The Nuclear Blog

I do hope this will be the last of this topic for a while, honestly, it's getting pretty dull for me even! I should start where I left off last time, here is a decay chain that happened all the time inside the Hanford nuclear reactors in Hanford Washington during World War II (it happens as well at other reactors but the historical significance of what happened at Hanford is too much to ignore). So what is going on here? Well we start with Uranium (red circle, I've colour coded by type of atom), now natural Uranium is more than 99% U-238, we bombard that Uranium with a neutron (the +n, no charge) that increases the weight by 1, to U-239 and still 92 protons. Then one neutron breaks apart into a proton and an electron (called a Beta particle) the beta is so energetic it zooms off into space, thus beta radiation. The proton sticks around and our atom has one extra proton, so 92+1 = 93, which is Neptunium. A second Beta decay occurs and our Neptunium becomes Plutonium.

There is a lot that I feel needs to be covered still but I really do not want to saddle my poor reader with too much in one sitting, I suspect this will only be the second of many parts on this topic. In the previous post I did allude to the fact that over time the amount of stuff decreases. What exactly is going on? The law of conservation of matter dictates the amount of stuff remains unchanged. Well if we look at say Plutonium 238 (that is the energy source for all of the space vehicles out beyond Mars orbit, and a few inside Mars orbit too) what is happening is the nucleus of the Plutonium atoms are breaking apart. Even in a gram of Plutonium there is going to be 2.53×10 21  plutonium atoms, that is 2.53 sextillion atoms (yes sextillion is a real number it's a thousand times more than a quintillion of course!). Well from here it's an application of the law of big numbers, that is plain old statistics, every so often at random an atom will decay. When exactly is rando

As I am an engineer by training and trade, I feel an important perspective can be gained by listening to a toxicologist. Therefore I am adding the following YouTube video , it's an 80 minute lecture given at the University of South Australia by Professor Geraldine "Gerry" Thomas. Any discussion of nuclear energy or nuclear technology, of any sort, probably should begin by explaining the concept of 'half-life'. Although this is probably well understood by many readers it is a concept that recurs so frequently that I feel if I don't explain this I am doing my readers a disservice. Wikipedia at the time of writing this defines half life as follows: Half-Life  (symbol  t 1⁄2 ) is the time required for a quantity to reduce to half of its initial value. The term is commonly used in  nuclear physics  to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo, or how long stable atoms survive,  radioactive decay . I guess if you read that a few times it kind of, s

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals - Hamlet Act II sc. 2 Well hello world! We humans have depended on combustion to power our vehicles, heat our homes, cook our food, light everything from city streets to bedrooms. In short the energy we get from combustion is what separates us from our stone age, cave dwelling ancestors. Sadly as the human population of our little planet continues to soar to larger and larger numbers, we cannot continue on this trajectory of burning things. Eventually we will run out of things to burn and very likely long before that, the planet's climatic systems will render earth uninhabitable for human life. The fact is atmospheric CO2 is rising and CO2 is known to be an effective heat trapping gas. We also know that a common byproduct of combustion is CO2.