Tag: nuclear power

Nuclear summer

Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. *** As a science writer, I’ve written about a lot of things I’ve never expected to see up close. The outer planets of the solar system, for example. The bottom of the ocean. Nuclear reactors. I still haven’t reached Neptune, and I’ve never been …

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What did I do on my summer vacation?

I toured a nuclear power plant under refurbishment, a tour which included a rare visit (for anyone) inside the vault of a reactor. Those would be the fuel tubes, currently being replaced, in the background. That’s my lovely wife Margaret Anne beside me. The reactor is at the Bruce Power plant near Kincardine, Ontario. This …

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Chernobyl

This week, Ukrainian authorities restarted the last working reactor at the Chernobyl power plant, site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster 13 years ago. Officials say the reactor is completely safe and free of any potential Y2K bugs. Considering that everybody living in the northern hemisphere 13 years ago was the unwilling recipient of at …

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Happy 40th anniversary, USS Nautilus!

  There’s not much in the way of interesting scientific anniversaries on my list for this month, which suits me fine, because it means I can focus on the one that interests me most:  the 40th anniversary of the launch of the world’s first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, on January 21, 1954. I don’t …

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Fusion

Nuclear fusion as an electrical power source is rather like some people’s plans for after they win the lottery. They’re sure it’s coming, and they’re sure it’s going to be great, but somehow it never seems to happen. Actually, that’s not a very fair comparison, because nuclear fusion really does seem to be on the …

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Fission

We sometimes talk about living in the Nuclear Age, because it has only been in the last 50 years that we have managed to harness the power expressed by Einstein as E=mc2. But strictly speaking, uranium fission, which is what we think of when we think of nuclear power, isn’t new. About 1.78 billion years …

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