Oh Boy
Just so you don’t think I’ve abandoned you – next week’s comic is on the board and nearly done, but not quite colored yet. I’m working on it. In the meantime, it’s time once again for Spiderforest’s famous Comic of the Week! See below for some great comics from the Spiderforest Webcomic Collective!
The Cyantian Chronicles: An adventure in finding yourself and living with it.
The Cyantians are a race of uplifted creatures, created to serve a dying alien race. Abandoned on a world not their own, they’re learning to make it home.
Soul’s Journey – A cursed pendant turns a runaway prince into a wolf. Can he find a way back to his human form to stop the brewing war on the horizon before it’s too late?
Realm of Owls offers a healthy dose of OWLS. And why not have some HUMOR with your OWLS as well? (And possibly a hint of SATIRE. We don’t know how that got there, but you can have it.)
The next page of 6-Commando will be ready soon!
This is what we call an “Unrequested Fission Surplus.”
I know the updates have been horribly erratic, but I’m working on things, and there is some promise of positive change in the near future. It’s been a rough year, but one way or the other it’s coming to an end.
Yeah, that could be a problem.
You want to read something super gruesome about how delicate nuclear reactors can be, read up on the SL-1 Criticality Accident. It was a freaking mess.
well shit whats another nuclear explosion at this rate?
Reactors DON’T explode like nukes. That lie has been doing it’s rounds for AGES now… but it doesn’t explode that way. The worst you’ll get is a steam explosion AND a meltdown… unless you’re Chernobyl and have the WORST setup with a team that ignored their superiors’ orders to NEVER do a shutdown test under the limit, shut EVERY safety mechanism off, with basically NOOBS that made up the night shift, the WORST reactor design ever, AND the top not being the regulated concrete topper for the reactor.
Yes. But they can be poorly designed like SL-1 was, such that removing a single control rod can cause a Prompt-Critical reaction that can generate a tremendous amount of fluid pressure if the reactor is only partially full. Also, exposed fuel rods, when they begin to burn off their casings, can generate hydrogen gas, which is its own kind of major hazard.
And yet for all that, it’s STILL probably among the most reliable and generally safe forms of power generation, particularly compared to say, gas, oil or coal (when you also consider what it takes to get the fuels to make them work). Every nuclear accident so far has been due to poor design or human error, and not to the inherent unsafeness of the reactor itself.
Just send in a few redshirts to get it fixed.
Well at least we can now get the two grunts doing monitoring assessment off doing something else because they’re definitely not going to be able to fix that from remote!
Exposed fuel rods is never a good sign. Actually, those sorts of things are over _real_ quick. If I understand these things right, the water works to dampen the chain reaction, as it boils away because of the heat, fewer neutrons are trapped, causing more reactions, raising the temperature, which boils off more water, etc, etc, and BOOM. SL-1 was over and done in 4 milliseconds…
It depends very much on your reactor design, and nearly all the designs I’m aware of would not go the way you describe. (The few exceptions being taken out of service once alternatives became available, precisely to avoid that scenario.)
You’re correct that the water used in many designs acts to moderate the neutrons as well as being a coolant. But that’s because the neutrons need to be within a given band of energy in order to be absorbed by a fuel nucleus and trigger fission – too fast, and they scatter off instead. Remove the moderator, and fewer neutrons are in the right energy range, leading to a decrease in reaction rate.
The concept is somewhat confused by the presence of neutron-absorbing control rods, which drop the neutron energy out the bottom end of the reactive band. They’re solid, so they’re not going to have a boil-off feedback (until you reach temperatures where you have even bigger problems), but it’s not impossible for a sufficiently big impact to jam the drive mechanisms.
Well, the radiation counter is only showing about 2.75 Gray, around 300 roentgens. Graphite from the Chernobyl-4 reactor was emitting 15-18,000 roentgens, and the uranium rods over 45,000. One poor bloody fireman looked over the edge of the smashed reactor-hall roof and caught some horrible figure like 6500 roentgens in a couple of seconds, right in the face, died before he even made it to Clinic 6 in Moscow.
Of course, part of the problem was the (willful) misreading of Chernobyl’s dosimeters (most of which only went up to 3.6 roentgens/hour detection range) along with the severe miscalibration of the first properly sensitive units to arrive onsite…so that 2.75 gray may not be entirely accurate…
I am a huge fan of nuclear power, but Chernobyl, Ignalina, SL-1 and Windscale in particular are scary, scary things- more for the way people responded than anything else.
“I told them, I told them! I don’t know anything about running a nuclear power station I’ve spent the last fifteen years managing conventional powerplants in Siberia! Fomin looked at me and said ‘Viktor Yevgenivich, what are you so worried about? The RBMK-1000 is no more complex or dangerous than a samovar.” Chernobyl manager Viktor Bryukhanov.
I wonder if she’s now regretting her “I don’t care what the answer is” line from last strip?