However, the badge as it is is not going to work well because it’s just a wee bit too wide to fit on the sidebar and also, you’ll notice the sidebar background color is green, and I think the badge would look better with a transparent background to overlay on that.

So I’d like your permission to edit the badge slightly. What I want to do is delete the white background and replace it with transparency, then scale the badge to be a bit smaller and finally, I’d like to change the style of the text slightly by making it somewhat larger and adding a stroke effect around it. The reason for this is that the light blue does not stand out well on the green background.

This is what I’d like to put on my sidebar: http://www.depletedcranium.com/popatomicwithgreenbackgroundsample.jpg

The only stylistic change is making the title bold and stroked, because if the original text is used against the green background of the sidebar it doesn’t stand out enough.

        Finrod said:

I’m sure what Doc means is that he’s delighted with your artistic efforts in service of pro-nuclear advocacy, and would be excited to collaborate with you on any suitable joint project you might be pleased to suggest.

Yes, exactly

        Suzy Hobbs said:

@ drbuzz0

I am in Asheville, NC. Thanks so much for your interest and support! I am doing my best to make Nuclear cool!

Are you pictured on that site? I mean… An attractive young lady arc welding… A woman whose feminine beauty soothes the eye even as her plasma arc burns the retina. A chick so hot she could make me melt faster than she even melts that metal. The girly whimsical femininity of hot pink as applied to the strength and power of a welding mask, retaining a classic beauty that is all the more illuminated by the ionized air.

The smell of perfume mixes with the oder of ozone.

It is a rare occurrence that a situation is electrifying both literally and metaphorically.

There’s just something about arc welding.. It’s so iconic of creation and forging something through human ingenuity and raw energy combined..

And she likes nuclear energy… I don’t even know if that’s better or not. I mean, arc welds and likes nuclear energy? That’s like somehow figuring out a way to play baseball and cards simultaneously and then being dealt a royal flush just as you hit a home-run out of the park…

I could almost pull a Chem Geek Gregor on this one. (if you’ve been reading this site for like two years you would know what that means.)

I am in Asheville, NC. Thanks so much for your interest and support! I am doing my best to make Nuclear cool!

Unfortunately, it’s the most conventional and the least innovative of all the ones out there. It’s basically just a small PWR with a modular but otherwise conventional design and a core lifespan only slightly longer than most PWR’s.

        Bruce said:

This was also the age where people had been indoctorinated to believe “nuclear excavation” was the future… we now know that with enough nuclear excavation, and you get a nuclear winter. Not to mention irradiating the area you just excavated.

I’m not sure I’d put it that way. For one thing, nuclear winter is doubtful and certainly would need at least thousands of “nuclear excavations”

The concept of using nuclear bombs to create a mountain pass, harbor, canal etc is a valid one. It does work. The irradiation issue comes down to a number of factors. Nuclear bombs can actually create fairly useful subsidence craters and underground voids while being completely contained. Some of the craters at NTS are now used for waste disposal.

There were experiments with varying success at using very small nuclear explosions to create isotopes or for other purposes (even power generation) by using salt domes or other underground areas to contain material for recovery or to act as thermal mass.

Part of the issue of reducing fallout in an uncontained nuclear explosion has to do with the nature of the explosive and the fission-fusion ratio. In theory, a large H-bomb can be triggered by a relatively small fission primary. The US achieved fusion ratios as high as 85% in test devices. The Soviet Union went much higher. 90% is easily possible, but higher would generally only work in larger designs.

There are obviously some enormous challenges in making something like that work. Part of it is the fact that with such a huge earth-moving explosion it has to be a pretty remote site where there won’t be a lot of damage to any structures or inhabited areas in the region.

The Soviet Union went far further than the US in researching this area. Their program was known as Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy and continued well into the 1980’s.

They did come up with several potential uses for nuclear explosions that were proven to have potential. One was the use of underground nuclear explosions as a means of destroying huge amounts of hazardous chemicals, such as chemical weapons. The extreme heat of the explosion could guarantee complete decomposition of the chemical material.

The most successful use was the use of small nuclear explosions near sites of potential oil or gas deposits as a means of seismic sounding. The US had also demonstrated that nuclear tests provided excellent seismic sounding data. The Soviet tests used a 2.5 kiloton nuclear explosion in an area of hard rock near the area for survey. The single powerful seismic pulse provided unparalleled resolution of sounding data.

They also used a nuclear device to create lake Chagan, which is now low enough in radioactivity not to be much of a concern.

I do think that these small reactors have enormous potential. They can be set up quickly and need relatively little maintenance and labor to keep running for extended periods of time. They can be prefabricated and theoretically mass produced.

There are certainly plenty of places that sorely need a reliable, relatively small, economical source of power: The Marshall Islands, Bermuda, Aruba, Barbados, Thull Air Force Base, the remote mining and oil and gas operations in Alaska and northern Canada, South Pole Station, McMurdo Base, the Canary Islands, Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Fiji, various parts of Africa.

It also remains to be seen whether clustering these reactors could be a viable alternative to a conventional nuclear plant with one or two much larger reactors. Conventionally, nuclear plants benefit from fewer, larger reactors – economics of scale. However, that could be challenged if smaller reactors could be prefabricated at a large enough scale. There’s some potential there, but it remains to be proven.

However: I’m a bit skeptical about these. The concept is sound from a scientific standpoint – there’s no technical reason you could not build small modular reactors. The issue I have is the degree to which they’re being sold (or over-sold) by small start-ups and underfunded operations. Designing a reactor is a complex matter. Designing non-conventional reactors like lead cooled fast reactors, gas cooled reactors and so on is even more complex.

I’d really love to see one of these concepts come to the market, but they’re starting to smell more and more like vaporware.