exceed that of other conventional plants. so "the electric production" isn't any more intense than a big gas fired plant.

Nuclear power plants and submarines aren't little quasistatic EMP sources.



"Now consider the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle. I am no damned nuclear scientist and I am not a physicist either,"

It doesn't work that way. There are four forces, not forms of power, and each has its own gauge bosons. The gauge boson for the electromagnetic force is the photon. For weak, W and Z particles, various gluons for strong, and gravitons for gravity. Some of these are easy to work with - the photon for instance. If the Higgs exists, then there's a fifth force, which is the Higgs field, and the Higgs boson is its mediator. The Higgs field supposedly interacts with various particles to different degrees, thus do you obtain mass. We can't even, as of yet, make or detect Higgs bosons. It's thought we may have, but they're still not absolutely sure. And the field is supposedly uniform - sort of like a static magnetic field. We don't know if the thing even exists, much less can we nullify it. And if we could, well, so far it's been pretty much standard that you won't get more energy out of it than you'll have to put in. Your hypothesis that *so much nuclear research* is going on that there is no money or scientific acumen left to research the Higgs is so far fetched as to be ludicrous. Much less the idea that there is some sort of anti-Higgs field which we could have for the taking if only we hadn't built that last nuclear reactor.


" In fact use of such a counter-wave is perhaps how one could explain the transportation of massive stones and the erection of massive stone objects that ancients all around the world seemed able to do and that modern man can not duplicate. In fact, how else could some of these structures and stones be explained?"

Are you serious? Are you seriously proposing that ancient man somehow built a superscience Higgs field suppressor and used it to...move stone bits around? That's your proof? You're postulating that some non-existent magnetic field from nuclear power generation prevents us from discovering the superscience of the ancients? What do you think a star does? Do you think that there is no nuclear decay in nature outside a power plant? It's like a really bad science fiction plot by Andre Norton or something where science drives out magic. Bah.

Patrick Sullivan said...

Over unity free energy was proven as early as 1855 when Bell operated his telegraph with the batteries disconnected. In 1871 Henry Paine powered a powerful table say and manufactured HHO, the same stuff that Stanley Meyers powered his dune buggy with, all using Free Energy.

If you're interested: "Free Energy Here and Now and Then: Velocity Power Sources.

Gives the technical details. Read it For Free here:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/175654

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