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foxgirlinfohazard · 2 years ago

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what is uranium glass?

YES YES YES

Ok so before uranium was found to be good for making bombs, it had exactly one (1) use. And that use was as a dye in glassware.

You see, when uranium is crushed up and added to glass at a somewhat low concentration, it turns the glass yellow. This, specifically, is vaseline glass. Glass with no additives except uranium, if you're a purist about that. However, the 'standard' (and far more common, at least in my own personal experience) is this lime green color, which is produced through adding a second colorant in addition to the uranium.

So, for the early 19th to early 20th century, tons and tons and tons of various uranium glassware was made. Particularly, it was made into tableware. Bowls, plates, cups, whatever.

People literally ate off and drank from this unbeknownst-to-them radioactive glass. But, because its often low in concentration, it's relatively safe. (Though I very certainly do not advocate for regular use of these. They may be low in concentration, but it's not the brightest idea.)

However, particularly in the 20th century, there were some pieces made that were upwards of 25% uranium by weight. Which is kinda overkill- most pieces are only about 2%.

Come the late 1930's, uranium became heavily regulated because, well, obviously. So, uranium glass production was halted. Most uranium glass pieces come from this era, which started in the 1830's.

A little over a decade after WWII, the regulations on uranium oxide were dropped, causing a few companies to start producing the glass again. However, this is all made with depleted uranium, as opposed to the natural uranium from before. It still glows, though.

Very few companies now make uranium glass, and those that do (at least in the past 20-30 years) exclusively make decorative items, like small statues.

One such company was Boyd's Crystal Art Glass, whose website is still up despite the company being closed since 2014. I have a piece from them, it being the small glass unicorn pictured above.

However, this ISNT the only glass that glows! Another example is manganese, which has been used to make glass clear! Like uranium, it glows green, but it can also glow red or orange! I have two pieces like this- a large stopper and a pitcher.

Under every condition EXCEPT a strong UV light, these pieces are completely clear!

(another two notable pieces in those photos are the blue and very light orange one, they both glow green! I can't remember what they are at the moment, but they're not uranium. The pink one glows as well, but it's a plastic-y coating as compared to a metal infused with the glass.)

You can find just about anything you can think of made out of uranium glass- candleholders, gas lamps, plates, statues, cups, bottles. Whatever was made out of glass, chances are there's a radioactive version.

Another notable thing is that it's remarkably easy to get a hold of. Go to a flea market with a UV flashlight or laser, and you'll find it all over the place.

One of my first pieces was a martini glass, which I got for $2. My most expensive was between $100-$200, but it's also a full gas lamp, so not really surprising. There was also a full set, cups and pitcher and lid and everything. That one, though, I got for my birthday.

Also, uranium glass isn't just transparent green. I've seen ones that a solid matte white just barely tinged with green- but are some of the brightest glowing ones out there. These ones are also known as milk glass.

(All pictures and the gif are mine, and of my own collection)

#also boyd glass made foxes as well #i haven't seen one in person but trust me i am looking very hard lmao #uranium glass #asks #in total i spent like an hour writing this and getting pictures lmao

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whiskeyslick · 6 years ago

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Anne Baring - Kosovo Easter 1999

Warning: graphic images of rape and atrocity. Kosovo Easter 1999 Anne Baring Listen to the Good News, they said… Then, over the mountain pass, deep in snow, we watched those who had lost all except life stumble towards hope, carrying infants, dragging children, old people wrapped in plastic like loaves of bread, so they could be pulled more easily over the icy surface. A woman tall and cragged as an oak leads a line of survivors. Some can walk no further in the heavy snow and die where they fall. A young girl holds her mother in her arms as life ebbs from her body. This time we saw the face of barbarism. This time we saw them: people like us, in clothes like ours, arriving in shock, avoiding the mined land, trudging the last miles along the rail track to the frontier; faces contorted with grief, women, men, children weeping uncontrollably, having lost everything save each other. Day after day we saw a human flood pouring across frontiers: lines of wagons, carts, tractors, trailers, a horse, a donkey; the old in wheelbarrows, and people walking, walking, soaked in icy rain through days and nights of anguish, carrying the old and young so dear to them. We saw bewildered people forced onto trains trying to hold families together, women giving birth alone driven trembling with their new-born into the maw of that suffocating mass. Helplessly we wept with them, seared by their suffering, longing to help, to put our arms around them, comfort, warm them; but we could only send money, food, love, and hope that they would reach shelter from that relentless rain. There was no time to gather children gone to play with friends, no time to warn others, no time to feed the animals, milk the cows, or say goodbye to the dear land, home for centuries. There was no time to gather provisions for the journey: milk for babies, food for toddlers, shoes, nappies, warm clothing. Women made knife-sharp choices - what to take, what to leave - choices to make the difference between life and death for those too young to know what was happening. Women who had seen husbands, sons, fathers shot before their eyes, kneeling, hands clasped behind heads, knowing they had only seconds to remember everything they loved, to treasure the precious life that would soon, so soon seep into the ground. Listen to the Good News, they said… Can this be happening still? This time we saw the face of barbarism. Men obeying orders. They took the young girls away out of the cars, out of the trailers. Everyone knew what would happen. Girls too young to imagine the coming thrusts tearing their soft skin, the rank smell of masked men crazed with blood lust, and hatred for the innocent girl, mother of tomorrow's enemy. Some they shot, some returned to the convoy hours or days after the rape. How could they hope to find their families, comfort for soul and body in that mêlée of desperate humanity? What solace could they find among people for whom rape is defilement, a shame to be hidden? How could this further pain be endured by those who had already known annihilation? If I had seen my daughter taken, her still fragile body shrinking with fear, her eyes pleading for help I could not give, my heart flayed by feeling, my scream would sound through centuries. Even now I hear it torn from my gut for those young lives blighted by the encounter with beasts. Century by century men have tracked each other through greening forests blessed with birdsong. Intent on killing, could they see or hear the marvel? Could they stop in wonder at the sound? How does a man become a predator, able to kill, rape, mutilate? Surely it is time to ask. Surely it is time to enquire. Surely it is time to search for answers. All this has happened so many times before. Is it the old herd instinct that binds together the men of a tribe? Is it the territorial instinct that attacks the stranger? Is it the memory of the primordial clan bonded together in the hunt? Is it the warrior ethos passed from father to son? Or the secret vengeance of mothers who have lost their sons? Is it the brutality endured by children who grow up to brutalise others, avenging impotence with omnipotence? Or is it the hatred nurtured by priests who, century by century, have called in God's name for the extermination of those they demonised, anathematised, banished from the circle of God's love? "Malignant Aggression" Fromm called it. Malignant is a strong word, an appropriate word for the kind of barbarism we have seen and heard. Men are trained to obey orders reflexively, without thinking. Obedience to tribal leaders, military leaders, religious leaders, has conditioned them to obey the call to kill, fearing shame, rejection, numbed to the pain of the other. "To be a man I have to kill. To be a patriot I have to kill. I wear a mask to inspire terror. I wear a mask to hide from myself. I do not know that I am mad. My orders are to kill, rape, destroy: My orders are to kill because the others are a different race. My orders are to kill because the others profess a different belief. My orders are to kill because the others are the enemy. Killing is easy - as easy as saying 'Good Morning'." What does it feel like to be this man? Does he ever ask himself: "What am I doing as I raise my gun to murder my brother? What am I doing as I violate and mutilate his body? What am I doing as I force my body into the violently trembling body of his wife or his daughter? What am I doing as I kick the head of a decapitated man around the yard of his home while his children vomit? What am I doing as I shoot the young child at his grandfather's knee? What am I doing as I slowly sever the ear of my brother and throw it to a dog to eat? What am I doing as I destroy his home? What am I doing as I rob him of all he has left? What am I doing as I tear him from all he holds dear? What am I doing as I allow hatred to corrode my soul?" I cannot escape the guilt of what I have done. I have obeyed orders; I have lost my soul." And what of the men who shrink from barbarity yet must kill or be killed for that is the law of the tribe? And what of the conscripts, who cannot endure the killing? And deserters on trial for their lives, they cannot forget the eyes of those they murdered, pleading for life; the rigid bodies of girls taken away to be raped, homes burnt to bone, orphaned children screaming for fathers, mothers; the eyes of the dying, the eyes of those who, like themselves, knew fear for the first time. And what of the mothers who see the life they have loved and nourished and cherished through hours, days, years of growth destroyed in a second by a bullet, a knife, a bomb? For nothing. Can this be happening still? In the camps thousands crowd together in the mud, the faecal stench, struggling for a patch of earth, a tent, water, blankets to survive the freezing night. Mothers searching, searching for a child lost on the journey who sobs somewhere, lost, alone. Some children cannot speak of what they have witnessed. They draw pictures to tell the story of what they have learned from us who, in spite of saviours, religions, belief in redemption, higher standards of living, endlessly re-enact the habits of the past. We have taught them hatred, cruelty, fear. A father asks his son what he will do when he meets the enemy. The boy, loving his father, hesitates, uncertain. He cannot imagine the answer expected: "You will kill him." That is the legacy of father to son in a warrior culture: the soul's innocence and trust raped by indoctrination. Why is this happening still? And the bombs rained down night after night upon the "enemy": the "intelligent" missiles aimed to destroy the infrastructure of the military machine, hurled from planes painted with images of scythe-wielding death and the word "Apocalypse". How appropriate that word. Missiles tipped with depleted uranium, radioactive ceramic designed to bring slow death years later; Missiles targeting oil refineries, bridges, communications. "You cannot have war without casualties." Immaculate objective words - remote from the experience of being in the path of a missile: a lion leaping upon you, no time to prepare for extinction. We cannot yet see our shadow. We cannot yet see that the continued invention of ever more terrible weapons perpetuates war. We cannot yet see that the proliferation of demonic agents of death ultimately invites our own destruction. The people of the world ache for deliverance from belligerent, psychopathic leaders, from servitude to the ancient belief that there are only two alternatives: power or powerlessness; victory, defeat. And the dead? Prisoners between dimensions the dead ache for release from the cycle of vengeance so they do not have to return to ancestral soil to repeat the bloody pattern of sacrifice, the hatred between peoples who could have been reconciled centuries ago, but for their leaders, but for their priests, but for their inability to renounce the evil of killing the other who is also the brother. Listen to the Good News, they said… How foolish we are to believe that we are redeemed. Surely we must accomplish our own redemption by renouncing the illusion that some of us are closer to God than others. Surely we must redeem Christ from the crucifixion continually re-enacted in the rape of our sister, the murder of our brother, before we speak of redemption, before we speak of the Good News, before we, the dead, can hope for resurrection. [No Easter Cease-fire In Kosovo, April 09, 1999]

#Poetry #anne baring #kosovo #war poetry #human rights

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jilliangkenny-blog · 6 years ago

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Nonrenewable Energy and its Disadvantages

Blog Post 13

Chapter 15: Nonrenewable Energy

For an overview of human energy use: we did not use energy in a significant way until the Europeans went through the Industrial Revolution about 275 years ago. This started the burning of wood from forests, which was used to heat buildings and provide energy for steam engines. Because the Europeans burned wood so fast, many forests became depleted. They could not grow back forests as quickly as they were chopping them down. This created a need for a new type of energy. Mining and burning coal was the solution to this problem. Many European countries, alongside the United States, bought into the coal industry, as well as petroleum from the ground to use oil as an energy source. Natural gas also emerged as an energy source, which was found underground. All of these energy sources are nonrenewable, meaning that they will run out, since they take millions of years to regenerate.

The first law of thermodynamics says, “it takes high-quality energy to get high-quality energy” (Miller and Spoolman 371). This means that, in order to obtain energy sources like oil and coal from the ground or from a mine, it takes high-quality energy in the first place to get this extracted. Therefore, burning fossil fuels requires energy. Then, once that energy source is extracted, that fossil fuel is burned, creating even more pollution and using even more energy. The second law of thermodynamics says, “some of the high-quality energy used in each step is automatically wasted and degraded to lower-quality energy” (371). This means that we are inherently wasting energy just by burning fossil fuels in any capacity. We cannot escape these two laws of thermodynamics, so this process results in a lower net energy after the process is completed. Net energy is how much energy is usable from a specific energy resource. We can calculate the net energy of an energy source by finding the total amount of energy and subtracting the energy needed to obtain this energy source for its consumers. Essentially, this process calculates how efficient an energy source is once you calculate the amount of energy needed to obtain that form of energy. The book compares net energy to a company’s profit. A company only makes profit if its earnings outweighs its expenses. If a company’s profit is significant enough to endure all of the expenses, then it is worth it to continue business. Similarly, if an energy source does not produce enough energy to outweigh all of the energy spent on extraction, then it is no longer worth it to expend resources on said energy source.

Therefore, once you calculate an energy source’s net energy yield, you can evaluate how likely that resource is to compete in the economy. Energy sources that have low or negative net energy yields are less likely to be competitive in an open market. On the other hand, energy sources that have high net energy fields are more likely to be competitive in the open market because they are less costly. This can be evened out with government subsidies, as is the case with nuclear power. Nuclear power has a low net energy yield because it requires large amounts of energy to begin the process of the nuclear power fuel cycle. This process includes extracting and processing uranium ore, converting it into nuclear fuel, building and operating nuclear power plants, safely storing the resulting highly radioactive wastes for thousands of years, dismantling each highly radioactive plant after its useful life, and safely storing its radioactive parts for thousands of years. Because of how strenuous this process is, it makes it more difficult for nuclear energy to succeed in an open marketplace. Governments around the world use subsidies to fund their success in order to make this energy available to consumers.

There are advantages and disadvantages to every kind of nonrenewable resource. Focusing first on oil. Some advantages of oil are that it is currently an abundant resource, it has a high net energy yield and it is relatively inexpensive. We currently depend heavily on oil for about one third of the world’s total commercial energy. Forty percent of this energy is used in the United States. Oil is used to grow most of our food, transport many people and goods, and make many of the items that we use in everyday life, such as plastic and asphalt. While we currently have many stores of this resource, it will not last forever. Since the world goes through oil so fast, and it is not the single largest source of commercial energy in the world, it will run out faster than we think. It is said that we will use about eighty percent of the world’s oil stores between 2050 and 2100, and it will be too expensive to remove any more of that remaining oil. While this seems like far away, we must be prepared for when this precious resource does, in fact, run out. The textbook suggests four options: “look for more oil, use less oil, waste less oil, or use other energy sources” (375). Another problem that the textbook suggests is with OPEC, or the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The US and China are not a part of this organization, even when they are the two largest consumers of oil worldwide. This presents a problem for these two nations because, when oil becomes a scarcer resource, these countries will have to pay much more for the same resource. OPEC would be a united front against all other countries in need of oil, giving them much more economic power than other countries.

Coal is another nonrenewable energy source that has many advantages and disadvantages. Coal is very plentiful in the mines of our planet, meaning that we are not likely to run out anytime soon. While this is good for its reliability, it is a very dirty fuel. Coal is mostly carbon, but it also releases small amounts of sulfur when burned, and it turns into sulfur dioxide. It also releases black carbon particulates, also known as soot, and other small pollutants. These pollutants get into our lungs and create issues with respiratory functioning. The Clean Air Task Force completed a study in which they discovered that, “fine-particle pollution in the United States, mostly from coal-burning power plants, prematurely kills more than 24,000 people a years, or an average of nearly 66 people per day” (383). This is clearly problematic for the well-being of people all over the world, and something we should concern ourselves with. While this is a huge drawback to using coal, it is a good resource for obvious reasons: it is relatively cheap to produce, and it is reliable for countries that do not have access to many other resources. There is a lot of controversy, though, over different types of coal, and if some can be considered “cleaner” to burn than others. In 2008, the US coal industry released something that they called “clean coal (385). They claimed that this was a way to burn coal in a cleaner way. This is not possible, however. In essence, coal is dirty, and there is not a way of burning it that creates less pollutants.

Nuclear energy is another form of energy, and it is a relatively new one. The process of nuclear energy involves nuclear fission. This process is a highly complicated one for what it is, which is heating up water that spins and turbine, which generates electricity. Nuclear fission is an inefficient process because it loses about seventy-five percent of all high-quality energy available through this process. Even more energy is lost later in the process, so this results in a low net energy yield. To talk a little bit about the history of nuclear power: in the 1950s, it was predicted that, by 2000, “at least 1,800 nuclear power plants would supply 21% of the world’s commercial energy … and most of the world’s electricity” (387). These predictions have not been met, though. There have been many government subsidies put into place in order to meet these goals, but it is still the world’s slowest growing form of energy. Nuclear energy can also result in very tragic accidents. Chernobyl saw one of the world’s most detrimental nuclear power plant accidents. This was a power plant located in Ukraine, and the reactors in the plant blew the roof off of the reactor building. The reactor then melted down, and the components of the plant burned for ten days. Many people died as a result of radioactive exposure.

Overall, there are many advantages and disadvantages for all of these types of nonrenewable energy sources. The primary disadvantage to most of these sources (oil, coal, natural gas) is that we are too reliant on them, and they are set to run out in the distant future. While they may be abundant right now, this will become problematic in the future, especially for countries that do not have as much of these resources readily available within their country. Another problem is that all of these forms create pollution, or become problematic when things go wrong. Oil and coal both release a lot of pollution into the air, coal especially. This creates many health issues for people in the area. Nuclear energy becomes very problematic when things go wrong with the plants, as seen historically. Radioactivity is extremely dangerous for people that are exposed to this, and this should not be something that we advocate for. While these are all reliable resources in the present, we should not continue to use them in thought of the future. We should turn to renewable resources in order to create reliable, lasting energy.

Word Count: 1623

Discussion Question: How can we justify the restriction of developing countries to use coal, for example, when developed countries of the present used these same resources in order to elevate their status economically?

#ENST 1000

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narcisbolgor-blog · 7 years ago

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The helium shutoff — a side effect of the Qatar confrontation

(CNN)The recent diplomatic dustup between Qatar and many other Gulf nations caused some nervousness for some of the world's most cutting edge scientists.

Among recalled ambassadors, closed borders and massive disruptions on travel and shipping, the diplomatic crisis highlighted the world's vulnerability to cutoffs in the supply of helium, since Qatar is the world's second-biggest producer of the vital substance, after the United States. Although the helium aspect of this diplomatic imbroglio has been resolved, it highlights the way in which international diplomacy can impact scientific research.

While most people might think of helium as simply being the gas that is used for balloons at children's birthday parties, it is actually a critical ingredient for some of the highest technologies on Earth.

It is used in cryogenic environments, like the operation of medical MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectrometers. It is used to purge and pressurize containers made of materials that cannot withstand chemical interactions.

It is used to provide controlled environments for the manufacture of solid-state computer chips. And it is used in tungsten gas welding for such metals as aluminum and copper, which would experience much weaker welds if they were contaminated by exposure to oxygen.

Helium is chemically inert and unique in its ability to remain liquid at temperatures below -450 F (-269 C). It is found in air at low concentrations (about five parts per million) -- a concentration that does not economically allow for easy extraction.

In fact, helium is mostly obtained from natural gas deposits, like the South Pars/North Dome field, which is a natural gas condensate field shared by Iran and Qatar. Qatar stopped helium production on June 13 and only resumed operations on July 2. Had production not been resumed, the impact on scientific research could have been quite worrisome.

Helium is produced in radioactive alpha decay of minerals bearing either uranium or thorium, both of which are radioactive elements. Alpha decay is the emission of the nucleus of a helium atom. The same sort of geological processes that trap natural gas underground will also trap helium. The concentrations of helium in natural gas deposits vary widely, ranging from a few parts per million to as much as 7% at a small gas field located in New Mexico.

Qatar, with an area smaller than that of Connecticut, produces 25% of the world's helium and the recent diplomatic crisis strongly reduced its ability to ship this valuable commodity.

While the country can still ship natural gas via special facilities near Ras Laffan Industrial City in the north part of the country, helium is normally shipped overland through Saudi Arabia to the Jebel Ali port in the United Arab Emirates. With this shipping route blocked, the helium liquefication facilities inside Qatar were effectively shut down on June 13.

The necessary helium shipping containers are essentially very large thermos bottles, which eventually warm up when they are emptied. Since the containers were located at the customer's site and not quickly returned to the producer's facility, they warmed and were easily contaminated with air. At liquid helium temperatures, more common gasses are frozen solid; thus a small contamination by ordinary air can form solid blockages in helium transfer pipes. Restarting the cooling plant and reconditioning shipping containers is a very delicate and time-consuming business.

The world's scientific and technical community needs reliable helium supplies and each facility usually stores locally only a few weeks' worth of liquid helium consumption. However, once their reserves are depleted, they become very concerned about how long a reduction in production caused by disruptions like this blockade of Qatar is going to last.

When the helium supply becomes very scarce, this hits medical and scientific users particularly hard. Helium rationing has no system for prioritization; medical facilities do not get special access to the remaining reserves. What drives the distribution in a rationing environment is individual contracts. Previous helium production reductions saw some facilities having their supply reduced by half.

The vulnerability of the world's helium supply is not a new thing. The United States formed an enormous helium reserve in 1925 just outside Amarillo, Texas, in part to ward off situations exactly like those caused by the Qatar blockade. However, in 1996, financial and political pressures led the US government to direct that the helium reserve be sold on the open market by 2006. The reduction of the reserve led to market forces driving the prices of this critical element, further leading to periodic shortages for the scientific community.

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So, what should we do to avert future crises like that posed by the Qatar blockade? The first is to continue to further develop existing helium recapture technologies. Although these technologies exist, many existing facilities simply use helium to cool something or as part of their production process and then vent the helium gas to the atmosphere.

Helium's inertness makes this safe, but it is wasteful. If more companies and laboratories would capture the gas and liquefy it, they could recapture the cost of the capture facilities in just a few years. It would also guard against vulnerabilities to shortages caused by geopolitical problems like the Qatar diplomatic crisis.

And, although the world's helium reserves have not been depleted, it is a nonrenewable resource. When it's gone, it's gone. That's true of many substances, but with helium, things are different. There is no known substance that can replace it.

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technato · 7 years ago

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TerraPower’s Nuclear Reactor Could Power the 21st Century

The traveling-wave reactor and other advanced reactor designs could solve our fossil fuel dependency

Photo: TerraPower

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Photo: TerraPower

Pipe Dream: Sodium-cooled nuclear reactors have a history of lackluster performance, but TerraPower believes it can build one that will work. Testing the flow of molten sodium through the reactor assembly is crucial. Water shares many of the same flow characteristics as the toxic metal and is a viable substitute for tests.

Table tennis isn’t meant to be played at Mach 2. At twice the speed of sound, the ping-pong ball punches a hole straight through the paddle. The engineers at TerraPower, a startup that has designed an advanced nuclear power reactor, use a pressurized-air cannon to demonstrate that very point to visitors. The stunt vividly illustrates a key concept in nuclear fission: Small objects traveling at high speed can have a big impact when they hit something seemingly immovable.

And perhaps there is a larger point being made here, too—one about a small and fast-moving startup having a big impact on the electric-power industry, which for many years also seemed immovable.

In a world defined by climate change, many experts hope that the electricity grid of the future will be powered entirely by solar, wind, and hydropower. Yet few expect that clean energy grid to manifest soon enough to bring about significant cuts in greenhouse gases within the next few decades. Solar- and wind-generated electricity are growing faster than any other category; nevertheless, together they accounted for less than 2 percent of the world’s primary energy consumption in 2015, according to the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century.

To build a bridge to that clean green grid of the future, many experts say we must depend on fission power. Among carbon-free power sources, only nuclear fission reactors have a track record of providing high levels of power, consistently and reliably, independent of weather and regardless of location.

Yet commercial nuclear reactors have barely changed since the first plants were commissioned halfway through the 20th century. Now, a significant fraction of the world’s 447 operable power reactors are showing their age and shortcomings, and after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan seven years ago, nuclear energy is in a precarious position. Between 2005 and 2015, the world share of nuclear in energy consumption fell from 5.73 to 4.44 percent. The abandonment of two giant reactor projects in South Carolina in the United States and the spiraling costs of completing the Hinkley Point C reactor in the United Kingdom, now projected to cost an eye-watering £20.3 billion (US $27.4 billion), have added to the malaise.

Elsewhere, there is some nuclear enthusiasm: China’s 38 reactors have a total of 33 gigawatts of nuclear capacity, and the country has plans to add an additional 58 GW by 2024. At the moment, some 50 power reactors are under construction worldwide. These reactors, plus an additional 110 that are planned, would contribute some 160 GW to the world’s grids, and avoid the emission of some 500 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. To get that kind of cut in greenhouse gases in the transportation sector, you’d have to junk more than 100 million cars, or roughly all the passenger cars in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Against this backdrop, several U.S. startups are pushing new reactor designs they say will address nuclear’s major shortcomings. In Cambridge, Mass., a startup called Transatomic Power is developing a reactor that runs on a liquid uranium fluoride–lithium fluoride mixture. In Denver, Gen4 Energy is designing a smaller, modular reactor that could be deployed quickly in remote sites.

Photo: Michael Koziol

Hardcore Testing: The full-scale reactor-core test assembly is more than three stories tall.

In this cluster of nuclear startups, TerraPower, based in Bellevue, Wash., stands out because it has deep pockets and a connection to nuclear-hungry China. Development of the reactor is being funded in part by Bill Gates, who serves as the company’s chairman. And to prove that its design is viable, TerraPower is poised to break ground on a test reactor next year in cooperation with the China National Nuclear Corp.

To reduce its coal dependence, China is racing to add over 250 GW of capacity by 2020 from renewables and nuclear. TerraPower’s president, Chris Levesque, sees an opening there for a nuclear reactor that is safer and more fuel efficient. He says the reactor’s fuel can’t easily be used for weapons, and the company claims that its reactor will generate very little waste. What’s more, TerraPower says that even if the reactor were left unattended, it wouldn’t suffer a calamitous mishap. For Levesque, it’s the perfect reactor to address the world’s woes. “We can’t seriously mitigate carbon and bring 1 billion people out of energy poverty without nuclear,” he says.

The TerraPower reactor is a new variation on a design that was conceived some 60 years ago by a now-forgotten Russian physicist, Saveli Feinberg. Following World War II, as the United States and the Soviet Union stockpiled nuclear weapons, some thinkers were wondering if atomic energy could be something other than a weapon of war. In 1958, during the Second International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, held in Geneva, Feinberg suggested that it would be possible to construct a reactor that produced its own fuel.

Feinberg imagined what we now call a breed-and-burn reactor. Early proposals featured a slowly advancing wave of nuclear fission through a fuel source, like a cigar that takes decades to burn, creating and consuming its fuel as the reaction travels through the core. But Feinberg’s design couldn’t compete during the bustling heyday of atomic energy. Uranium was plentiful, other reactors were cheaper and easier to build, and the difficult task of radioactive-waste disposal was still decades away.

The breed-and-burn concept languished until Edward Teller, the driving force behind the hydrogen bomb, and astrophysicist Lowell Wood revived it in the 1990s. In 2006, Wood became an adviser to Intellectual Ventures, the intellectual property and investment firm that is TerraPower’s parent company. At the time, Intellectual Ventures was exploring everything—fission, fusion, renewables—as potential solutions to cutting carbon. So Wood suggested the traveling-wave reactor (TWR), a subtype of the breed-and-burn reactor design. “I expected to find something wrong with it in a few months and then focus on renewables,” says John Gilleland, the chief technical officer of TerraPower. “But I couldn’t find anything wrong with it.”

That’s not to say the reactor that Wood and Teller designed was perfect. “The one they came up with in the ’90s was very elegant, but not practical,” says Gilleland. But it gave TerraPower engineers somewhere to start, and the hope that if they could get the reactor design to work, it might address all of fission’s current shortcomings.

Others have been less optimistic. “There are multiple levels of problems with the traveling-wave reactor,” says Arjun Makhijani, the president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. “Maybe a magical new technology could come along for it, but hopefully we don’t have to rely on magic.” Makhijani says it’s hard enough to sustain a steady nuclear reaction without the additional difficulty of creating fuel inside the core, and notes that the techniques TerraPower will use to cool the core have largely failed in the past.

The TerraPower team, led by Wood and Gilleland, first tackled these challenges using computer models. In 2009, they began building the Advanced Reactor Modeling Interface (ARMI), a digital toolbox for simulating deeply customizable reactors. With ARMI, the team could specify the size, shape, and material of every reactor component, and then run extensive tests. In the end, they came away with what they believe is a practical model of a breed-and-burn TWR first proposed by Feinberg six decades ago. As Levesque recalls, he joined TerraPower when the team approached him with remarkable news: “Hey, we think we can do the TWR now.”

Photo: Michael Koziol

Fuel for Thought: Mock fuel pins (not made of radioactive uranium!) sit ready for validation tests.

To understand why the TWR stymied physicists for decades, first consider that today’s reactors rely on enriched uranium, which has a much higher ratio of the fissile isotope of uranium (U-235) to its more stable counterpart (U-⁠238) than does a natural sample of uranium.

When a passing neutron strikes a U-235 atom, it’s enough to split the atom into barium and krypton isotopes with three neutrons left over (like that high-speed ping-pong ball punching through a sturdy paddle). Criticality occurs when enough neutrons hit enough other fissile uranium atoms to create a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. In today’s reactors, the only way to achieve criticality is to have a healthy abundance of U-235 atoms in the fuel.

In contrast, the TWR will be able to use depleted uranium, which has far less U-235 and cannot reach criticality unassisted. TerraPower’s solution is to arrange 169 solid uranium fuel pins into a hexagon. When the reaction begins, the U-238 atoms absorb spare neutrons to become U-239, which decays in a matter of minutes to neptunium-239, and then decays again to plutonium-⁠239. When struck by a neutron, Pu-239 releases two or three more neutrons, enough to sustain a chain reaction.

It also releases plenty of energy; after all, Pu-239 is the primary isotope used in modern nuclear weapons. But Levesque says the creation of Pu-239 doesn’t make the reactor a nuclear-proliferation danger—just the opposite. Pu-239 won’t accumulate in the TWR; instead, stray neutrons will split the Pu-239 into a cascade of fission products almost immediately.

Surfing the Sodium Wave

Illustration: James Provost

In other words, the reactor breeds the highly fissile plutonium fuel it needs right before it burns it, just as Feinberg imagined so many decades ago. Yet the “traveling wave” label refers to something slightly different from the slowly burning, cigar-style reactor. In the TWR, an overhead crane system will maintain a reaction within a ringed portion of the core by moving pins into and out of that zone from elsewhere in the core, like a very large, precise arcade claw machine.

To generate electricity, the TWR uses a more complicated system than today’s reactors, which use the core’s immense heat to boil water and drive a steam turbine to generate usable electricity. In the TWR, the heat will be absorbed by a looping stream of liquid sodium, which leaves the reactor core and then boils water to drive the steam turbine.

But therein lies a major problem, says Makhijani. Molten sodium can move more heat out of the core than water, and it’s actually less corrosive to metal pipes than hot water is. But it’s a highly toxic metal, and it’s violently flammable when it encounters oxygen. “The problem around the sodium cooling, it’s proved the Achilles’ heel,” he says.

Makhijani points to two sodium-cooled reactors as classic examples of the scheme’s inherent difficulties. In France, Superphénix struggled to exceed 7 percent capacity during most of its 10 years of operation because sodium regularly leaked into the fuel storage tanks. More alarmingly, Monju in Japan shut down less than a year after it achieved criticality when vibrations in the liquid sodium loop ruptured a pipe, causing an intense fire to erupt as soon as the sodium made contact with the oxygen in the air. “Some have worked okay,” says Makhijani. “Some have worked badly, and others have been economic disasters.”

Photo: TerraPower

Foundational Underpinnings: An engineer readies a bundle of full-size mock fuel pins to test how they’ll perform during their operational lifetime.

Today, TerraPower’s lab is filled with bits of fuel pins and reactor components. Among other things, the team has been testing how molten sodium will flow through the reactor’s pipes, how it will corrode those pipes, even the inevitable expansion of all of the core’s components as they are subjected to decades of heat—all problems that have plagued sodium-cooled reactors in the past. TerraPower’s engineers will use what they learn from the results when building their test reactor—and they’ll find out if their design really works.

The safety of the TerraPower reactor stems in part from inherent design factors. Of course, all power reactors are designed with safety systems. Each one has a coping time, which indicates how long a stricken reactor can go on without human intervention before catastrophe occurs. Ideas for so-called inherently safe reactors have been touted since the 1980s, but the goal for TerraPower is a reactor that relies on fundamental physics to provide unlimited coping time.

The TWR’s design features some of the same safety systems standard to nuclear reactors. In the case of an accident in any reactor, control rods crafted from neutron-absorbing materials like cadmium plummet into the core and halt a runaway chain reaction that could otherwise lead to a core meltdown. Such a shutdown is called a scram.

Scramming a reactor cuts its fission rate to almost zero in a very short time, though residual heat can still cause a disaster. At Chernobyl, some of the fuel rods fractured during the scram, allowing the reactor to continue to a meltdown. At Fukushima Daiichi, a broken coolant system failed to transfer heat away from the core quickly enough. That’s why the TerraPower team wanted to find a reactor that could naturally wind down, even if its safety systems failed.

TerraPower’s reactor stays cool because its pure uranium fuel pins move heat out of the core much more effectively than the fuel rods in today’s typical reactors. If even that isn’t enough to prevent a meltdown, the company has an ace up its sleeve. As Gilleland explains, the fuel pins will expand when they get too hot—just enough so that neutrons can slip past the fuel pins without hitting more Pu-239, thereby slowing the reaction and cooling the core automatically.

Because the TWR burns its fuel more efficiently, the TerraPower team also claims it will produce less waste. The company says a 1,200-MW reactor will generate only 5 metric megatons of waste per gigawatt-year, whereas a typical reactor today produces 21 metric megatons per gigawatt-year. If that number is right, the reactor could address the ongoing storage problem by drastically reducing the amount of generated waste, which remains highly radioactive for thousands of years. More than 60 years into the nuclear age, only Finland and Sweden have made serious progress in building deep, permanent repositories, and even those won’t be ready until the 2020s.

Illustration: MCKIBILLO

Smil Says…

Anything dependent on circulating hot liquid sodium for decades is neither easy to build nor to operate.

TerraPower plans to break ground on its test reactor next year in China. If all goes well, this reactor will be operational by the mid-2020s. But even if TerraPower’s reactor succeeds wildly, it will take 20 years or more for the company to deploy large numbers of TWRs. Thus for the next couple of decades, the world’s utilities will have no choice but to rely on fossil fuels and conventional nuclear reactors for reliable, round-the-clock electricity.

Fission will probably not be the final answer. After decades of always being 30 years away, nuclear fusion may finally come into its own. Societies will be able to depend on renewables more heavily as storage and other technologies make them more reliable. But for the coming decades, some analysts insist, nuclear fission’s reliability and zero emissions are the best choice to shoulder the burden of the world’s rapidly electrifying economies.

“I don’t think we should think about the solution for midcentury being the solution for all time,” says Jane Long, a former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California. “If I were in charge of everything, I would say, have a long-term plan to get [all of our electricity] from sunlight—there’s enough of it. For the near term, we shouldn’t be taking things with big impact off the table, like nuclear.”

As the globe warms and the climate becomes increasingly unstable, the argument for nuclear will become more obvious, Long says. “It’s got to come to the point where people realize how much we need this.”

This article appears in the June 2018 print issue as “What Will the Electricity Miracle Be?”

TerraPower’s Nuclear Reactor Could Power the 21st Century syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

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ralphmorgan-blog1 · 7 years ago

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The helium shutoff — a side effect of the Qatar confrontation

(CNN)The recent diplomatic dustup between Qatar and many other Gulf nations caused some nervousness for some of the world's most cutting edge scientists.

Qatar, with an area smaller than that of Connecticut, produces 25% of the world's helium and the recent diplomatic crisis strongly reduced its ability to ship this valuable commodity.

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clubofinfo · 8 years ago

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Expert: Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions. — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pg. 253-4, 1963 Although the entirely illegal attack by the US on Syria’s Shayrat Airbase in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government, showed not a thought towards Congressional debate, United Nations mandate or the rule of law, it seems that some thought might have gone into the date. Not alone was embarking on the action on April 6th – US time – the 100th anniversary of the United States entering World War 1, but in Europe and the Middle East, as the fifty nine Tomahawk Cruise missiles struck on the dawn of April 7th, it was the 61st anniversary of Syria’s independence from France being officially recognized – and of the 2003 fall of Baghdad to the illegal invaders, the US, UK and Poland committing Nuremberg’s “supreme international crime …” Incidentally, April 7th was also the day Attila the Hun “the scourge of all lands”, sacked the town of Metz and widely slaughtered other cities in Gaul in 451. A reminder: On September 12th, 2013 Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad committed to surrender Syria’s chemical weapons, with the caveats that the United States must stop threatening his country and supplying weapons to the terrorists. On June 23rd, 2014 at 11.32 pm., then Secretary of State John Kerry tweeted: Today the last 8% of declared chemical weapons were removed from Syria. Great work done by all involved. Further, “We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out”, Kerry said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in July 2014. Kerry was referring to the deal between the U.S., and Russia in September 2013 in which the Russians agreed to help remove and destroy Syria’s entire chemical weapons stockpile. Moreover: “The last of the remaining chemicals identified for removal from Syria were loaded this afternoon aboard the Danish ship Ark Futura”, confirmed Ahmet Üzümcü, Director General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in June 2014. However, that said, the chaos that ensued in trying to find countries who would dispose of the weapons hardly augured well for the safety of their disposal or indeed the certainty that quantities would not simply be sold on to terrorist groups. For example, sixty containers were: “ … transferred from a Danish cargo ship to a US ship in the Italian port of Giola Tauro, in Calabria, with further consignments also expected to arrive.” Amongst numerous crises, the port suffered from allegations of being a: “major hub for cocaine shipments to Europe by the Calabria-based ‘Ndrangheta mafia.” Not really the safest place to ship chemical components prized by some very well funded criminals. (See the full story of the mind-bending chaos surrounding the removal by the OPCW here.) As ever, double standards rule. The same article reminds that when it comes to chemical weapons: “Israel rules the Middle East supreme, its WMD capability intact. This was pointed out by Bob Rigg – former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, former senior editor for the OCPW and former Chair of the New Zealand National Consultative Committee on Disarmament: At present, Israel has a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Once the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons is complete, Israel will enjoy a near regional monopoly over a second weapon of mass destruction – chemical weapons. In addition to Israel, Egypt is the only regional power with a chemical weapons capability. The “international community” now led by the Presidential “Agent Orange” in the White House is toweringly selective when it comes to accusations of weapons of mass destruction. For example, in 2009, Human Rights Watch, in a shocking, detailed seventy-one page document, reported that: Israel’s repeated firing of white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza during its recent military campaign was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes Human Rights Watch researchers in Gaza immediately after hostilities ended found spent shells, canister liners, and dozens of burnt felt wedges containing white phosphorus on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a United Nations school. The report also presents ballistics evidence, photographs, and satellite imagery, as well as documents from the Israeli military and government. No Cruise missiles were fired at Israel, no worldwide condemnation at an apocalyptic assault on a tiny, illegally fragmented part of Palestine with no army, navy or air force. How selective the US and friends are in their murderous, righteous indignation. Trump is shortly to embark on a State visit to Israel. Syria, of course, is one of seven countries (Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Iran and Yemen) that General Wesley Clark was told by a Pentagon pal shortly after 9/11, “was going to be taken out.” Trump has followed his warmongering predecessors declaring himself judge, jury and executioner within 48 hours of the chemical release, with apparently no thought as to who might have been storing lethal substances in an area entirely controlled by the “moderate” Western backed organ eaters, head choppers and child executioners. International law, the UN Charter, diplomacy has been damned, ditched and shredded by yet another self appointed “leader of the free world”, the attack on Syria another US illegal assault on a sovereign nation. On the following Monday night (April 10th) sabre rattling US Defence Secretary James Mattis, warned the Syrian government it would be: “ill-advised ever again to use chemical weapons …”, still without a shred of reliable evidence that Syria was involved. What there is evidence of is that the US indeed used both chemical and radiological weapons – fifty nine times – in their attack. [Emphasis added] Tomahawk Cruise missiles used in the attack are thought to contain Depleted Uranium. “Toxicity of DU is both chemical and radiological …” states that International Atomic Energy Agency document. In addition to the fifty nine Tomahawks, the US has been using DU weapons in Iraq since 1991 and eventually admitted to using them in Syria in 2015, though in spite of it being the US weapon of choice no figures for use in Syria in other years have been forthcoming. US Central Command has acknowledged that DU was fired on two dates – the 18th and 23rd November 2015 … 5,100 rounds of 30 mm DU ammunition were used by A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft. This equates to 1,524 kg of DU.1 [Emphasis added] Here again, lest forgotten, quotes from the US Army itself regarding the terrifying legacy of DU: No available technology can significantly change the inherent chemical and radiological toxicity of DU. These are intrinsic properties of uranium.2 Further: “DU is a … radioactive waste and therefore, must be deposited in a licensed repository.” Same source, p. 154. Note: “ … a licensed depository.” Not on a school, home, street, farm, Mosque, church, university, hospital, village, town or city. “Short term effects of high doses can result in death, while long term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer.”3 [Emphasis added] So let’s have no more self righteous nonsense over something entirely unproven the Syrian government are being accused of when the US itself has been using chemical and radiological weapons for twenty five years, its own Army manuals warning of the dangers. The soaring cancers and birth defects linked to the use of DU in Iraq and wherever else they have been used — mirrored in US servicemen, women and families are chilling proof of the voracity of the warnings. DU has a half-life of 4.5 Billion years. Its use condemns and curses the not yet even conceived — until the end of time. In 2008 the European Parliament called for a global ban on DU weapons and a moratorium on their use. In a Resolution which: “strongly reiterates its call on all EU Member States and NATO countries to impose a moratorium on the use of depleted uranium weapons and to redouble efforts towards a global ban.” The resolution was adopted with 491votes in favour, 18 against and 12 abstentions.4 In March 2007 the Belgium Parliament had voted unanimously to ban DU weapons in a law prohibiting: “the manufacture, use, storage, sale, acquisition, supply and transit of inert munitions and armour that contain depleted uranium or any other industrially manufactured uranium.”5 In June 2009, Belgium became the first country to prevent the flow of money to producers of uranium weapons anywhere, the law requiring that: “ … financial institutions … must bring their investment in large weapon producers such as Alliant Techsystems (US), BAE Systems (UK) and General Dynamics (US) to an end.” Donald Trump, thus had a chance to turn a new leaf as new President, make good his promises on avoiding foreign interventions with concrete initiatives already in place to endorse and build on. On January 26, 2017, British Prime Minister May during her visit to President Trump in Washington made the following statement: The days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an attempt to remake the world in our own image are over. Yet the UK government immediately supported the shameful radioactive and chemically toxic bombardment of Syria. Further, it was widely reported that thirty-six of the Cruise missiles are unaccounted for. Where did they land? Who did they kill? Or are they lying at the bottom of the Mediterranean decaying, to poison its waters and life for all time? “Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror”, said Trump of the alleged attack in Syria, with no proof of who was responsible, but abundant proof that the US-backed terrorists had access to dangerous chemicals. However, as Chris Ernesto writes with heart searing instances: In the first three months of his Presidency, Trump has dropped bombs – and killed children (and beautiful babies) – in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. However, in a nauseating irony, exposed by the Palmer Report, Trump allegedly may have profited from the deaths he caused: Tomahawk missiles are manufactured by Raytheon Inc., and according to this report from Business Insider, Donald Trump owned stock in Raytheon up through at least the start of the presidential election cycle. There is no record that he subsequently sold that stock. The Tomahawks that Trump just burned up will have to be replaced, meaning he just handed a nearly hundred million dollar payday to a company he owns stock in. Not surprisingly, shares of Raytheon spiked today, meaning he’s directly profiting from his Syria attack. The shares were, within hours, recorded as up by 2.1%. In a further twist in integrity ditching, The Washington Post had writer Ed Rogers: … to push for and praise military action against Syria without disclosing that he’s a lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon … ‘In the piece headlined “Could it be? Is President Trump on a roll?” Rogers wrote that Trump “received bipartisan support for his military strike in Syria …’ The Post did not disclose that Rogers and his firm, BGR Group, lobbies on behalf of Raytheon … Rogers is listed as a (BGR) lobbyist. BGR is one of the country’s largest lobbying firms, taking in nearly $17 million in reported lobbying income last year. So much for “draining the swamp.” * International Commission to Ban Uranium Weapons, October 21, 2016 * US Army Environmental Policy Institute, Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium Use in the US Army, June 1995, p.xxii. * Kinetic Energy Penetrator Long Term Study, Danesi, 1991. * European Parliament, May 22, 2008. * Belgian Coalition ‘Stop Uranium Weapons’, March 22nd, 2007. http://clubof.info/

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verschwoerer · 8 years ago

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Die USA bestätigen den Einsatz von hochtoxischem abgereichertem Uran bei ihren Luftangriffen in Syrien.

Die USA bestätigen den Einsatz von hochtoxischem abgereichertem Uran bei ihren Luftangriffen in Syrien. Erste Berichte darüber wurden noch als iranische Propaganda abgetan. Das Eingeständnis kommt nur wenige Tage nachdem Assad erstmals die US-amerikanische Militärpräsenz in und über Syrien offiziell begrüßt hat.

Aus dieser Quelle zur weiteren Verbreitung entnommen: http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/14/the-united-states-used-depleted-uranium-in-syria/?utm_content=buffer752c7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

INVESTIGATION

The United States Used Depleted Uranium in Syria

The airstrikes on oil trucks in Islamic State-controlled areas employed the toxic material, which has been accused of causing cancer and birth defects.

Officials have confirmed that the U.S. military, despite vowing not to use depleted uranium weapons on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, fired thousands of rounds of the munitions during two high-profile raids on oil trucks in Islamic State-controlled Syria in late 2015. The air assaults mark the first confirmed use of this armament since the 2003 Iraq invasion, when it was used hundreds of thousands of times, setting off outrage among local communities, which alleged that its toxic material caused cancer and birth defects.

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) spokesman Maj. Josh Jacques toldAirwars and Foreign Policy that 5,265 armor-piercing 30 mm rounds containing depleted uranium (DU) were shot from Air Force A-10 fixed-wing aircraft on Nov. 16 and Nov. 22, 2015, destroying about 350 vehicles* in the country’s eastern desert.

Earlier in the campaign, both coalition and U.S. officials said the ammunition had not and would not be used in anti-Islamic State operations. In March 2015, coalition spokesman John Moore said, “U.S. and coalition aircraft have not been and will not be using depleted uranium munitions in Iraq or Syria during Operation Inherent Resolve.” Later that month, a Pentagon representative told War is Boring that A-10s deployed in the region would not have access to armor-piercing ammunition containing DU because the Islamic State didn’t possess the tanks it is designed to penetrate.

It remains unclear if the November 2015 strikes occurred near populated areas. In 2003, hundreds of thousands of rounds were shot in densely settled areas during the American invasion, leading to deep resentment and fear among Iraqi civilians and anger at the highest levels of government in Baghdad. In 2014, in a U.N. report on DU, the Iraqi government expressed “its deep concern over the harmful effects” of the material.

DU weapons, it said, “constitute a danger to human beings and the environment”

DU weapons, it said, “constitute a danger to human beings and the environment” and urged the United Nations to conduct in-depth studies on their effects. Such studies of DU have not yet been completed, and scientists and doctors say as a result there is still very limited credible “direct epidemiological evidence” connecting DU to negative health effects.

The potential popular blowback from using DU, however, is very real. While the United States insists it has the right to use the weapon, experts call the decision to use the weapon in such quantities against targets it wasn’t designed for — such as tanks — peculiar at best.

The U.S. raids were part of “Tidal Wave II” — an operation aimed at crippling infrastructure that the Islamic State relied on to sell millions of dollars’ worth of oil. The Pentagon said the Nov. 16 attacks happened in the early morning near Al-Bukamal, a city in the governorate of Deir Ezzor near the border with Iraq, and destroyed 116 tanker trucks. Though the coalition said that the strikes occurred entirely in Syrian territory, both sides of the frontier were completely under the control of the militant group at the time. Any firing of DU in Iraqi territory would have far greater political repercussions, given the anger over its previous use there. The Nov. 16 video below shows tankers hit first by larger ordnances, before others are engulfed in sparks and ripped apart by fire from 30 mm cannons. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQkG-RWxFfY ]

Video of the second DU run on Nov. 22 destroyed what is described as 283 “Daesh Oil trucks” in the desert between Al-Hasakeh and Deir Ezzor — both capitals of governorates of the same names. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IC-GzY2SRw ]

The use of DU in Syria was first reported by this author in IRIN News last October. CENTCOM and the U.S. Air Force at first denied it was fired, then offered differing accounts of what happened, including an admission in October that the weapon had been used. However, the dates confirmed by CENTCOM at that point were off by several days. It is now clear that the munitions were used in the most publicized of the Tidal Wave II attacks.

Depleted uranium is left over from the enrichment of uranium 235. It is exceptionally hard, and has been employed by militaries both to penetrate armored targets and to reinforce their potential targets like tanks against enemy fire. Though less radioactive than the original uranium, DU is toxic and is considered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to be a “radiation health hazard when inside the body.”

The most likely way for such intake to occur is through the inhalation of small particles near where a weapon is used. But doctors and anti-nuclear activists alike say there hasn’t been enough research done to prove the precise health effects and exposure thresholds for humans. Most important, the lack of comprehensive research on illnesses and health outcomes in post-conflict areas where DU was used has led to a proliferation of assumptions and theories about DU’s potential to cause birth defects and cancer. Firing rounds near civilian populations has a powerful psychological effect, causing distress and severe anxiety, as the International Atomic Energy Agency noted in 2014

Internationally, DU exists in a legal gray area.

Internationally, DU exists in a legal gray area. It is not explicitly banned by U.N. conventions like those that restrict land mines or chemical weapons. And although the United States applies restrictions on the weapon’s handling domestically, it does not regulate its use overseas in civilian areas with nearly the same caution.

“I think this is an area of international humanitarian law that needs a lot more attention,” said Cymie Payne, a legal scholar and professor of ecology at Rutgers University who has researched DU. “As we’ve been focusing more in recent years on the post-conflict period and thinking about peace building …we need a clean environment so people can use the environment.”

Jacques, the CENTCOM spokesman, says the ammunition was fired that November because of a “higher probability of destruction for targets.” Shortly after both attacks, the U.S.-led coalition released the videos showing multiple vehicles lit up by bombs, missiles, and prolonged fire from the 30 mm cannons of Air Force A-10s — but did not specify that the flight crews had loaded those cannons with DU. Those videos — along with dozens of other strike recordings — have been removed from official coalition channels in recent months.

When DU rounds are loaded in A-10s, they are combined with a lesser amount of non-DU high-explosive incendiary (HEI) rounds, amounting to a “combat mix.” In November 2015, a total of 6,320 rounds of the mix were used in Syria: According to CENTCOM, 1,790 30 mm rounds — including 1,490 with DU — were fired on Nov. 16; on Nov. 22, 4,530 rounds of combat mix were fired containing 3,775 DU armor-piercing munitions. Though DU rounds have been fired in other theaters — including the Balkans — much of the attention centers on Iraq, where an estimated 1 million rounds were shot during the first Gulf War and the 2003 invasion.

A recent analysis of previously undisclosed firing data from the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq showed that most DU rounds were fired at so-called soft targets, such as vehicles or troop positions, instead of targeting the tanks and armored vehicles according to Pentagon guidelines that date back at least to a 1975 review by the U.S. Air Force. The Pentagon’s current Law of War Manual states, “Depleted uranium (DU) is used in some munitions because its density and physical properties create a particularly effective penetrating combination to defeat enemy armored vehicles, including tanks.”

The oil trucks hit in November 2015 were also unarmored and would qualify as soft targets

The oil trucks hit in November 2015 were also unarmored and would qualify as soft targets, the researchers who performed the analysis of the 2003 targeting cache contend. The trucks, in fact, were most likely manned by civilians rather than Islamic State members, according to U.S. officials. A Pentagon representative said the United States had dropped leaflets warning of an imminent attack before the Nov. 16 strike, in an effort to minimize casualties.

“The use of DU ammunition against oil tankers seems difficult to justify militarily on the basis of the arguments used by the U.S. to support its use — that it is for destroying armored targets,” said Doug Weir, head of the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons. “Tankers are clearly not armored, and the alternative non-DU HEI [high-explosive incendiary] rounds would likely have been sufficient for the task.”

The spent ammunition littering eastern Syria after the attack, along with the wreckage of the trucks, was almost surely not handled appropriately by the occupying authority — that is, the Islamic State. Even if civilians driving the trucks were not initially exposed to the toxic remnants of DU, scavengers and other local residents will likely be placed at risk for years to come.

“What will happen with the destroyed vehicles? Usually they end up in scrapyards, are stripped of valuable parts and components, and dumped,” said Wim Zwijnenburg, senior researcher at the Dutch NGO Pax. “This puts scrap-metal workers, most likely local civilians, at risk of exposure.”

If there are few ideas for what post-Islamic State governance will resemble in eastern Syria, there are none at all about how to safely handle the depleted uranium that the U.S.-led coalition has placed into the environment.

http://www.aktivist4you.at/wordpress/2017/02/15/die-usa-bestaetigen-den-einsatz-von-hochtoxischem-abgereichertem-uran-bei-ihren-luftangriffen-in-syrien/

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technato · 7 years ago

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TerraPower’s Nuclear Reactor Could Power the 21st Century

The traveling-wave reactor and other advanced reactor designs could solve our fossil fuel dependency

Photo: TerraPower

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Photo: TerraPower

And perhaps there is a larger point being made here, too—one about a small and fast-moving startup having a big impact on the electric-power industry, which for many years also seemed immovable.

Photo: Michael Koziol

Hardcore Testing: The full-scale reactor-core test assembly is more than three stories tall.

Photo: Michael Koziol

Fuel for Thought: Mock fuel pins (not made of radioactive uranium!) sit ready for validation tests.

Surfing the Sodium Wave

Illustration: James Provost

Photo: TerraPower

Foundational Underpinnings: An engineer readies a bundle of full-size mock fuel pins to test how they’ll perform during their operational lifetime.

Illustration: MCKIBILLO

Smil Says…

Anything dependent on circulating hot liquid sodium for decades is neither easy to build nor to operate.

This article appears in the June 2018 print issue as “What Will the Electricity Miracle Be?”

TerraPower’s Nuclear Reactor Could Power the 21st Century syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

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