Every nuclear explosion since 1945

[Napoléon]

Why the hell is *France* going all out on nuclear testing?

Why is any country going all out on nuclear testing? I suspect it will be the same answer.

[Reforged]

Why the hell is *France* going all out on nuclear testing?

Why is any country going all out on nuclear testing? I suspect it will be the same answer.

America went all out because of Russia, Russia went all out because of America. Both sides wanted to prove their supremacy.
We, Britain, tested alittle for the sake of testing and proof we could launch as did other nations.
I don't understand Frances motives for going overboard on the testing, they launched over 300 times. It doesn't make much sense.

[Napoléon]

America went all out because of Russia, Russia went all out because of America. Both sides wanted to prove their supremacy.
We tested alittle for the sake of testing it and proving we could as did other countries.
I don't understand Frances motives for going overboard on the testing, they launched over 300 times. It doesn't make much sense.

Yes, America and Russia were in direct competition, that pushed both of them to launch so many times. But the question of why France went all out is in my opinion just the same as both America and Russia. They don't test them to prove their supremacy, they test them because they need to know exactly what they're dealing with. Moros went through this in one of his previous posts. The fact that France have launched more times than the UK, or Pakistan or wherever else just tells me that they have had more resources (or a willingness to use those resources) to put into testing nuclear devices.

[Anomalocaris]

Have fracking techniques improved enough not to cause chemical contamination issues yet?

No. It's not even at the stage where the driller can be forced to disclose what the fuck they are injecting into the ground so the problem can be defined.

[Welsh cake]

Why the hell is *France* going all out on nuclear testing?

Trying to find a way of vaporising all the wastage from their fast-breeder reactors.

It didn't work, so now they're dumping their crap in Britain and Germany last time I checked, definitely the UK, since they bought our infrastructure.

Damn you Gordon Brown.

[Autumnlicious]

Trying to find a way of vaporising all the wastage from their fast-breeder reactors.

Old nuclear technology and the cheap bastards (well, it's not really cheap, maintaining older designs when we have newer designs made specifically to deal with the faults of the old) will be the death of Nuclear.

Only way nuclear can move forward is to have safe, small reactors that utilize molten salts instead of water -- the benefit of the molten salt method is that you can have the radioactive material inside the salt pellets that becomes released ONLY when the temperature of the reactor is within certain limits.

Too hot and the reactor (the thorium design) expands. Still too hot? Active fan assembly fails, a plug drops and melts, the chamber drains and the reactor cools. Too cold and it shuts down, leaving bricks of congealed salt with radioactive crap locked inside. Not that overheating is easy.

The first is that thorium absorbs more neutrons if it overheats, the so called Doppler effect[33]. This leaves fewer neutrons to continue the chain reaction, reducing power. The second effect has to do with thermal expansion of the fuel[34]. If the fuel overheats, it expands considerably, which, due to the liquid nature of the fuel, will push fuel out of the active core region, reducing the chain reaction, with no damage to components. Solid fuelled reactors cannot expand their fuel by much, without damaging it, because it is tightly contained in fuel rods. These virtues of the LFTR are attained by integrating the coolant with the fuel. Coolant and fuel are inseparable, so any leak or movement of fuel will be intrinsically accompanied by a large amount of coolant. Thus, the coolant follows the heat source.

The best part about them? The amount of radioactive material to power a thorium reactor is much, much less compared to BWR's and PWR's -- possibly because the Thorium design can be scaled to a very small form factor (the Xerox Parc talk I went to had the speaker quoting refrigerator sized micro-reactors) and be very safe (from tampering) because you'd need to be able to separate the salts out in a very specialized high temperature oven, something that endemically limits underfunded-to-medium funded nuclear terrorism. Left alone, the slabs of radioactive salts would just sit cold and moderately radioactive -- the perfect fuel source to truck around.

I love nuclear. I really do. But I cannot stand the nuclear industry and their insistence on using OLD designs. Designs that are unsafe, expensive, require HUMAN intervention all the time, need GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES for insurance (no US based nuclear facility would be economically viable otherwise -- Check it yourself Chuck -- that's why Nuclear will currently be MORE expensive than solar and possibly other sources), etc,.

The future of Nuclear's soul will be Generation 4 and beyond (MSRs, etc).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluo...um_reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

Personally, I think MSR's are the way to go -- if Nuclear's biggest heel is big ass facilities that need giant insurance subsidies AND expensive SPENT FUEL storage, then small, micro isobreeder MSR's would be ideal.

[Reforged]

Why the hell is *France* going all out on nuclear testing?

Trying to find a way of vaporising all the wastage from their fast-breeder reactors.

It didn't work, so now they're dumping their crap in Britain and Germany last time I checked, definitely the UK, since they bought our infrastructure.

Damn you Gordon Brown.

I had a hunch there had to be a specific reason. Didn't make sense investing that much otherwise.

[Creed of Heresy]

Fucking hell, Moros, take a hit of the bong [then pass it my way plz] and calm down. XD Don't need to bite my head off. When I was referring to the unreliability of solar panels I did not mean that the panels themselves are unreliable; I am referring to the aforementioned power supply methods themselves being unreliable or inefficient. Am I saying that they should not be built? Hell no. Anything that is resource-efficient, economically sustainable and ecologically sustainable is aces in my book. But unfortunately with solar panels, you ARE stuck with dealing with inclement weather. Cloudy days aren't gonna provide quite as much juice as sunny days, na'mean? And like...I can't remember who [sorry] said, the systems for windpower have to shoulder a heavy burden and can be pretty cost-heavy to maintain. As far as dams go, I KNOW I was stating the obvious; that was kind of the point. XD You can't rely solely on any one of those resources, and in truth it's not really likely we could rely solely on all of them, either. Hence, nuclear power. That or geothermal power but I'm not exactly too knowledgeable on that so I'll pass on that topic for now.

So with this in mind I have to ask Welsh Cake; why're you so proud of scrapping your plans to build new reactors? Congrats, bro, you're gonna replace those with more chemical-burning plants! You know, increasingly-finite resources? Good luck with that, lemme know how that works out for you guys in about 30 years or so... Except, wait, your country doesn't even HAVE a plan for what they're gonna replace it with! EVEN MORE BRILLIANT. 8D

Also, yes, nuclear power plants are a bit pricey to get started but once running they're actually very economical to maintain, require low resource input, have high energy output, and produce zero emissions, and if we could just get that containment facility built, it would be just fine. As far as the Nevadans whining goes; they were bitching about a storage facility being built an hour's drive away from them at closest, one that was pretty much designed to cause zero environmental damage on the grounds the thing was designed to be completely sealed tight. Ignorant idiots jumping to conclusions. And of COURSE it didn't have funding; WHADDYA THINK HAPPENS when people don't support a project because of their short-sightedness? Funding dries up.

If more people supported building more reactors there'd be more demand for the newer reactors, which means the safer, far more efficient reactors with less waste output and with better heat management and failsafes and friggin' EVERYTHING THAT WOULD NIX EVERY SINGLE ISSUE THESE IMBECILES KEEP BITCHING ABOUT.

*deep breath*

Also I'm surprised nobody got my "launch it into the sun" joke. Nobody watches Futurama??

[Also don't let my opinions and my, er, zealotry on the subject give you the idea I'm trying to mock you or that I'm looking down on you; this is one of my more favorite topics of discussion and if you haven't figured out by now that I get a bit...fiery in discussions, we haven't posted back and forth enough yet. ;D ]

[Autumnlicious]

You're full of crap. PWRs currently used wouldn't pay for their damned selves if the US government stopped subsidizing them. And the industry won't invest in Gen 4.

So we're stuck with aging Gen 3 and Gen 2 infrastructure that is incredibly expensive to maintain and remove. That produces highly toxic waste.

Hardly a deal.

---

And also, you never addressed the fact that the evaluations for two other sites for nuclear waste storage were halted before they could yield anything. Which sort of blows holes in your framing of Nevadans as ignorant not-in-my-backyard types -- they were singled out. And they have every right to oppose being used as a waste storage center.

You'll have to convince them first they're not being screwed. Good luck with that/

---

Also, your argument for "people wanting new reactors" is crap. Fukushima possessed aging, unsafe reactors. But it was profitable enough.

GE still sells Gen 2 BWR/PWR designs. The same ones used as above.

---

The MSR guys at Xerox Parc mentioned that the reactor could use thorium or spent fuel. From our older reactors. Which would be better than letting it mound up in storage tanks along the Great Lakes.

[Napoléon]

That's what I love about Moros (and simultaneously hate when he does it to me). If you're talking bullshit, you will inevitably feel his wrath!