I know, but Jack Lemon and Michael Douglas...
[Reply]

I’m sure I’ve seen that movie at some point in my life but don’t remember a damn thing about the plot. Be like seeing a new release. :-)
[Reply]

Well I watched "Band of Brothers"this weekend and binged "Chernobyl" this afternoon. Incredible! I did not know the inside story of the event and this series brought it to life. Just wow! Lies and the USSR who would have thunk?
[Reply]

You’re not going to have a whole lot of other weekends, TV wise, that can compare with that one
[Reply]

Yep. It's pretty much all downhill from there.

Ease into it slowly by watching The Pacific and John Adams.
[Reply]

The Pacific is not the same as Band of Brothers. BOB was 2001 and The Pacific was 2010. I so could not wait and was let down. Nothing like BOB. So next up for me is Overlord and Bohemian Rhapsody
[Reply]

It wasn't as good, but it was still excellent. Because it followed three guys in different units it lacked the cohesiveness of BoB.
[Reply]

TV wise, is Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime season 1
[Reply]

Well put! Absolutely this. It reminds me of the Gunslinger series by Stephen King - 13 fucking years before the next book for this reboot ending? WTF!!!! I hope you see my meaning. Anticipation.
[Reply]

Back to the OP. In the end, the cards were stacked against Valery, he became a martyr with the tape recordings for his colleagues and it took his deliberate hanging to get action and "the truth" out to provoke action. Damn good series and so glad I watched. Really incredible series!
[Reply]

I am actually going to watch The Pacific over my 4 day weekend this week to refresh my opinion and hopefully enjoy!
[Reply]

If you liked Jared Harris' acting then give the first season of the Expanse a try.
[Reply]

I am reading Midnight in Chernobyl (sadly, I'm only about halfway through and it's an E-book so I'm about to lose it and end up back on a 2 month wait list; stupid auto-checkout, had no idea I even had it for about 10 of my 21 days).

It's incredible. The insight into the mechanics of went went wrong, especially when combined with how they did it visually in the show, is really fantastic. I finally understand exactly how the positive void coefficient works due to their use of graphite as a moderator instead of water or heavy water. The fast-reactor dynamic is also very good information to have (and frankly, from a pure policy perspective, I'm surprised we haven't made more of those to burn off 'exhausted' nuclear fuel in a cleaner manner).

The way the RBMK reactor works and it's scale is easier to understand now as well. The way the fuel channels essentially superheated and burst, releasing heat into the coolant which flash vaporized, etc... is all extremely useful as well.

And I FINALLY understand why they used graphite on the tips of those boron control rods. All I've ever read/heard is 'because it's cheaper' and I've always wondered if they were really doing this to save a few thousand bucks in boron. That's not actually why they did it.

So boron is a neutron absorber (slow neutrons are what create the fission reactions) and by inserting the boron control rods, you absorb those neutrons rather than allow them to continue and collide with other neutrons to create energy. The more of the rod you insert, the more neutrons you absorb and the more the reaction slows. Absorb them all through a SCRAM and the reaction just stops. Make sense? Well the Russians wanted their reactors to be as fuel efficient as possible so they wanted as many of those slow neutrons to impact other neutrons as possible. So obviously you don't want neutron absorbing material in the fuel chambers when you're just trying to run it open, right?

Well the control rods NEVER truly come out of the fuel chamber. They're always at least partially in because if you need to bring them down, you don't want there to be some scenario where one of them misaligns and jams the mechanism. You see where I'm going with this?

If the entire control rod is made of boron, you're going to have a section of boron in the fuel chamber at all times, even if the rods are retracted. And in so doing, those small sections of Boron are going to absorb neutrons and make the reactor marginally less efficient.

By having graphite tips on the ends of the rods for as far as they needed to be inserted to ensure that they're in the channels at all times, you have a moderating material in the fuel channels instead of a neutron absorber and so you get as many 'fissions' as possible. Makes the reactor just an Nth more fuel efficient. And also makes it 'splodey (a fact they already knew, just didn't tell anyone about).

And the positive void coefficient thing is fascinating as well. Getting back to the 'slow neutrons' thing - most neutrons spun off are high speed, they move too fast to reliably create any other fission event - they just fly out into the ether and don't collide with anything. So inside the reaction chambers you have to have a 'moderator' to capture those neutrons and release them more slowly (or just generally slow them down). This creates far more fission events and far more energy. It's something like 10-1 in a conventional reactor, IMO.

Well most western reactors use water as their moderator (regular or heavy). It's a good material for it. They also use water as a coolant. And lets say you have a situation where you lose your coolant - PANIC!!!! Right? Wrong, by losing your coolant, you've also lost your moderator. And with no moderator in place, your neutrons become more and more fast neutrons that are largely useless. As the coolant drops, so does reactivity. Also the case as the coolant converts to steam - the steam is much less efficient to cool, but also to moderate. So in steam voids (in the rare instance they even exist in western reactors) slow down the reaction.

But in a graphite moderated, water cooled reactor, you have the opposite problem for obvious reasons. If you lose coolant or create steam, then you create more heat and more energy. The moderators, meanwhile, are still there because it's just graphite and the graphite isn't impacted by the loss of coolant. So the graphite continues to create very 'fissionable' slow neutrons even in the absence of water or in the presence of these large steam pockets. The steam now does NOTHING to absorb neutrons (water will absorb a little, steam absorbs essentially none) and so you end up with a runaway reaction.

So the idea of positive void coefficient makes intuitive sense but it's nowhere near as cool as the concept of negative void coefficient that comes about as a result of having your coolant AND your moderator be the same substance. It's just fascinating as hell to me.
[Reply]

John Adams was great.
[Reply]

Agreed
[Reply]