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Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

popularmechanics.com

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Re: Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

#121

Post by zoklet-enjoyer »

tsunamifury wrote: post #88
hammock wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we can’t have a good faith discussion then maybe it is a good idea to hide nuclear and animal labs. But with less oversight, that also invites abuse. You can probably imagine abuse on your own in an anima lab, but I would also point out after Obama banned gain of function research in 2014 U.S. scientists moved their lab to China where it continued without the same oversight, and bad things happened.

As a dyed in the wool leftist I more and more struggle with Obama legacy from common core to regulation to his utter selling out the American people to the cia. When he was well intentioned he seemed to be a total failure and when he was blatantly self interested he was monstrous. I don’t think the right is another option but woof… this is tough

It was obvious when he was president that he's a terrible person. Not sure how you're struggling with it now. He's just a guy like anyone else. Not special. We shouldn't deify presidents. I didn't vote for him in 2008 because I thought he was too inexperienced. I didn't vote for him in 2012 because he continued the war of terror.

Re: Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

#122

Post by mananaysiempre »

cogman10 wrote: post #60
rayiner wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Climate activists backed and propagandized by the fossil fuel industry and the KGB Who are the current generation of climate activists backed and propagandized by?

IDK, Maybe china? China is eating everyone's lunch when it comes to producing green tech (particularly solar and batteries).

China is eating everyone’s lunch on new(ish) sources of energy because it seems to have basically run out of old(er) ones. The insane amount of coal burning aside, there are e.g. basically as many hydroelectric plants in China as its enormous rivers can support, accompanied by the huge amounts of ecological and societal destruction that those always cause, and that’s still not enough. The buildup of both solar and nuclear energy infrastructure is not motivated by compassion for the environment or (pace George Carlin) the humans that have to live in it, it’s motivated by the cold, hard necessity of powering the industrial base. And if the project can partly fund itself by selling some of the production capacity to others, all the better.

None of this detracts from the quality of the engineering, but it’s important to keep the motivation in view (whether to filter out the propaganda or to try and reproduce something like this at home).

Re: Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

#123

Post by dgacmu »

jeffbee wrote: post #84
dgacmu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the above poster said. Generation costs are a small part of most consumers' bills, but particularly in CA. If you look at the location marginal pricing map from CA ISO: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/prices You'll see that right now (before solar has really kicked in), The price for the next megawatt hour of generation is $49 -- i.e., under 5c per kWh. That's comparable to the average price in PJM (east coas…

In terms of consumer bills, California is actually among the states with typical spending on such things. Your actual energy bill in California is not that high. There are 14 American states where residential energy bills are higher than California's. People are always pointing out the marginal volumetric costs of electricity, which is indeed very high. But that is just reflection of the fact that we use so little en…

Agreed. The point I'm trying to make is that the breakdown of California's costs shows that it's not actually the generation cost, i.e., whether or not the generation is solar or fossil is not really the thing that's making the difference.

(When you factor in behind the meter, solar is, in fact, probably reducing the average cost to consumers.)

Re: Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

#124

Post by owenversteeg »

I see a lot of people claiming this sort of thing was “common” (JASON at the Royal Naval College London, MIT’s MITR-II, CROCUS at EPL) but there is a huge difference between these things. Kodak’s CFX was a small device the size of a refrigerator; it is a neutron source and not a reactor. CROCUS is a reactor, but also small (100W thermal) and JASON, while larger, is also low power (10 kW.) MITR-II on the other hand is nearly one thousand times larger at 6 MW thermal.

There are only three civilian reactors >1MW in the US: at MIT, UC Davis, and the University of Missouri. You could also count the RINSC MTR, which is owned and operated by the Rhode Island state Atomic Energy Commission but located on the University of Rhode Island campus and collaborates closely with the university. Similarly, there are only two >1MW in Western Europe (TU Delft and TU München.)

If this sort of thing interests you, I can recommend reading about the history of the TRIGA. Freeman Dyson and Edward Teller designed it as a reactor “safe even in the hands of a young graduate student” and the US government sent them around the world as part of Atoms for Peace.

Re: Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

#125

Post by ralph84 »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #119
0ckpuppet wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't this theory proven by documents that were released and reported on?

No, it’s very squarely in the conspiracy theory category.

The idea it came from a mystery animal species that despite six years of intense searching hasn’t been identified is the conspiracy theory.

Re: Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

#126

Post by kordlessagain »

orioni wrote: post #19
jandrewrogers wrote: post #17

When I studied chemistry at university, only a handful of select students were introduced to the nuclear science lab in the basement. It had a lot of spicy isotopes, neutron sources, etc. Even as a chemistry student with free run of the place for years I had no idea it was in the building until the department head pulled a few of us aside. The reason for the informal secrecy, as it was explained to me, is that every…

This is just like how universities hide their animal research facilities. It wasn't until the final year of my biology degree that I found out we had a basement floor under our life sciences building where this research is carried out. I visited a few times as part of a research project I was involved in, and that experience was one of the factors that put me off pursuing a career in biomedical research.

To be fair an operational animal lab is an order of different ethical problem than safely storying radioactive material.

Re: Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

#127

Post by MalbertKerman »

dtgriscom wrote: post #25

OK, HN physicists: how did this work? My first guess was that the beam of Cf252-emitted neutrons, when it hits the U235, triggers new neutrons moving in the same direction, rather than in random directions. This would ensure that any tertiary neutrons would join the crowd and help the amplification while not just heating the system up. Or, maybe that's the point? It's a not-quite-critical collection of U235 that is p…

> then wouldn't that require a razor's edge of criticality?

Yup. From the device description in its decommissioning plan:

  The CFX was a sub-critical assembly of uranium-2-35 surrounding a Cf-252 source. The function of the U-235 fuel was to multiply the neutrons coming from the Cf-252 source, which fissions spontaneously. The CFX was designed never to exceed a Keff of 0.99. The CFX assembly yielded sufficient neutron fluxes for applications such as neutron activation analysis.
Keff is the fission neutron multiplication ratio; 1 is criticality.

Re: Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

#128

Post by chc4 »

owenversteeg wrote: post #124

I see a lot of people claiming this sort of thing was “common” (JASON at the Royal Naval College London, MIT’s MITR-II, CROCUS at EPL) but there is a huge difference between these things. Kodak’s CFX was a small device the size of a refrigerator; it is a neutron source and not a reactor. CROCUS is a reactor, but also small (100W thermal) and JASON, while larger, is also low power (10 kW.) MITR-II on the other hand is…

UMass Lowell has a 1MW research reactor as well.

Re: Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

#129

Post by pfdietz »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #42
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But at the moment, solar + battery is quick to deploy and about as cheap as you can get. The actual equation is solar + battery + gas fired power plant. That’s the dirty secret behind intermittent power sources and why fossil fuel companies are all investing in solar and wind. Batteries are simply not enough to face the long term intermittence. It’s purely an intra-day solution at the moment and nobody knows how to…

The actual actual problem is energy per acre of land per year. Solar is king in places like west Texas and Nevada. Massive sunny flat sprawling landscapes where the land is practically free. It's a different story in places like Massachusetts or New York, where land is expensive and the sun is mildly sunny. Gas becomes much more competitive because you only need 5 acres instead of 500, and the energy is 24/7.

> It's a different story in places like Massachusetts or New York, where land is expensive and the sun is mildly sunny.

Even in those places, the cost of land is a small fraction of the cost of a PV installation.

Re: Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

#130

Post by Projectiboga »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #69
orioni wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just like how universities hide their animal research facilities. It wasn't until the final year of my biology degree that I found out we had a basement floor under our life sciences building where this research is carried out. I visited a few times as part of a research project I was involved in, and that experience was one of the factors that put me off pursuing a career in biomedical research.

Could you describe the experience? I’ve always wondered what biomedical research was actually like.

A standard part of preclinical research for medicines and topical ingrediants is to determine the LD50. That is the dose per unit of weight of an animal, typically lab rats, that will kill just about 50% +- some small range. That is time consuming to zero into a 50% kill rate over a statistically significant sample.
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