Thank you for your informative article, Angela! Nuclear engineer Gavin Ridley's analysis provides a graphic near the bottom of the data file you link to. His analysis shows three isotopes (Ba-140, Zr-95, and Co-144) have activities that are about 100 times Valar's claims, assuming a 30-day cooldown. Gavin's analysis then shows this fuel rapidly delivers a lethal dose of radiation with only a 30 day cooldown.
There's also the approximation for isotope safety of needing 10 half lives elapsed to cool the isotope mixture down. Applying that rule to the above three isotopes yields a cooldown requirement of 128 days, 3,730 days, and 640 days, respectively. My conclusion is that Valar is selectively reporting the safety of its TRISO fuel just coming out of a reactor.
Good journalism of a weird moment in nuclear history. The space between these poles is wide. Would love to see Obama get back into the nuclear debate to clear the time lost under his disastrous NRC appointees.
The NRC certification requirements, ALARA, and LNT are radiophobic junk science that continue to exaggerate cost and depress construction of fission plants world wide. The valid alternative is not to assert that a specific fission vessel and cycle configuration 'cannot melt down' or any other false hyperbole from cherry picked statistics, but to establish a safety engineering process to design and certify plant configurations and to perform safety engineering to establish standards such as valid dose limits. The NRC cannot be trusted to do this. It needs to be abolished and a different agency architected and developed. Sick the Doge on NRC and FERC! Systems engineering is needed across the board in product and project development. Where items are safety regulated state capacity must be developed to coordinate adequate levels of systems engineering through standards, schools and firms. Until this is invested in the US will not resolve its construction cost problem.
Do you have any data or secret information that demonstrates how all these additional planned reactors Obama supposedly quashed would NOT have been canceled just like the dozens of others that were supposedly in the pipeline and canceled too? All but Vogtle and the poor folks in South Carolina who had their tax-pockets picked to pay for a $9 billion hole in the ground. The economic conditions at the time would be exactly the same and would still have crushed nuclear's competitiveness with fossils and renewables, forcing closures and ripping up planned reactors.
Thank you for your informative article, Angela! Nuclear engineer Gavin Ridley's analysis provides a graphic near the bottom of the data file you link to. His analysis shows three isotopes (Ba-140, Zr-95, and Co-144) have activities that are about 100 times Valar's claims, assuming a 30-day cooldown. Gavin's analysis then shows this fuel rapidly delivers a lethal dose of radiation with only a 30 day cooldown.
There's also the approximation for isotope safety of needing 10 half lives elapsed to cool the isotope mixture down. Applying that rule to the above three isotopes yields a cooldown requirement of 128 days, 3,730 days, and 640 days, respectively. My conclusion is that Valar is selectively reporting the safety of its TRISO fuel just coming out of a reactor.
Good journalism of a weird moment in nuclear history. The space between these poles is wide. Would love to see Obama get back into the nuclear debate to clear the time lost under his disastrous NRC appointees.
Keep Obama as far from this debate as possible. The man is a complete Luddite.
The NRC certification requirements, ALARA, and LNT are radiophobic junk science that continue to exaggerate cost and depress construction of fission plants world wide. The valid alternative is not to assert that a specific fission vessel and cycle configuration 'cannot melt down' or any other false hyperbole from cherry picked statistics, but to establish a safety engineering process to design and certify plant configurations and to perform safety engineering to establish standards such as valid dose limits. The NRC cannot be trusted to do this. It needs to be abolished and a different agency architected and developed. Sick the Doge on NRC and FERC! Systems engineering is needed across the board in product and project development. Where items are safety regulated state capacity must be developed to coordinate adequate levels of systems engineering through standards, schools and firms. Until this is invested in the US will not resolve its construction cost problem.
Thank you. You said what I would say. No sympathy for the NRC.
Do you have any data or secret information that demonstrates how all these additional planned reactors Obama supposedly quashed would NOT have been canceled just like the dozens of others that were supposedly in the pipeline and canceled too? All but Vogtle and the poor folks in South Carolina who had their tax-pockets picked to pay for a $9 billion hole in the ground. The economic conditions at the time would be exactly the same and would still have crushed nuclear's competitiveness with fossils and renewables, forcing closures and ripping up planned reactors.