Post by kayevcee on Jul 21, 2013 15:08:10 GMT
I was watching this video:
and it put me in mind of the climactic villain smackdown at the end of Pacific Rim. Without revealing too much for curious TMUKers who haven't seen Pacific Rim yet came in here anyway, the climax involves the goodies carrying a nuclear bomb to take out the dimensional portal that keeps dumping Godzillas on luckless coastal cities. Inevitably it doesn't work out, the bomb is lost and they have to use a nuclear reactor instead.
This relates to the video because the video explains how explosions happen at nuclear reactors. Basically, explosions are caused by the release of hydrogen from around the fuel rods that then combusts in the high temperatures surrounding them. This can spread radioactive dust over a large area as happened at Fukushima and on a larger scale at Chernobyl. This is bad news for property values, but what it is NOT is a nuclear explosion as depicted in the film.
You cannot get a nuclear explosion from a nuclear reactor. It's just not possible. Weapons-grade uranium is 95% U-235. Fuel grade uranium is about 10% U-235. That's not enough for the cascading chain reaction necessary to make a relatively small Hiroshima-style nuke, never mind an enormous modern-day city-eraser which needs a deuterium-tritium jacket and all sorts of exciting extra components that Gypsy Danger had no reason to be carrying. I suppose they had a big store of deuterium on board to run their plasma cannons, but they still didn't have enough U-235 on board to trigger the initial detonation.
While cutting back to the alien generals 20 years later to find them all dying of thyroid cancer due to all the Sr-90 in their food chain would have been more realistic, it would not have made as spectacular an ending. The ending we did get is wrong on a very fundamental level that I think fuels (no pun intended) an irrational fear of nuclear power, that in turn I think is very unhealthy for a society that is trying to combat climate change and find alternatives to fossil fuels. While traditional nuclear reactors are by no means the only answer (and not without their problems) they do represent a low-carbon source of energy that has a relatively low impact on human health contrasted with, say, coal mining accidents and respiratory ailments from living near power plants.
So for all its allegories about climate change with coastal cities having to build giant walls to hold back the tide (of giant monsters in this case), I feel like the ending sends the wrong message about one of the few viable alternatives to fossil fuels.
So there.
-Nick
and it put me in mind of the climactic villain smackdown at the end of Pacific Rim. Without revealing too much for curious TMUKers who haven't seen Pacific Rim yet came in here anyway, the climax involves the goodies carrying a nuclear bomb to take out the dimensional portal that keeps dumping Godzillas on luckless coastal cities. Inevitably it doesn't work out, the bomb is lost and they have to use a nuclear reactor instead.
This relates to the video because the video explains how explosions happen at nuclear reactors. Basically, explosions are caused by the release of hydrogen from around the fuel rods that then combusts in the high temperatures surrounding them. This can spread radioactive dust over a large area as happened at Fukushima and on a larger scale at Chernobyl. This is bad news for property values, but what it is NOT is a nuclear explosion as depicted in the film.
You cannot get a nuclear explosion from a nuclear reactor. It's just not possible. Weapons-grade uranium is 95% U-235. Fuel grade uranium is about 10% U-235. That's not enough for the cascading chain reaction necessary to make a relatively small Hiroshima-style nuke, never mind an enormous modern-day city-eraser which needs a deuterium-tritium jacket and all sorts of exciting extra components that Gypsy Danger had no reason to be carrying. I suppose they had a big store of deuterium on board to run their plasma cannons, but they still didn't have enough U-235 on board to trigger the initial detonation.
While cutting back to the alien generals 20 years later to find them all dying of thyroid cancer due to all the Sr-90 in their food chain would have been more realistic, it would not have made as spectacular an ending. The ending we did get is wrong on a very fundamental level that I think fuels (no pun intended) an irrational fear of nuclear power, that in turn I think is very unhealthy for a society that is trying to combat climate change and find alternatives to fossil fuels. While traditional nuclear reactors are by no means the only answer (and not without their problems) they do represent a low-carbon source of energy that has a relatively low impact on human health contrasted with, say, coal mining accidents and respiratory ailments from living near power plants.
So for all its allegories about climate change with coastal cities having to build giant walls to hold back the tide (of giant monsters in this case), I feel like the ending sends the wrong message about one of the few viable alternatives to fossil fuels.
So there.
-Nick
