[meteorite-list] Not to worry. Nukes are good.

From: al mitt <almitt_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 07:20:11 -0500
Message-ID: <969E2B04F2BC4B948F072ED6DF3334AA_at_StarmanPC>

Hi Count and all,

Glad to see your post here. I just made the same comment to people yesterday
who were worried.

I believe that most (sensible) reactors use water to moderate the reaction.
If the reactor gets too hot (pressure and all) then the water evaporates and
the reaction stops. 3 Mile Island would have been a whole lot better if they
had done nothing. It is the extra things they shouldn't have done that
caused most
of the problems. I believe there is a lot more education now for people
involved in those.

The Russian disaster was the result of using graphite rods to moderate the
reaction. The reactor got too hot, warped the rods and they couldn't be
pulled out and the result was a melt down.

They only problem I see with nuclear energy is what to do with spent rods.
We need a good way to contain them where nut jobs can't get there hands on
them to hurt people. They leave the fuel in the rods so they are ten times
larger than they have to be to make it harder for someone to walk off with
material.

Best and my heart goes out to all the Japanese people who have lost love
ones and will have major clean up to do for weeks. I hope that things will
go smooth and without further disaster.

--AL Mitterling


----- Original Message -----
From: "Count Deiro" <countdeiro at earthlink.net>
To: "Michael Gilmer" <meteoritemike at gmail.com>
Cc: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>; "drtanuki" <drtanuki at yahoo.com>
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2011 11:48 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Not to worry. Nukes are good.


> Not to worry Mike, Dirk and Listers,
>
> The GE designed reactors (1960) at Fukushima/Daiichi have triple on site
> redundancy in cooling and containment and the possibility of an
> uncontrolled environmentally harmful release of radioactive (in this case
> steam) is negligible.
>
> It's all in the numbers. When the media reports that core pressures are
> such and such above normal and that the radioactivity that might be
> released is " thousand of times above normal", they fail to tell you that
> "normal" is such a low level of emission as to mean nothing to humans, or
> the environment.
>
> This same kind of irresponsible reporting created the infamous, an
> unnecessary, panic at "Three Mile Island" where the total tritium release
> equated to a couple of X-rays, or a trip across the USA on an airliner.
>
> My point is, that If you demonstrated to the typical uneducated man in the
> street that a bit of Trinitite was giving off 1000 times the background
> (normal) radiation level, he'd panic. I've proved this by putting a
> contamination meter on Trinitite samples with the sensitivity set to high
> and watching my victim's reaction as it loudly goes off scale.
>
> When I served on Nevada's Nuclear Waste Study Committee and was the
> entertainment on the Chamber of Commerce and Lion's Club rubber chicken
> circuit, I used to place a common household smoke detector (They contain
> an Americium emitter) under some hapless audience member's chair and then,
> much to his discomfort, using a meter to locate him.
>
> The great unwashed have more fears than medieval peasants, yet they refuse
> to expend the mental sweat to learn the science. Ask them to listen to
> more than two sentences describing fission and their eyes glaze over. Yet
> their votes decide the future of energy production, or better said..the
> lack of it....in my country.
>
> Regards and stay calm.
>
> Count Deiro
> IMCA 3536
Received on Sat 12 Mar 2011 07:20:11 AM PST