The Chaotic-Neutron

This is scary at first sight.Excerpt from the article

A potential problem with the emergency reactor core cooling system at the nation’s largest nuclear power plant went undetected from 1986, when it began producing power, until last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission(NRC) and the plant operator confirmed Thursday.

The issue was identified when engineers at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station did an analysis after NRC inspectors raised questions at a detailed inspection early last week. The NRC was following up to see if earlier cooling system problems had been fixed.

The review showed the emergency cooling system may not operate as expected to provide water to reactor cores after a small leak in the reactor cooling lines, NRC spokesman Victor Dricks said.

Practically, for this flaw to lead to any kind of disatrous results, lots of redundant safety systems need to fail together. Well, i am not refuting the fact that such an incident could have happened anytime in the past 19 years of its operation but chances for a complete failure and a meltdown are slim. Nevertheless, this is definitely a serious issue and hopefully, the NRC will bring in a stricter system to check all the flaws in all operating reactors.

God, i dont even want to begin to imagine what the media fuss will be, on all this.

If one lets an infinite number of monkeys to type on a keyboard, one will eventually write Macbeth, but does that mean they are as intelligent as Shakespeare?via Who created the Creator then ? : a random post i stumbled onto.

I am sure every one of you know by now that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been jointly awarded to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director general of IAEA. In his interview, after the announcement of the award, he made a beautiful statement. Here it is.

If we are going to survive, we need to put the emphasis on what unites us together and not what separates us. It is not the difference in colour or creed or border, or what have you; it’s a fact that you are part of the human race, and the more we are able to understand the affinity we have with it, with each other, the more we can have, achieve, a lasting peace, durable peace, I believe.

And that my friend, is a true peace loving man’s words !

Nearly 20,000 dead in South Asian quake. This is very sad. On a beautiful sunday morning, this is not the kind of news i wanted to see.Eventhough i do not exactly like Pakistan or maybe just their Indian team and politicians, a toll of 20,000 innocent people is a terrible and disturbing news. And what’s more petrifying is that South Asia is Prone to more Earthquakes in the future. Here are some excerpts from this article about some of the damage that earthquakes have caused in the past.

The area along India’s northern border in disputed Kashmir is by far the hottest spot in that country, said A.K. Shukla, director of India’s Earthquake Risk Evaluation Center. He said the latest quake, unfortunately, will not be the last and may not be the largest to come.”It’s not a question of surprise, because that area is a highly seismic one,” he said. “It’s not surprising at all.”

Saturday’s quake was centered about 60 miles northeast of Islamabad in the forested mountains of Pakistani Kashmir. At least 22 aftershocks followed within 24 hours, including a 6.2-magnitude temblor.

In 1935, a magnitude-7.5 earthquake was recorded in Quetta, India, killing 50,000. In 1974, just north of the recent quake’s epicenter, a magnitude-6.2 earthquake occurred, generating 5,800 casualties.

Will the same type of collision that created the Himalayas millions of years ago be the demise of beautiful Asia and my beautiful sub-continent ? I pray for that not to happen.

Update : Death Toll at 35,000 in Pakistan Quake

Just got the hot news. I have cleared all three papers in my qualification exam ! I rock ! I am high with excitement now. If the world is going to collapse onto itself, please let it be now.

Good things aside, i still have a oral qualifier round to look forward to. I was told that i was a bit weak with Reactor Physics and so have 2 major Gods in nuclear department specializing in Xr physics on my committee for the oral.

Now this is going to be fun. Before even the thought of starting preparation for the oral, i am going out to party ! Woohoo …

Why nuclear power is not the answer

An excerpt from the article.

“Nuclear power is not a solution to climate change. It could only ever provide for a tiny proportion of our energy needs and this would be at great cost to the taxpayer, the environment and would pose a threat to the safety of the public. Clean technologies are available and they need the Government’s support. Tony Blair must stop talking to the nuclear lobby and speed up investment low -carbon, renewable and efficient energy technologies.”

What are those renewable energy sources which will both satisfy the rising energy needs and be economical as well as efficient ? I really would like to know. But Friends of the Earth Executive Director Tony Juniper fails to answer that.

Probably the biggest misconception on Nuclear power is that “Nuclear power has a poor safety record”. If you want to base that future safety of reactors are dictated by 2 accidents that happened more than 25 years back, then God help these people.

Maybe the Director needs to learn from how France satisfies its energy needs. More than 70% of power is produced from nuclear reactors and how many accidents have they had till now ?? Zilch. Take that for your record and stop brooding over Chernobyl and TMI already.

It is really sad that man’s prejudice overpowers logic (Well that applies to my comments too, but hey, this is my blog !).

Got this as a forward from a friend of mine and was told that this works for almost every person he knows. This only takes a second to do and it’s amazing!

Read on …

Have you ever wondered if your mind is normal or different? Well, do this little mind exercise (no need to write anything down) and find out at the end!!

Free will or synaptic wiring? You be the judge.

Check out the following exercise, guaranteed to raise an eyebrow.

Now, click on this link >>

Love beyond physical and material needs
Is sublime and inexpressible in words.
Blind as a bat, in the darkness that feeds
The passion, the light, is mysterious and a complex surd.

If my passion were a woman personified,
I’d marry her right away without a second thought.
Serenity and chaos, meeting at this origin,
The best perfection attained in all my years.

Wishing that my father were here
To see how this being has crawled forward.
This the only sad thought that now enters my mind
Let unbound happiness shower his heart.

Article By Charles Stein

I spent more years than I would care to admit writing about the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. The Seabrook story was exhausting, but it taught me a valuable lesson: When it comes to energy, especially the price of energy, the future is very hard to see.

Seabrook was conceived in the late 1960s, a time of great optimism about nuclear power. Nuclear plants, the utilities promised, would produce electricity that was ”too cheap to meter.” When oil prices shot up in the 1970s, eventually reaching the unheard of price of $30 a barrel, Seabrook had another selling point: it would reduce New England’s dependence on costly foreign oil.

Things turned out differently. Like many of the nuclear plants in that era, Seabrook ran into engineering and political problems. Construction advanced at a snail’s pace. Every year, the plant’s estimated cost got higher and its completion date got pushed further into the future. When Seabrook finally went on line in 1990, its price tag had reached $6 billion.

The owners had to eat some of that money, because regulators refused to pass the costs along to consumers. Changes in the price of oil made Seabrook’s economics even worse. By 1990 oil was selling for less than $23 a barrel and the price fell even lower in the years that followed.

The verdict was clear: Nuclear power was a financial disaster; oil was a bargain.

Fast-forward to today. In case you hadn’t noticed, the price of oil has gone up a lot — to about $64 a barrel. The price of natural gas — the most popular fuel source in New England’s power plants — has gone up even more sharply. Utilities that venture out to buy electricity in the spot market are paying three times as much for power as they did a year ago. Consumers could pay about 20 percent more for electricity this winter, largely because of higher oil and gas prices.

And those ”white elephant” nuclear plants like Seabrook? It turns out they are sitting in the catbird seat. Their steep initial costs have been written off over time. Their cost of fuel is minuscule, according to Steven Taub, an executive at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm. Even with all other costs thrown in, nuclear plants today produce power at less than half the cost of plants that burn natural gas or oil.

Like the Saudi Arabians, the owners of nuclear plants have plenty of cheap power that they can sell at high prices in deregulated energy markets, earning big profits in the process. Many of the plants, Seabrook included, were purchased by new owners in recent years who paid relatively little for the assets. In 2002, FPL Energy, a Florida company, bought a controlling interest in Seabrook for $836 million. ”In today’s market, many of those plants are worth significantly more,” Taub said.

The verdict is clear: Nuclear power is a bargain; oil and gas are a financial disaster.

There are plenty of specialists around who are firmly convinced that high oil and gas prices are here to stay. Richard Lester suggests we should be wary about such pronouncements. “Smart people don’t get this right,” said Lester, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of nuclear science and engineering. In 2003, Lester and some colleagues wrote a report on the future of nuclear power. They assumed natural gas prices — the main competition — would stay in a range of $3 to $6 per million BTUs. Last week natural gas was selling for more than $12 per million BTUs.

The solution here is obvious: We need to be diversified. Investors spread their bets around because they don’t know which stocks will do well and which will do poorly. We need to do the same with sources of energy because, in truth, we don’t have a clue what will happen to their prices in the future. The cheap may become expensive and the expensive cheap.

When it comes to the energy future, a little humility goes a long way.

– Right on the head.