Category: Physics
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The Size Of The Atmosphere
I have had several discussions where people have said that the atmosphere is so enormous that man could not affect it. When you look up […]
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Nuclear Power – Converting Mass Into Energy?
One of the things that most people know about nuclear power is that it about turning mass into energy – E= mc2. Although this is […]
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Black Holes – Classical Theory
This is just a short discussion about black holes which does not use any of Einstein’s complicated field equations and relies (mainly) on school level […]
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Why do metals have low specific heat capacities? – they don’t
I came across the following answer to the question “Why do metals have low specific heat capacities?”: Metal atoms in pure metal are very close […]
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Controlling Nuclear Fission
Every induced fission event produces two or more neutrons. These neutrons can go on to induce more fission, or they can be absorbed without producing […]
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Production and Fission of Transuranic Elements In A Nuclear Reactor
If you are wondering where I am going with this it is because it is relevant to nuclear weapons proliferation, thorium fuel cycles and the […]
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More About Neutrons
This is another background post and I am going to explain a bit more about the interaction of neutrons with matter. Since neutrons do not […]
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Cs-137 in Spent Fuel as it leaves the reactor
I am now going to get a rough idea of how much caesium 137 there is in spent nuclear fuel. One reason for choosing Cs-137 […]
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Production and Decay of Fission Products
We are going to assume that the fissile product has one mode of decay and does not do anything naughty, such as undergo neutron capture. […]
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Radioactivity of U-238
This is just an example of how to calculate the radioactivity of an isotope from its halflife. Uranium 238 has a halflife of 4.468×109 years […]
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A Rough Model of a Nuclear Reactor
This model is very rough however it gives some idea about power and energy output from a nuclear reactor which I will use in later […]
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Implications of High Burnup Fuel – Basic Notes
An important issue around nuclear new build is the amount and what happens to the spent fuel. The proposed EPR reactors at Sizewell and Hinkley […]
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Spent Fuel – Basic Notes
These are just a few basic notes about spent fuel waste from nuclear power stations. It assumes a basic understanding of the nuclear fission process […]
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Uranium Enrichment Formula
This is another one of those background information posts deriving the mass balances for uranium enrichment. Let us consider the following enrichment scenario: We have […]
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Using Energy and Thermal Efficiency
This is a follow on from my previous post – Energy and Temperature and looks at how we can extract and use energy from a […]
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Energy and Temperature
First of all I am going to talk a bit about energy. It is not going to be a scientific analysis but is designed to […]
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The Earth should emit as much energy as it receives from the Sun
This is something that I wrote quite a while ago. Basically the Earth has to emit as much energy as it receives from the Sun […]
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Secular and Transient Equilibrium Formula
I will give the full derivation since although it is quite long and looks complicated it uses nothing more than A-level mathematics. Despite this the […]
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Secular Equilibrium
The reason for this post is to help people understand ‘secular equilibrium’. The reason for people interest is mainly due to this report which is […]
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Thorium and Proliferation
I will probably write about the Thorium cycle a bit more at some later point. There seems to be a growing number of people who […]
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