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Europe's radiation mystery solved

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By *ara J OP   TV/TS
over a year ago

Bristol East

Here's an interesting story if you're interested in things environmental, radioactive and military.

Last autumn, a number of countries across Europe detected traces of Iodine-131 in the air.

Iodine-131 is a short-lived radioactive gas given off when nuclear fuel is irradiated, i.e. in a nuclear reactor.

Heavy exposure to it causes thyroid cancer, so people who live within the emergency planning zone of nuclear sites are pre-issued with stable iodine tablets that they must consume in an emergency. (The stable iodine floods the thyroid, leaving no room for the Iodine-131 to be absorbed.)

Countries like France pointed the finger at Russia. Environmental groups wondered about an accident at Mayak, the major Russian nuclear fuel cycle facility and probably the most contaminated site on the planet.

Russia denied any accident at Mayak.

A few weeks ago, another story - a particle of highly-enriched uranium detected above the Arctic. HEU is dual-use - it can be used as fuel in a reactor or "explosive" in a bomb.

Where did it come from? North Korea, some speculated.

Yesterday, Vladimir Putin gave his state-of-the-nation address.

He announced Russia has developed a nuclear-powered missile. A miniature nuclear reactor on a rocket, making it so fast that it is impossible for any country to defend.

The US says a missile crashed during a test flight.

This could explain both the Iodine 131 and the HEU particle.

I'm thinking, my god, who in their right mind would use a nuclear reactor to power a missile.

Well, the Americans tried and failed in the 1960s because they could not miniaturise the power plant. It looks like the Russians have succeeded.

And since these missiles will be carrying nuclear warheads, why worry about a bit more radioactive fall-out when we're entering a nuclear winter and most of the world is dying from radiation sickness or starvation.

Trump has announced an expansion of the US nuclear weaponry and it looks like Putin has beaten him to the punch.

A new nuclear arms race beckons.

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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago

Interesting read.

I've read recently the USA has decided to develop much smaller nukes.The thinking being that large warheads are far to devastating to use and the MAD argument comes into play,but a small tactical nuke could be justified and used in multiple scenarios preventing nukes from being obsolete cold war technology.The arms race is back on and their itching to drop little nukes to prove they would use them.Its a sad world.

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By *ara J OP   TV/TS
over a year ago

Bristol East

Indeed. The Americans are even talking about restarting nuclear tests (I think their last one was 1992).

The world went potty after the last big financial crash and it looks like it is going potty again after the latest big financial crash.

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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago

Poverty, and income disparity breed conflict and empower those who don't see it as the horrendous last resort that it is.

Sadly some things never change

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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago

It's not directly related but...

The British would have been better served had they developed their nuclear energy R&D, then rolled out less dangerous more productive plants.

Britain retains nuclear weapons but has lost the possible future where the positive aspects of the subject could have happened and I find that depressing. The same pattern has happened in the USA while China has overtaken both in every area of nuclear energy production and research.

I think China rules the world through its nuclear advances and biotechnology while we remain stagnant. It is obvious that nuclear and biotech are the 'seed' intellectually for other important tech on the tech tree.

In three years China will be more wealthy than the USA. There were panics about this decades ago and now that it is really happened nobody wants to talk about it.

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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago

This century was always going to belong to China.It was predicted in the 1970s.

However I disagree that theyre ahead in nuclear technology and biotechnology.China can mass produce and copy but can it innovate?.

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By *ara J OP   TV/TS
over a year ago

Bristol East

Re nuclear in the UK.

The history here is one of confused priorities - military needs mixed with civil needs and complicated by classic scientific meddling.

Consequently, the designs Britain went for - lots of them, too many of them - were fudges, trying to serve competing priorities.

None of them was a success commercially because economics was not the motivation.

The Americans by contrast developed a very sharp focus - to develop the biggest, most economic reactor they could - and cornered the market with the PWR.

The UK has no reactor industry left, only a huge liability to clean up the sites and waste generated by all the crazy R & D projects.

The current Government refuses for ideological reasons to return to a state corporation responsible for developing nuclear energy, but is quite happy for the state-owned corporations of France and China to do so.

The French government is the principal owner of every single nuclear power station in the UK, and soon they will be joined by the Chinese government.

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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago


"This century was always going to belong to China.It was predicted in the 1970s.

However I disagree that theyre ahead in nuclear technology and biotechnology.China can mass produce and copy but can it innovate?."

Hard question to tackle. Some thoughts related to the general topic: In my opinion the Japanese are becoming at least as inventive as Westerners are - it's not visibly obvious just yet but there's quite a few hi tech products which mostly only exist in Korean or Japanese markets, and I keep seeing minor feats in Japan that I consider impressive - my suspicion is that their culture has become more similar to our culture in the Anglophone world a few decades ago. To see a place they are ahead of us look at their washlets, robotic toilets that don't require toilet paper. This is 80-90% of households in Korea and Japan. They could advance further again by incorporating medical tech into them, then they obviously would be way ahead of us.

China - I just know less about so I don't know. We have to consider the option also that they may not need to be invent new things if their GDP is larger than the USA, they could simply absorb our smaller pockets of cleverness and extrapolate them faster than we can. Companies like Tencent could have Silicon Valley's breakfast in AI with the quantity of data (required for 'deep learning) they are able to gather from the population.

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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago


"Re nuclear in the UK.

The history here is one of confused priorities - military needs mixed with civil needs and complicated by classic scientific meddling.

Consequently, the designs Britain went for - lots of them, too many of them - were fudges, trying to serve competing priorities.

None of them was a success commercially because economics was not the motivation.

The Americans by contrast developed a very sharp focus - to develop the biggest, most economic reactor they could - and cornered the market with the PWR.

The UK has no reactor industry left, only a huge liability to clean up the sites and waste generated by all the crazy R & D projects.

The current Government refuses for ideological reasons to return to a state corporation responsible for developing nuclear energy, but is quite happy for the state-owned corporations of France and China to do so.

The French government is the principal owner of every single nuclear power station in the UK, and soon they will be joined by the Chinese government."

Agree with all of that.

It's tragic the UK government was unable to keep the long view.

These types of topics are never brought up much in popular media so the population loses sight of where they could be losing out, that's an aspect of our media I do not like and partially blame for what's happened.

Nationalism is not without a blemished record but at least the competitive spirit in times past would have kept people thinking about these things.

I regretfully come to the idea that maybe we weren't mature enough, maybe even as a species, to cope with the kind of power that exists in nuclear technology. It's the new invention of Fire and we've yet to rise to the challenge. Look at the euro project for fusion "We'll crack it in twenty years" which sounds a lot like a synonym for never.

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By *asyukMan
over a year ago

West London


"This century was always going to belong to China.It was predicted in the 1970s.

However I disagree that theyre ahead in nuclear technology and biotechnology.China can mass produce and copy but can it innovate?.

Hard question to tackle. Some thoughts related to the general topic: In my opinion the Japanese are becoming at least as inventive as Westerners are - it's not visibly obvious just yet but there's quite a few hi tech products which mostly only exist in Korean or Japanese markets, and I keep seeing minor feats in Japan that I consider impressive - my suspicion is that their culture has become more similar to our culture in the Anglophone world a few decades ago. To see a place they are ahead of us look at their washlets, robotic toilets that don't require toilet paper. This is 80-90% of households in Korea and Japan. They could advance further again by incorporating medical tech into them, then they obviously would be way ahead of us.

China - I just know less about so I don't know. We have to consider the option also that they may not need to be invent new things if their GDP is larger than the USA, they could simply absorb our smaller pockets of cleverness and extrapolate them faster than we can. Companies like Tencent could have Silicon Valley's breakfast in AI with the quantity of data (required for 'deep learning) they are able to gather from the population."

The Japanese are becoming as inventive?

I think that's a rather Eurocentric view of the world. The level of technological and cultural innovation from there has been easily equivalent to the West for decades. We're just blind to it.

China is rapidly catching up. They have required any company selling and manufacturing there to share technology. Their problem will be in the innovation required for consumer goods as free thinking poses a problem for a totalitarian state.

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By *asyukMan
over a year ago

West London


"Re nuclear in the UK.

The history here is one of confused priorities - military needs mixed with civil needs and complicated by classic scientific meddling.

Consequently, the designs Britain went for - lots of them, too many of them - were fudges, trying to serve competing priorities.

None of them was a success commercially because economics was not the motivation.

The Americans by contrast developed a very sharp focus - to develop the biggest, most economic reactor they could - and cornered the market with the PWR.

The UK has no reactor industry left, only a huge liability to clean up the sites and waste generated by all the crazy R & D projects.

The current Government refuses for ideological reasons to return to a state corporation responsible for developing nuclear energy, but is quite happy for the state-owned corporations of France and China to do so.

The French government is the principal owner of every single nuclear power station in the UK, and soon they will be joined by the Chinese government.

Agree with all of that.

It's tragic the UK government was unable to keep the long view.

These types of topics are never brought up much in popular media so the population loses sight of where they could be losing out, that's an aspect of our media I do not like and partially blame for what's happened.

Nationalism is not without a blemished record but at least the competitive spirit in times past would have kept people thinking about these things.

I regretfully come to the idea that maybe we weren't mature enough, maybe even as a species, to cope with the kind of power that exists in nuclear technology. It's the new invention of Fire and we've yet to rise to the challenge. Look at the euro project for fusion "We'll crack it in twenty years" which sounds a lot like a synonym for never."

The UK nuclear strategy is, sadly, rooted in the Cold War.

We chose the nuclear technology that we did because it produced waste material suitable for making nuclear weapons out of.

The most efficient path for energy production was, and is, Thorium salt. Abundant raw material and catastrophic failure leads to the radioactive material solidifying not distributing into the environment.

Even now we decided not to take that path...

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By *alcon43Woman
over a year ago

Paisley

Wonder what investments in nuclear power Trump has. Someone will be making money out of it.

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By *LCCCouple
over a year ago

Cambridge


"Wonder what investments in nuclear power Trump has. Someone will be making money out of it. "

It's not nuclear power, it's nuclear weapons.

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By *ara J OP   TV/TS
over a year ago

Bristol East

Trump?

Keep an eye on Saudi Arabia, arch-enemy of Iran.

Saudi wants to build nuclear reactors.

Russia and China are knocking on their door.

Trump is catching up and sees an opportunity to revive the bankrupt Westinghouse business.

The snag?

US policy requires that any export of civil reactor technology is matched with control over the nuclear fuel, i.e. to avoid it being diverted for weapons.

The Saudis want the ability to enrich their own uranium, as a counter to Iran.

Trump seems willing to relax the rules. He needs Congress to agree.

What sort of message will that send to the world about the proliferation of nuclear material?

Does he care?

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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago


"This century was always going to belong to China.It was predicted in the 1970s.

However I disagree that theyre ahead in nuclear technology and biotechnology.China can mass produce and copy but can it innovate?.

Hard question to tackle. Some thoughts related to the general topic: In my opinion the Japanese are becoming at least as inventive as Westerners are - it's not visibly obvious just yet but there's quite a few hi tech products which mostly only exist in Korean or Japanese markets, and I keep seeing minor feats in Japan that I consider impressive - my suspicion is that their culture has become more similar to our culture in the Anglophone world a few decades ago. To see a place they are ahead of us look at their washlets, robotic toilets that don't require toilet paper. This is 80-90% of households in Korea and Japan. They could advance further again by incorporating medical tech into them, then they obviously would be way ahead of us.

China - I just know less about so I don't know. We have to consider the option also that they may not need to be invent new things if their GDP is larger than the USA, they could simply absorb our smaller pockets of cleverness and extrapolate them faster than we can. Companies like Tencent could have Silicon Valley's breakfast in AI with the quantity of data (required for 'deep learning) they are able to gather from the population."

The biggest problem from what Ive read is the company culture of Asian tech giants.They don't place the young bright things at the top they value an employee with lifetime of experience within the company over the strange kids with the crazy ideas.

The Google's and Amazon's value the young bright things and give them whatever they want.Even if that means breaking traditions.Asians struggle with this.

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By *ustJ0dieTV/TS
over a year ago

Burton-on-Trent

I've missed this, but isn't the future of space travel based on nuclear power also?

So is it confirmed as an offensive ballistic missile test or a space vehicle test?

Just being devils advocate. Know you have knowledge in this field Sara.

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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago


"I've missed this, but isn't the future of space travel based on nuclear power also?

So is it confirmed as an offensive ballistic missile test or a space vehicle test?

Just being devils advocate. Know you have knowledge in this field Sara."

There exist blueprints of designs with 50 year old nuclear tech that would put millions of tonnes into orbit. Freeman Dyson famously invented such a design - Project Orion.

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By *ara J OP   TV/TS
over a year ago

Bristol East

I think the Americans have just let a contract to develop a reactor propulsion system for space travel.

Plutonium batteries and the like have been used, but I think this is the first time for a reactor in space.

Will the public like the thought of a reactor in the sky above their heads?

Never ever crossed my mind it would turn up in a missile, though.

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By *ophieslutTV/TS
over a year ago

Central

Trump is interested in anything that he thinks will let him be perceived as leading the field and making America great again - whatever the consequences, which he doesn't care about. He's about ego and doing anything to prop it up or inflate it. His thinking towards these smaller weapons is awful, if it would mean that they'd be more readily used, breaking a decades long suspension. It's unlikely that once one has been used that others wouldn't cause a cascade - they could be from the same or any country.

We can see from his reaction to global warming that his attention isn't really in the right place, in terms of care for the world, including his own country. Obviously a dangerous leader needs to be controlled.

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