On 4/15/2011 8:49, Invisible wrote:
> That doesn't mean that the cooling system can't overload and explode.

Right. But if you knock down a thorium salt reactor, it just gets cold. It's 
basically a big stack of pool-ball sized balls that heat up if you get a 
bunch of them close enough. So if something goes wrong and knocks down the 
wall, it cools off and you send in people in lead-lined bulldozers to scoop 
the stuff up.

 > Or somebody flies a passenger jet into it. Or...

They're designed to resist that one.

> Uranium-235 has a halflife is 700 million years.

U-235 isn't that dangerous, tho, unless you pile up enough to interact.

What it also means is that if you spill 100 pounds of U-235 somewhere, it's 
going to take 700 million years for even 50 pounds of it to have emitted 
radiation. That's a very low level of radiation.

The actual chemical properties are probably more dangerous than the 
radioactive properties if you spread it out widely enough.

 > That's /halflife/, not the
> time it takes to degrade completely, just the time for *half* of it to go
> away. 700 million years is longer than that oil has been in the ground. ;-)

Which tells you that it isn't *that* dangerous or there wouldn't be any life 
in the ground.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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