Archive for January, 2012

Room sought in munich

Monday, January 30th, 2012

Tim was unreckoned given notice for his room in munich. So he needs a new one.
If you know a room close to a subway, preferably close to the subway which goes to TU munich and which is maximally around 300 Euros (all inclusive) per month then please send an email or give a call.

Gerda

Saturday, January 28th, 2012


Gerda Schellhase, fotographer unknown

randform reader Bart asked about my grandmother Gerda. As said before I am reluctant to talk about my family. However in some sense – especially if they are rather part of history- I may make an exception. Talking about them may be important to understand history.

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hard disk

Saturday, January 28th, 2012

Concerning my laptop: I was informed by the repairshop that the hard disk is broken.

time

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Tim had found some time over the holidays for doing music. He has thus just uploaded a cool new song to soundcloud. It is entirely written and arranged by himself. Vocals and some violin by Cat Caspari, cello by Z.

involuntarily offline

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Short note: On monday I finally got my macbook back from the repairshop. Unfortunately it seems now its broken again.

mini nuclear wastes

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

The discussion about certain nuclear waste problems which was indirectly adressed in my previous post about mini nuclear reactors went a little further on the blog Azimuth (here, here and here). Connected with the Azimuth blog is the socalled Azimuth project and the Azimuth forum, where amongst others people voluntarily discuss scientific studies on climate and environmental issues and even do some related software projects (like for example this here). So in the comment I suggested that someone could eventually do the necessary calculations to check wether there is a higher cancer rate in the San Francisco Bay area which may be due to a nuclear waste site in the waters close to San Francisco. Likewise one could eventually do similar calculations for the 25000 undersea radioactive waste sites in Russia mentioned in the post about the mini nuclear reactors or to other known sites in the world (see also this post and this comment about sites in India). It would of course also be interesting to hear about related studies.

related randform posts:
->on a recent study of increased risk of cancer in the vicinity of german nuclear power plants
->On the socalled Greiser-study
-> and the general overview on nuclear science posts on randform

randform and lateron offline

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

As some randform readers may have noticed the randform blog webpage, as well as Tims lateron.de were put offline yesterday Jan. 18 on the occasion of the protests against SOPA and PIPA and ACTA.

mini nuclear reactors

Monday, January 9th, 2012

Nuclear reactors of smaller sizes like even as small as that they can be buried in the garden and the problem of the traceability of nuclear waste were already mentioned in this randform post with the example of the company Hyperion. So here a little update on the development of some of these reactors:

world nuclear info on small reactors (as of 09 Jan. 12) reports about Hyperions activities in the US:

In March 2010, Hyperion notified the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that it planned to submit a design certification application in 2012. The company says it has many expressions of interest for ordering units. In September 2010, the company signed an agreement with Savannah River Nuclear Solutions to possibly build a demonstration unit at the Department of Energy site there. (Over 1953-1991, this was where a number of production reactors for weapons plutonium and tritium were built and run.) Hyperion has said it plans to build a prototype by 2015, possibly with uranium oxide fuel if the nitride is not then available.

But Hyperion is not the only small reactor company which is active in the US, apart from the TWR one can read the following in the press release of Babcock & Wilcox Sep. 29 2011:

The Babcock & Wilcox Company (B&W) (NYSE:BWC) and Generation mPower LLC (Generation mPower) will dedicate the unique B&W mPower™ Integrated System Test (IST) facility in Bedford County, Va., at a ceremony today.

The IST facility supports further development of the B&W mPower reactor technology that represents a new generation of smaller, scalable nuclear power plants. This world-class testing facility was made possible in part by generous support from the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission (TICRC), which provided more than $7 million in grants to support construction of the facility and the purchase of process equipment.

Apart from the testing facility it seems the Tennessee Vallee Authority may be interested in a concrete project.

But the fastet new projects*** are probably HTR-10 versions. According to world nuclear the HTR-10 is a pebble bed reactor – a technology which was more or less abandoned here in Germany, last but not least to the accident at the research facility in Jülich, but seems to have found supporters in China.

According to world nuclear:

Construction of a larger version of the HTR-10, China’s HTR-PM, was approved in principle in November 2005, with construction start in mid 2011.

And since Tsinghua university just opened a new nuclear technology lab this will not be the end of the story.

***There are of course rather old prototypes of small nuclear reactors, like there is according to world nuclear:

Already operating in a remote corner of Siberia are four small units at the Bilibino co-generation plant. These four 62 MWt (thermal) units are an unusual graphite-moderated boiling water design with water/steam channels through the moderator. They produce steam for district heating and 11 MWe (net) electricity each. They have performed well since 1976, much more cheaply than fossil fuel alternatives in the Arctic region.

And there are of course other reators and other small reactors like in submarines some of them performed so well that Russia reports 25,000 undersea radioactive waste sites.