Do dimmer switches work with Low Energy Bulbs?

[Derek Geldard]

Depends on the accuracy you need. FWIR the standard deviation is equal to the square root of the total counts. IE roughly speaking to get an accuracy of 1.4% you need to aquire 10,000 counts. Might as well call it 1-2 days and check into a hotel for a night or two. A problem with counting as long as that is that the counting instrument can pick up a burst of counts from EMI or detector malfunctions and you'd never know, whats more the instrument has probably never been tested in such a stringent application.

All the nuclear stations (except Trawsfynneth) sample fish in aquatic environment, you can usually see a boathouse near the sea some distance from the reactors with a nuclear counting lab and a small boat in it. We equipped the Magnox stations with them.

The greens would have "Oi polloi" believe they have a monopoly on environmental monitoring.

I've heard that there is a quarry somewhere near the Aberdeen ring rd. (Anderson drive ?) that is reputed to be "red hot". I've not found it yet, which is one reason I asked our learned friend where his supposed "hotspots" near Dounreay are, but he appears to want to keep his little twinkling light under a bushel.

Derek

[Adam Aglionby]

Sorry, bad term, they were commonly referred to as hotspots, but were actually fragments of fuel rod washing up on the shore:

enough risk that some beaches have been closed off for months at a time.

People injured , who knows

`s mission is now to decommission, whatever the future of nuclear , what`s learnt at Dounreay is extremely important in leraning how to tempt genie back near bottle.

Problems with French installations, there have been some,do know that the European Presurised Reactors, EPR, under construction,France and Finland are way over budget and the other design lined up for the U.K , Westinghouse AP1000 just hit safety design problems

nuclear isn`t the non fossil plug and play option the lobby would lead you to believe.

Still no ones answered where proposed high level waste repository is going to be?

Cheers Adam

[peteshew]

Or that excellent patio cleaner Armillatox. No way would you consider that as a garden fungicide.

Pete Shew

[The Natural Philosopher]

In so many ways.

But dont tell them.

[The Natural Philosopher]

IF the sort of luminous watches we all used to have post war, were washed up on a beach, it would be, with today's standards, enough to close off a beach.

As would half a dozen smoke alarms.

Obviouly no one does. As there are none.

Have you BEEN there?

I have actually. Its the most desolate and deserted piece of land in the UK.

Dounreay is a bloody nusiance. It was never built with decomissioning in mind, and its proving a bugger to take apart to todays safety standards.

Of course in the 50's it would have been ripped apart and teh worst stuff dumped in lead cans, and left there..

Well if you MUST read the Guardian,and greenpeace, you can hardly expect objective reporting.

It is actually.

reprocess it.

Burn it in reactors.

That's the obvious answer.

Eventually you end up with more or less fast decay uisotopes, and thse only need storing for a short time anyway.

The earth is already full of long term isotopes, or we wouldn't have nuclear power anyway. Putting the odd bit back hardly seems an issue.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You would if you had honey fungus.

[Adam Aglionby]

Glad you mentioned that, Dalgety Bay, radium contamination from aircarft dial manufacture:

regarded a major risk in that quantity , but Radium killed its discoverer Marie Curie and lots of innocent factory workers

> As would half a dozen smoke alarms.

Couple of times, Thurso less than 15 miles away has an excellent chip shop and one of the best stocked sweetie shops anywhere. The clear light in the far north is a highly reccomended experience.

Think Cape Wrath at the other corner really gets award for most desolate place.

The technology involved and the reliabilty required is astonishing, can only admire the engineers working on the projects, anything after is going to look simple.

Down the shaft, no lead cans...

budget.

Didn`t quote the Guardian, did quote the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commision , which do hope is reasonably objective.

EPR has yet to be built and is hitting problems, alternative has just failed safety case, sorry what are you going to build a new generation of AGRs?

So obvious no one is doing it.

Dounreay as a fast breeder failed.

Yucca Mountain has an uncertain future but the stuff has to go somewhere, reprocessing jsut generates more low and mid waste and false records:

> Eventually you end up with more or less fast decay uisotopes, and thse

None of them exist naturally in the concentrations we have created, if only could water the darn stuff back down.

Cheers Adam

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:28:16 +0000 someone who may be John Rumm wrote this:-

I think that the "health & safety" lobby is going overboard on the subject, the usual gold plating we see in the UK from people unable to judge risks. Open a window if someone wants, but compared to fillings it is a minor problem.

In large numbers it is a different issue, but I very much doubt if more than one is broken in a house at any one time. I have broken one or two since the early 1980s (obviously the old glass jar ones were harder to break, but the ones without a glass jar have been around for as long in the form of the Thorn 2D).

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:08:57 -0700 (PDT) someone who may be Adam Aglionby wrote this:-

And over time. I gather they have given up providing estimated completion dates for the one in Finland.

[David Hansen]

On Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:11:14 -0700 (PDT) someone who may be Adam Aglionby wrote this:-

has some more up to date reports.

It is a while since I read some of the information. However, from memory there would be a visible "burn", a red patch the skin, if an adult was to hold some of the found particles against their skin for around 15 minutes. In other words fairly "hot" and obviously much more radioactive than a luminous watch.

The major risk is ingestion, which would expose people to the particle for a long time. Adults are unlikely to be exposed to major risk, but children could be. Children eat sand sometimes.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Then they deserve all the worms they get.

I assume you have never BEEN to the beach at Dounreay. I am not surprised, No one else has either. I've been close. looked out over the sea a bit further up the road. No reason to stay more than a couple of minutes. Vile place.

There is no beach to speak of. There is no public access to the beach such as it is.

The particles in question are heavy and wont be easily shifted by tidal movement.

Dounreay in short represents no safety issues to the general public that couldn't be solved by simply closing that stretch of shoreline.

It was a fast breeder reactor, set up to breed weapons grade ,material, built to a lax 50;'s standard and badly managed thereafter.

It simply has no bearing on discussions about new nuclear. Its just always dredged up by the anti - nuclear lobby as an example of things that will go wrong. But its history. It bears about as much relevance as citing boiler explosions in Stephensons rocket does to the safety issues of a modern steam turbine.

Let's add in a few facts.

The DFR fast breeder reactor was a small one. Only 14MW. However it is reckoned it did add 600GWh of generation, and reduction in carbon concomitant with that. At today's wind turbine prices (10p a unit), that represents £60M of generated power. Its main function was not power generation though. It was breeding of nuclear materials and as a research facility.

The PFR reactor at 250MW capacity ran for 20 years. at a putative 80% load factor, and 10p a unit that's generated £3.5bn of carbon free power.

Th capital cost of a new nuclear set of comparable output would be less than a billion.

That needs to be offset against the clean up costs. In any *rational* argument.

I note with interest the coincidence of your name with

make windpower gearboxes.

[John Rumm]

Opening a window is certainly good advice, however if you are not aware of the requirement, and also are not able to dispose of any resulting liquid spillage, then the vapour level threat remains the moment you shut the window.

The only time a filling is going to represent a significant risk is to the dentist preparing the amalgam. Once the mercury is chemically bound to something else it poses far less risk. The main risk from liquid mercury is exposure to mercury vapour (hence why dentists, labs, hospitals etc are expected to have spillage control kits on hand).

Some CFLs come with rubber outer jackets these days, which makes breakages less likely in the first place, and containment better.

[Owain]

If we're talking about government mismanagement and corruption I think our lot are just less bad.

And they tend not to have machine guns, of course.

Owain

[ARWadsworth]

You used to be able to catch AIDs from mercury until 1991.

Adam

[Tim W]

ARWadsworth wibbled on Sunday 01 November 2009 19:40

Oohhh :-O

I nearly caught AIDS when I watched[1] The Village People doing "YMCA" on Youtube...

[1] Childrens' request. Gave me a chance to explain what "gay" meant without getting overly gross... "See that bloke with the big mustache and the leather cap? Well...."

Had to watch this several times times to de-gay:

made me join the Russian Army and I'm not even Russian...

[Rod]

Looked like a very heavy duty version of that Berocca advert at the beginning!

[Tim W]

Rod wibbled on Sunday 01 November 2009 20:50

Apparently the Lieutenant or whatever he is is actually a well known singer.

[The Natural Philosopher]

[Derek Geldard]

It would probably have been more honest of us if we'd given up providing estimated completion dates for most (all ?) of our large engineering projects such as the M74 extension, and it's usually the Greens who are the chief offenders although the trade unions also rate. (Viz the Isle of Grain power station).

Derek

[Derek Geldard]

An external radiation hazard of that magnitude on a public beach I would find difficult to contemplate.

Futile to do hypothetical sums. If you can tell us where it happened we could investigate it, but radiation physicists are more commonly concerned with amounts a million or so times less. What is normally considered a hotspot is for instance where what otherwise would be a low level discharge into the sea gets concentrated in sands and muds which bind it like Fullers Earth.

Derek