This 1998 booklet [PDF, 18 MB] gives the impression that it was meant to accompany a video presentation, and we should very much like to know if that was so, and if so, whether anyone can track down the video.
The really odd part is at the back. The last few pages are dedicated to information about a specific power plant, leading us to believe that the booklet was produced in several versions, perhaps for distribution at the visitor centers of different power plants. But the information at the end of this booklet about nuclear power is about a hydro station!
It must be explained that the only inland nuclear power station in Britain was Trawsfynydd in North Wales, a 550 MW station which started up in 1965 and operated until 1991 — that is, it shut down years before this booklet was issued. Trawsfynydd nuclear station used for cooling the lake created in the 1920s to feed the 30 MW Maentwrog hydro station, which was thereafter operated as an auxiliary of the nuclear plant. And so the data pages of this booklet refer to Maentwrog, which is currently operated by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
More of our scanned nuclear–energy public–information booklets can be found here.
These amusing images are from a booklet intended for children, entitled Nuclear Know–How! With an element of truth, put out by the Central Electricity Generating Board in Britain. The printing date appears to be 1980, but judging by the style, it may have been created some years earlier.
Blackpool again? My recent visit to a Nuklearia meetup, a degree of comeuppance for Gerhard Schröder, various recent industrial accidents, performance–enhancing drugs in sport, and an answer to a question from SDFer jlamothe about the possibilities of nuclear power for the Yukon Territory.
Direct link to archive recording [192 kbps MP3, 40 MB]
Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934) was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and is still the only person to this day who has her awards in two different fields.
On July 4, 1934, she passed away from aplastic anemia, or the lack of production of red blood cells, directly caused by her long-term exposure to radiation. Today we remember her for her contributions to humanity.
Both Becquerel and Pierre Curie had to threaten to refuse the prize for discovery of radioactivity and radioelements, before the Nobel Committee would agree to include Marie in it. Both of them were quite insistent that her contributions were of central importance to the overall work. It was her insight as a chemist which re–directed their attention from fluorescent substances (a line of inquiry initially suggested by Röntgen’s discovery of X–rays) to the heavy elements, leading to the discovery of the radioactivity of thorium, which none of the physicists who had been inspired by Becquerel’s initial publication had bothered to check.
In this film (Italian language, apparently produced in multiple language versions in Germany in the 1960s) you can see dramatizations of the research and experiments by the Curies and others which led to the discovery and understanding of radioactivity, radioactive elements, the modes of decay, and ultimately the atomic nucleus itself. This work, which began less than 130 years ago, is fundamental to our modern understanding of the world on all scales — without knowledge of the nucleus, astronomy and cosmology as we know them would be impossible, because we would not understand the energy source and evolution of stars.
Interestingly, specialists in the relevant fields generally believe that the radiation poisoning which killed Mme Curie was due less to her work with radium and polonium, than to her service in the First World War. In the laboratory she observed safety precautions to the extent anyone had ever thought of them, but while taking X–rays of wounded French soldiers she often worked long past the point of developing radiation burns.
Central to the work of the natural sciences is verifying one’s own results and those of other investigators, a task which is not complete without delving into the methods by which those results were obtained.
Unfortunately, the mass media, and even the scientifically–inclined public, do not tend to wait for that painstaking and time–consuming work. So, for instance, we heard much about the amazing and even revolutionary results in neuroscience from “functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging” ; and then someone tried fMRI on a dead fish. As it turned out, many fMRI studies were utterly meaningless because of sloppy experimental technique.
A Martian Eclipse: Phobos Crosses the Sun
Video Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, ASU MSSS, SSI
Explanation: What’s that passing in front of the Sun? It looks like a moon, but it can’t be Earth’s Moon, because it isn’t round. It’s the Martian moon Phobos. The featured video was taken from the surface of Mars in 2022 by the Perseverance rover. Phobos, at 11.5 kilometers across, is 150 times smaller than Luna (our moon) in diameter, but also 50 times closer to its parent planet. In fact, Phobos is so close to Mars that it is expected to break up and crash into Mars within the next 50 million years. In the near term, the low orbit of Phobos results in more rapid solar eclipses than seen from Earth. The featured video is shown in real time – the transit really took about 40 seconds, as shown. The videographer – the robotic rover Perseverance (Percy) – continues to explore Jezero Crater on Mars, searching not only for clues to the watery history of the now dry world, but evidence of ancient microbial life.
Two decorated Canadian athletes are among those competing at this weekend's inaugural Enhanced Games — which is either the future of sport o
Under the conditions of the present day, the training regimens for champion athletes would kill or cripple most people. Indeed, it may be said that what makes a champion athlete these days is some physiological quirk which allows a person to survive that kind of training. Thousands break down under the strain, for every one who reaches the highest level of competition.
Things were different a century or so ago, before the “three–minute mile” and the “Fosbury flop”. But today, given that what are termed “performance–enhancing drugs” do not diminish, but rather increase the strain on the organism, there is room for doubt that the highest performance achievable with drugs is much different from that without. The main thing that the drugs can do is make the training go faster, making it even more debilitating.
What would be far more interesting is an entirely hypothetical class of truly performance–enhancing drugs, which would allow the body to do the same work it does now, but with less damage. These would be roughly equivalent to anti–aging drugs, whereas sports doping today typically makes the user old before his time.
Recent events in Romania once again lead us to question the notion of “economic efficiency”. Does it really make sense to re–define what we consider good to match the outcome of a theory? Also, further travel plans, and a stab at re–formatting the Man and Atom Briefing Book.
Direct link to archive recording [192 kbps MP3, 40 MB]
„DER TAG in Berlin & Brandenburg“ ist das regionale Schaufenster im rbb Fernsehen. Täglich ab 18:00 Uhr bieten wir Ihnen einen kompakten Übe
Beginning at about 22 minutes into this broadcast you can see some of the Nuklearia folks demonstrating in favour of atomic power in Germany. I went up to visit them last night, at their regular local meet–up, but I didn’t take part in the demonstration before hand, and so am not in this video. Parts of this segment must have been pre–recorded, as the meet–up last night was at a different place, and in any case was still going on when this programme aired.
Both Cernavodă reactors went simultaneously offline for the first time in history. Prices hit 140 EUR/MWh. Romania became Europe’s most expe
Here is the question that must be answered : is the purpose of an electric power system to supply consumers with reliable, reasonably–priced energy to support their activities, many of which are profit–making, while others are socially important in other ways? Or is it to provide arbitrageurs with an opportunity to skim off wealth?
If your answer is the latter, then the combination of generation which is not correlated with demand, auction pricing, and time–shifting storage is practically ideal. If your answer is the former, however, then the central–station utility model of vertically–integrated supply systems with rolled–in pricing has a great deal more going for it.
The genesis of the electricity–market model lies in the 1970s, when economists in the USA took great offense to the fact that the unit cost of generating electricity had monotonically declined since central–station power was first introduced nearly a hundred years before. This could not possibly continue, they said, and therefore pricing the kilowatt–hour based on the average cost of generation was inefficient and even unjust. Yes, so far, new generating units added to power systems had consistenly supplied power at a cost lower than the average, but when that stopped being true, the utility business model would collapse.
They also saw the very large investments being made in large generating units (to produce power at the lowest cost), distribution systems (to supply plenty of power to all consumers), and transmission and intertie systems (to improve both generator loading and system reliability), and said that these must be inefficient and a wrong allocation of resources. Pricing electricity according to the marginal rather than the average cost of supply, the cost of the last unit generated to meet the demand, would discourage wasteful and unnecessary electrification and therefore curtail these investments.
The fact that electrification was consistently associated with a more efficient use of primary energy, and greater productivity and profitability in industry, was irrelevant to these theoreticians. Likewise they either did not believe that engineers were prepared to continue driving down the cost of the kWh, or they simply did not care. And so their prophecy became self–fulfilling, because continuing to lower the cost of power depended on very large unit investments in large nuclear central stations, and particularly in breeder reactors (which virtually eliminate the resource cost of fuel, leaving only the processing and fabrication costs, which can be reduced with improved technology and larger scale), which vertically–integrated utilities could make, but generating companies in power markets could not.
Now, you may wonder how this was sold to the public. To a great extent, it required resentment of the electricity monopolies, which in the USA was stirred up by many of the investor–owned utilities themselves (notably PG&E) in their struggle against public power in the 1950s and 1960s, and stigmatizing nuclear central stations creations of scientific hubris. And then all it took was the promise of turning the tables by getting the power company to pay you for kilowatt–hours generated with rooftop solar or a backyard wind machine or whatever (in Germany, the case of a farmer who wanted to connect his tiny hydro dam to the grid was massively publicized), to spark the cupidity of the many people who cannot tell the difference between profiting because everyone is doing better, and profiting at the expense of one’s neighbour.
It is hard to doubt that we are all worse off, socially, economically, and environmentally, for following this advice. But the economists insist that this is the better outcome, because it is in line with their theories, which by definition produce the optimal results. Does this not sound like some kind of weird religion?
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