![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Does this internet quiz have a bias?
Feb. 3rd, 2006 01:07 amDear internet quiz, please stop shilling for the nuclear power industry. I like nuclear power. I live in a city provided by the largest nuclear reactor in the nation. I even got 10 out of 10 of your questions corret. Yay nuclear energy, but people don’t oppose nuclear energy because of fear of mutants. They oppose it because of the potential for catastrophic destruction and the nuclear waist that the quiz even admits will remain toxic for many hundreds of years. Question number six is particularly disingenuous:
“6. One of the chief dangers from nuclear power plants is that they can explodelike a nuclear bomb.
false - There's a big difference between a nuclear core and a nuclear bomb. After detonation, the density of uranium (or plutonium) atoms in a bomb is incredibly high, enough for fissions to take place and energy to be released in a hundred millionth of a second! So it flies apart. The density of atoms in a nuclear core is much less, and, even in a meltdown situation would generate heat at a much slower rate than is necessary to fly apart. The act of meltdown actually terminates the explosive process, because when a core "melts down" it spreads out and goes sub-critical. ”
Of course this is true, but it also contains a significant omission, that being the “sub-critical” mass of nuclear material in a meltdown does get very hot, even if it does so much more slowly than a nuclear bomb. It gets so hot in fact that no material in the world can contain it, it burns through the reactor, through the concrete under it, bores down into the earth until it hits the water table instantly turning it into superheated radioactive steam which erupts through the earth in geysers for miles and miles around, searing and contaminating everything it touches. Chernobyl had its share of two headed cows without the need for a nuclear bomb.
Nuclear power is a pretty old school issue, and really I guess the debate over it hasn't really evolved much since the seventies. The nuclear power industry naturally has all sorts of facts and omissions like this, just like any purveyors of potentially hazardous products. I still like the concept of nuclear energy better than coal :)
“6. One of the chief dangers from nuclear power plants is that they can explodelike a nuclear bomb.
false - There's a big difference between a nuclear core and a nuclear bomb. After detonation, the density of uranium (or plutonium) atoms in a bomb is incredibly high, enough for fissions to take place and energy to be released in a hundred millionth of a second! So it flies apart. The density of atoms in a nuclear core is much less, and, even in a meltdown situation would generate heat at a much slower rate than is necessary to fly apart. The act of meltdown actually terminates the explosive process, because when a core "melts down" it spreads out and goes sub-critical. ”
Of course this is true, but it also contains a significant omission, that being the “sub-critical” mass of nuclear material in a meltdown does get very hot, even if it does so much more slowly than a nuclear bomb. It gets so hot in fact that no material in the world can contain it, it burns through the reactor, through the concrete under it, bores down into the earth until it hits the water table instantly turning it into superheated radioactive steam which erupts through the earth in geysers for miles and miles around, searing and contaminating everything it touches. Chernobyl had its share of two headed cows without the need for a nuclear bomb.
Nuclear power is a pretty old school issue, and really I guess the debate over it hasn't really evolved much since the seventies. The nuclear power industry naturally has all sorts of facts and omissions like this, just like any purveyors of potentially hazardous products. I still like the concept of nuclear energy better than coal :)
