Germany: “Even tiny doses of radiation are bad. Burn coal instead of low-carbon nuclear!”
Also Germany: “The U-Bahn station tiles in Berlin are glazed with slightly radioactive uranium.”
Source: chaos.social/@gigabecquerel…
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Nick Touran
15.6K posts
Nick Touran
@whatisnuclear
- Just heard a brutal joke: A fusion scientist goes to heaven. For all his hard work he is allowed to ask God one question. He asks 'will fusion power ever be economically feasible' and God says 'yes, but not in my lifetime'
- Nuclear fission energy is too slow to help us with climate change you guys. See?
- CONFIRMED: China built and has brought to full power the world's first-ever thorium-containing molten salt reactor, the TMSR-LF1. Initial criticality occurred on Oct 11, 2023. Full power on June 17, 2024. Pa-233 from thorium was detected Oct 8, 2024. It's the first MSR to run
- Here's Finland's new 1600 MWe 24/7 zero-carbon fission power plant, the OL3 EPR! Now at full power, it makes 14% of the country's electricity and reduces their electricity imports by 60%! Bravo, Finland! (Source PDF with legend linked at bottom of here tvo.fi/en/index/produ…)
- One (1) of these little uranium pellets can make all the electricity and heat needed by an average US household for 4 months straight in a conventional nuclear reactor with zero CO₂. If used in a breeder reactor (first demo'd in 1952), a pellet could do so for 7.5 years!
- Crazy story: in the early 1990s, the USA purchased 6 TOPAZ-II space nuclear reactors from the USSR/Russia and flew them to New Mexico for testing. These reactors had thermionic cells around each of their 37 fuel pins: "Thermionic Fuel Element"! (a 🧵...)
- This has to be one of the biggest ideas I've ever seen: a nuclear-powered Agro-Industrial complex. ✅ 1 billion gallons of fresh water / day from the sea ✅ 2 GW of electricity ✅ 300k-acre food factory ✅ phosphorous via electric furnace for fertilizer ✅ food for 6 million
00:00 - 10 years ago today, I built a cathode ray tube in a wine bottle for fun. I had been reading Linus Pauling's amazing textbook General Chemistry and realized that CRTs sat at an essential moment in physics history. In the late 1800s, high voltage and vacuum pump technologies were
- As a nuclear engineering undergrad in 2006, my colleagues and I decided that a big hurdle holding nuclear energy back was lack of public knowledge and understanding. So we decided to make whatisnuclear.com, an educational nuclear website for everyone.
- Paul Dorfman, one of @Greenpeace's main nuclear commentators, just blocked me (a Ph.D. scientist) after pointing out a glaring and egregious error in his analysis. He said nuclear wasn't low carbon. I pointed out, calmly and patiently, that it was. x.com/whatisnuclear/…
Replying to @dorfman_pIt must be noted that that number and conclusion is a serious outlier among the lifecycle analysis literature that looks into these things (and does indeed consider waste management). IPCC meta-analysis results (median) shown below: - This is the main opposition group fighting to close down the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, which supplies 9% of California's electricity with low-carbon 24/7 power.
