How newer reactors would have survived Fukushima - 25 March 2011. Cookies on the New Scientist website close Our website uses cookies, which are small text files that are widely used in order to make websites work more effectively. To continue using our website and consent to the use of cookies, click away from this box or click 'Close' Find out about our cookies and how to change them Tech Log in Your login is case sensitive I have forgotten my password close My New Scientist Look for Science Jobs This is a preview of the full article New Scientist full online access is exclusive to subscribers. Home|Tech | News How newer reactors would have survived Fukushima 25 March 2011 by Paul Marks Magazine issue 2805. Read more: "Special report: Rescuing nuclear power" THERE'S nothing quite like watching reactor buildings explode on live TV to destroy your faith in nuclear power. The Fukushima reactors are a 40-year-old design.
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content. PrintWeb Back to top. Nuclear agency plans for futuristic waste option - tech - 23 February 2011. The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements. Stanford Report, August 23, 2010 When researchers found an unusual linkage between solar flares and the inner life of radioactive elements on Earth, it touched off a scientific detective investigation that could end up protecting the lives of space-walking astronauts and maybe rewriting some of the assumptions of physics. By Dan Stober L.A. Cicero Peter Sturrock, professor emeritus of applied physics It's a mystery that presented itself unexpectedly: The radioactive decay of some elements sitting quietly in laboratories on Earth seemed to be influenced by activities inside the sun, 93 million miles away.
Is this possible? Researchers from Stanford and Purdue University believe it is. There is even an outside chance that this unexpected effect is brought about by a previously unknown particle emitted by the sun. The story begins, in a sense, in classrooms around the world, where students are taught that the rate of decay of a specific radioactive material is a constant. Random numbers. Strong interaction. In particle physics, the strong interaction (also called the strong force, strong nuclear force, nuclear strong force or color force) is one of the four fundamental interactions of nature, the others being electromagnetism, the weak interaction and gravitation. At atomic scale, it is about 100 times stronger than electromagnetism, which in turn is orders of magnitude stronger than the weak force interaction and gravitation.
It ensures the stability of ordinary matter, in confining the elementary particles quarks into hadrons such as the proton and neutron, the largest components of the mass of ordinary matter. Furthermore, most of the mass-energy of a common proton or neutron is in the form of the strong force field energy; the individual quarks provide only about 1% of the mass-energy of a proton[citation needed]. In the context of binding protons and neutrons together to form atoms, the strong interaction is called the nuclear force (or residual strong force).
History[edit] The Tsar Bomba. Nuclear Weapons - basic technology concepts [UNC] A few words about nuclear weapons technology.. Fission weapons Nuclear weapons exploit two principle physical, or more specifically nuclear, properties of certain substances: fission and fusion. Fission is possible in a number of heavy elements, but in weapons it is principally confined to what is termed slow neutron fission in just two particular isotopes: 235U and 239Pu. These are termed fissile, and are the source of energy in atomic weapons. An explosive chain reaction can be started with relatively slight energy input (so-called slow neutrons) in such material. An actual 239Pu ingot, alloyed with gallium for improved physical properties Isotopes are 'varieties' of an element which differ only in their number of neutrons. For example, hydrogen exists as 1H 2H and 3H -- different isotopes of the same chemical element, with no, one, and two neutrons respectively.
Typical appearance of a thermonuclear weapon detonation -- from many miles away. Facts about Nuclear Weapons.