The Atomic Show #007 (MP3 – 14.5MB – 42min)
Shane and Rod talk about some announcements related to new nuclear power plant construction in the US, South Korea, and Bulgaria.
We also move off topic on occasion and touch on the following subjects:
- The Dupic process of recycling nuclear fuel from a pressurized water reactor into a CANDU reactor
- Recycling fruit waste into rabbit food and back to fruit tree fertilizer
- Milorganite
- Safety improvements at currently operated RBMK reactors
- Peter Beattie’s comments about coal versus uranium
- Mining uranium from coal
- Transporting coal from Australia to China
- Starving polar bears
- NRC fees for nuclear plant licenses
- Professionalism of the NRC
- Enriched silicon for microprocessor production
- Iran’s enrichment program
Hope you enjoy. Please let us know how you like the show. We are especially interested in comments about audio quality – so far no complaints, but that is not always grounds for celebration.
PS – Apparently good nukes sometimes think alike. This morning I was listening to my friend John Wheeler’s This Week in Nuclear podcast number 13 and heard him telling almost the same story that Shane told about the site chosen by Duke Power and the Southern Company for their new nuclear power station. Guess I need to go rent the Abyss.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:05 — 14.5MB)
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I was a bit surprised to hear that different isotopes of Silicon actually had tangibly different physical properties in the way the show described. That was quite interesting, and I’d be fascinated to know more details of why this works this way. One of the reasons isotopes took so long to be discovered and why enrichment is so tough (or extracting deuterium or tritium from regular water) is because isotopes have virtually identical physical and chemical properties. Of course, they have a few subtly different properties, as easily seen with U235 vs U238, but I didn’t really expect something more mundane like heat handling properties.
PowerPointSamurai,
It’s not so much that the physical properties of the different Si isotopes
differ; they all vary subtly in mass, just like the more newsworthy U. The
effect is more subtle in that the different masses of the isotopes cause
inclusions and flaws in the crystalline structure of cooled and purified Si,
in effect increasing the “thermal resistance” of the end product. This
effect is as dominant as impurities in the final product, but is potentially
much simpler to do something about; hence the interest.
For more information on the phenomenon, you can Google on the terms
. The most informative of the results I’ve seen:
http://www.isonics.com/isopure_main.htm
That’s what I get for trying to be clever with delimiters; the terms are “isotopic silicon thermal”.
This is an area of continuing education for me. Fascinating reference there, Shane.
This is a key paragraph in the document after learning about the mechanisms that provide isotopically pure SI with higher thermal conductivity and greater value in tightly packed microprocessors: