These are Amazing and a little terrifying :)
Cherenkov light is such a beautiful blue, it really has its own unique look. Honestly one of my favorite colors, just a little more spicy than most.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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My university had a reactor similar to the first one and there was a parabolic mirror angled over the pool so we could look in from the control room. I always loved watching the Cherenkov radiation and thinking about how I was basically seeing a photonic boom.
So many feelings. I'm a proponent of nuclear power, but I'll be the first to admit that I find this both fascinating and a little bit scary, yes.
Also less enthusiastic after reading about the dishonesty surrounding Three Mile Island.
I was just up there a couple months ago. We stayed at a hotel. There was a really dense fog the night we arrived. The next morning I woke up and there were the cooling towers 4 miles away bigger than life.
The plant was old tech. The actual amount release was minor, but yeah, it was a serious breakdown in communication. We really could do better now, but the cost of being as safe as possible probably makes the operating cost pretty rough.
My biggest worry is accidents are still not a thing of the past. Fukushima is 12 years old, we still can't seem to work out passive failsafe in conventional fission.
My problem is that people keep building reactors on faultlines and on seashores, I get that basically all of Japan is a faultline but in the U.S there is so much land where no disasters or indeed nothing in general ever happens.
Yeah, They need unlimited water nearby which is also where people usually live :/ And the plants are all ancient, the transmit losses were bad back then. If it weren't for renewables, we might be putting them in distant areas with man-made reservoirs and multi-million volt transmission lines.
If safe enough and in a location without natural disasters it shouldn’t be a big deal to be semi near a plant. Take the Palo Verde plant in AZ. There’s no disasters that happen in the area other than heat and from what I’ve heard is they use the cleaned waste water from the cities to run the plant.
How accurate was the Netflix documentary that covered the disaster up near three mile, if you've seen it? The portrayal of the people in charge of the plant was... not flattering.
I'm not sure we will ever get the risk to zero. Better, perhaps, to build away from population centers?
I'm a little apprehensive about the bigger budget documentaries. I feel like the cheaper more boring versions have less intensive to spin the truths.
My favorite documentary ( I can't seem to find it now ) was pretty clear about cause, failure to act, failure to act correctly, failure to notify people. It was truly a perfect storm of people doing the wrong thing. There was a safety design flaw, unrelated there was a bad valve, the company that made the valve knew it was bad, and knew exactly where that valve was installed but never called it out. There were control room lapses in maintenance and reaction. There was confusion around what was happening. Authorities weren't notified in time, when they were notified, it was incorrect. It took the President Carter (a trained nuclear engineer) to fly in personally to rein in the situation.
It could have been worse. It may have even been a but worse than they let on. A whistleblower over the whole situation was mysteriously killed.
The thing is, the whole thing happened in '79 we didn't even have reasonable computers at the time. Simulations were a pipe-dream. There are safer materials we could use. We could even design something more safely to use current fuels.
But, we have solar, we have wind and maybe fusion. All of which are probably more cost effective.
That's fair. They implied more radiation got out then was disclosed but life has kept me from digging into that claim so... not sure. Given the lack of major disasters (absent Tsunamis and Chernobyl) I'd say we're either doing well with safety or very, very lucky.
They vented quite a bit of gas. More than they even knew. The real question would be water seepage, but none had seemed to detect any. Looks like there is some amount of long term leakage.
I'm going to be cautious with my words so I don't doxx myself. I worked with the raw data for the environmental and groundwater program for TMI for about seven years. The legacy contamination onsite from '79 is heavily monitored and an annual report is created every year for both the environmental program and the groundwater program.
Those reports are available on the NRC website.
yeah be super careful here, it's hard to impossible to erase things from the Fediverse.