Just some notes. It was during war time but not an official incident of war. But.....
Yeah, if I remember the maths right certain grain dusts can have potential energy on par with some of the most powerful high explosives and rocket fuels with the right fuel/air mixture. The big difference being grain dusts are low explosive, not high explosive.
www.npr.org
Yep. Simple flour is actually very dangerous: back a few centuries, you'd have flames nowhere near a flour mill. It's not that much of a problem in a large pile on the ground, but as a fine dust in the atmosphere...
Well, the entire plot was terribly handled, but yeah, that's going for farce.
Coal dust, likewise.
Ok, but nuclear plants can't blow up like this. The fuel wouldn't blow up in an accidental fire nearby, and the waste wouldn't blow up at all. It admittedly has its own risks, but bearing in mind that people are still likely to die from secondary effects of this explosion (toxic gases, destroyed homes, overwhelmed hospitals, the list goes on), this explosion in Beirut is more devastating than any nuclear accident in history and most of those nuclear accidents combined.
I just learned. I didn't know what low explosives or high explosives meant so I googled it and I still don't entirely get it but something about 'subsonic' verus 'supersonic'.
Well, in terms of immediate deaths attributable to the explosion itself. Chernobyl is likely to have had a much greater toll from lasting radiation and the higher mortality it has led to.
Yes, it was the german isle of Helgoland, that was partially blown up.
They can. I think at one point it even happened to the world's largest grain elevator in Kansas.
It's also not going to be easy to quantify the deaths caused by displacing half of Beirut and filling the city with toxic gases. I think it's a pretty fair comparison.
Chernobyl did blow up "like this". The difference between the explosion at Chernobyl and the one in Beirut, was the Chernobyl blast was partially contained by the reactor vessel which turned it into something like a quasi-nuclear claymore aimed straight up.
How old are these books you're reading, and who wrote them? Frankly, the anti-nuke and fossil fuels lobbies spend a whole lot of money, time, and effort to keep the public's understanding of nuclear power stuck in the 1940's and irrationally fearful, preventing widescale adoption of reactor designs even from the '50s that are tested, proven, and so safe the laws of thermodynamics would have to change for them to produce even a TMI-scale incident. Fast, breeder, and high-temperature reactor designs actually are that old.
Well, that's true, but that amount of gas doesn't tend to linger for decades. Radiation does.
It is not the reality of the technology but humans that worries me about this. The discussion surrounding nuclear power has, like so many topics, become extremely polarized. One side is overly freaked out about it and the other is too placating, to the point that it will lead to complacency.
No, but they can blow up in other ways.
Just some food for thought, a question for you to look up at your leisure so as to not derail the thread: which energy source produces more radioactive waste by weight, more dangerous radioactive waste products, and releases more radioisotopes in the atmosphere in the course of regular operations, coal or nuclear?
I already know what you're trying to get at and it's wrong. Coal does not produce more radioactive waste, coal is far far less regulated that our radioactive material which is why it has more of an effect on the environment.
Um.
www.ovoenergy.com
