The steam explosion that tore the roof from Chernobyl’s fourth unit in the pre-dawn hours of April 26, 1986, spewing fallout across much of Europe, seemed a Hollywood techno-disaster flick become chillingly real. Though the drama and terror of those spring days have faded, we are still pondering the lessons that, like millions of latent cancers planted by the stricken… return to article
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Reader Comments (4)Page 1 of 1 pagesHas coal killed more or less people than nuclear energy? Done more or less environmental damage? How about oil?
6 billion people using energy at the rate of the developed world is not feasible. I wonder what we will tell the developing countries? (Maybe zero point energy is the answer?)
Posted by Maggie on Apr 28, 2005 at 12:09 PM Hi Maggie,
What do you mean:
(Maybe zero point energy is the answer?)I’m confused.
Posted by Merlin on May 1, 2005 at 4:50 PM Hi Merlin - It was a joke. ALong the lines of “nuclear energy will be so cheap as to make measuring the use of it unnecessay”.
Zero point energy is the energy the universe is immersed in (empty space is very active, it turns out). Tapping it is the stuff of SciFi.
Posted by Maggie on May 2, 2005 at 10:20 AM The peaceful atom may yet be our savior in a world with a growing thirst for energy drinking from a well that appears to be in danger of going dry. Pressurized water cooled reactors, whether like the design at Chernobyl or the US design at TMI, were flawed designs that sprang from the push by the US Navy and Adm. Hyman Rickover to put reactors on submarines. But there is another way...pebble bed reactors which are, thanks to the laws of physics, immune to runaway chain reactions due to coolant loss.
See Wired’s “Let A Thousand Reactors Bloom” for the story of pebble bed reactor technology in China.
http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html
Posted by Roman Berry on May 4, 2005 at 4:46 AM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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