Japan agrees to hand over nuclear material to United States

[donquixote99]

Originally Posted by djv8ga

Look, this a stupid question, but I'm no expert in nuclear plants.
I heard an "expert" on the radio claim that the old rods were more radioactive than the new rods.
Is this true? If it is, why are they?

That may be true when they first pop them out of the reactor. There are lots of isotopes produced in the reactor, both fission products (created when atoms are split) and isotopes created when atoms absorb extra neutrons. But a characteristic of radioactive elements is they decay as they emit particles, and the faster they emit particles, the faster they decay. The most radioactive isotopes thus have half-lives measured in weeks (or less).

Here's a graph of overall radioactive decay over time for three type of nuclear fuel, from Wikipedia.



A thing to note is that plot has a logarithmic scale on both axis. That means that on a linear scale, those lines would basically look like this:



Very fast decrease at first, then a long tail.

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by merrylander

Thorium is being touted as a replacement fuel because it has such a high melting point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYW50F42ss8&feature=kp

John

[merrylander]

Try this one it is even more fun,

http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear-pow...322.candu.aspx

[djv8ga]

A solar panel is so much simpler.

[merrylander]

Originally Posted by djv8ga

A solar panel is so much simpler.

In AZ maybe but it would not do a hell of a lot of good in the short northern days.

[Tom Joad]

Originally Posted by donquixote99

OK, what's my choice here? In my backyard, or coming at me at the end of a missile?

Here is a helpful video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0XawkZ7zj0

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by merrylander

In AZ maybe but it would not do a hell of a lot of good in the short northern days.

They do quite well in Germany, Rob. That's pretty far north.

John

[merrylander]

Originally Posted by Boreas

They do quite well in Germany, Rob. That's pretty far north.

John

But if you get, quite typically, an overcast three or four days will your batteries last that long?

[piece-itpete]

That's when you fire up the coal plant that you keep in ready-to-operate standby 24/7.

Pete

[donquixote99]

Better be a gas turbine.

Or a diesel if we're talking self-sufficient power, which I more assume with solar. Solar power starts out distributed all-over, so who needs a grid?