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Subject: "Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3"     Previous Topic | Next Topic
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Gryphonadmin
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Aug-01-19, 11:52 PM (EDT)
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"Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3"
 
   I was looking over some of the older episodes of NXE last night, refreshing my memory as to the sequence in which certain events happened, and I ran across something that has been bothering me all day.

Most of you probably know that I have a sort of ingrained resistance to revising things too heavily after the fact. This is largely an artifact of the way EPU stuff used to come out first on USENET, a medium which only allowed for posting new copies of things and not making edits to the versions that were already out there. It was like broadcast TV—once the product was out on the airwaves, you were stuck with what people had seen until and unless you transmitted it again.

I've made some headway in my off-and-on efforts to move past that since going to web-only distribution, but I still feel like making big edits to things that have been declared finished is kind of cheating. Also, it's a dangerous hole to jump down. I mean, if I tried to rewrite all of NXE to reflect my present-day authorial sensibilities, that would take forever, get in the way of anything new getting written (which happens slowly enough nowadays as it is), and probably anger as many people as it pleased. And ultimately it would probably turn out differently!

(Come to think of it, the people who make the actual Evangelion basically did that. So at least there would be symmetry, I guess?)

Anyway, I mostly try to reserve the revision beam for big things that I just can't abide now that I've noticed them, and the glaringly terrible nuclear science in Exodus 2:3 made that list. It's funny, because that episode is chock-full of completely made-up science and technology that I'm perfectly fine with the hokiness of, but the way I described Jet Alone's reactor working was so wrong I couldn't stand to leave it that way.

So this evening, instead of accomplishing anything useful, I have rewritten that entire sequence so that JA's reactor works the way nuclear power reactors really work—something about which I evidently had no clue whatsoever in 1997.

I am indebted, if that's the word, to James Mahaffey, author of Atomic Accidents and Atomic Adventures, for the significantly improved understanding of nuclear power technology that caused me to trip over that scene and fall straight into the edit hole, but which also enabled me to rewrite it into something that doesn't make me want to slam my face against a window.

The revised edition replaces the one linked on the series index page, or you can get it here you're burning to check out the edit right now.

--G.
and yes, this does mean I'm trying to get somewhere on Exodus 5:2 right now; ye gods, at this rate real life will pass the story setting soon and it'll turn into a period piece
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
  RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3 MuninsFire Aug-02-19 1
     RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3 Gryphonadmin Aug-02-19 2
         RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3 MuninsFire Aug-02-19 5
             RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3 zwol Aug-02-19 6
                 RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3 Gryphonadmin Aug-02-19 7
  RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3 Star Ranger4 Aug-02-19 3
     RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3 Gryphonadmin Aug-02-19 4
  a few notes Gryphonadmin Aug-02-19 8
     RE: a few notes MuninsFire Aug-03-19 9
         RE: a few notes Gryphonadmin Aug-03-19 10
             RE: a few notes MuninsFire Aug-03-19 11
                 RE: a few notes Offsides Aug-06-19 12

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MuninsFire
Member since Mar-27-07
324 posts
Aug-02-19, 02:04 AM (EDT)
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1. "RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3"
In response to message #0
 
   Ooh, I'll have to give it a reread.

> "I'm sure it'll find some way to screw up. Computers always do."

Back when I read this line the first time, I found it rather amusing. Nowadays, I just....yeah. They do.

>

Oh hey - yeah, that explanation works much better. I like it.

--
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome
decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river,
ran
Through caverns measureless to
man
Down to a sunless sea


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Gryphonadmin
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19953 posts
Aug-02-19, 02:11 AM (EDT)
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2. "RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3"
In response to message #1
 
   >Oh hey - yeah, that explanation works much better. I like it.

It was convenient that we had already long since established that Misato doesn't know shit about anything technological. Gave Maya and Truss someone to explain it all to, without resorting to the clunky "I am explaining this to someone who, logically, should know it better than I do" stuff the AGSys guys do in the original version.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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MuninsFire
Member since Mar-27-07
324 posts
Aug-02-19, 03:34 AM (EDT)
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5. "RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3"
In response to message #2
 
   >>Oh hey - yeah, that explanation works much better. I like it.
>
>It was convenient that we had already long since established that
>Misato doesn't know shit about anything technological. Gave Maya and
>Truss someone to explain it all to, without resorting to the clunky "I
>am explaining this to someone who, logically, should know it better
>than I do" stuff the AGSys guys do in the original version.
>
>

Aye, that's pretty handy. Also, I liked how you kept the consequences of the original, but in a different 'shape' - as well as annotation of atmospheric conditions pertinent to the emergency

--
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome
decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river,
ran
Through caverns measureless to
man
Down to a sunless sea


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zwol
Member since Feb-24-12
237 posts
Aug-02-19, 10:21 AM (EDT)
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6. "RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3"
In response to message #5
 
   >>>Oh hey - yeah, that explanation works much better. I like it.

I concur.

>>It was convenient that we had already long since established that
>>Misato doesn't know shit about anything technological. Gave Maya and
>>Truss someone to explain it all to, without resorting to the clunky "I
>>am explaining this to someone who, logically, should know it better
>>than I do" stuff the AGSys guys do in the original version.
>
>Aye, that's pretty handy. Also, I liked how you kept the consequences
>of the original, but in a different 'shape' - as well as annotation of
>atmospheric conditions pertinent to the emergency

Yes. There might be a typo, though, where it says "render a few hundred square miles upwind of the site uninhabitable" shouldn't that be "downwind"?


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Gryphonadmin
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19953 posts
Aug-02-19, 01:15 PM (EDT)
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7. "RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3"
In response to message #6
 
   >Yes. There might be a typo, though, where it says "render a few
>hundred square miles upwind of the site uninhabitable" shouldn't that
>be "downwind"?

Oh, derp, of course it should. Thanks.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Star Ranger4
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Aug-02-19, 02:23 AM (EDT)
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3. "RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3"
In response to message #0
 
   >--G.
>and yes, this does mean I'm trying to get somewhere on
>Exodus 5:2 right now; ye gods, at this rate real life will pass
>the story setting soon and it'll turn into a period piece
>-><-

Interesting this came up now, G, as over on Bob Schoeck's boards there was a whole string of very interesting posts under the title of "anatomy of a nuclear oops" by an Irish member of the forums by name of Dartz. Take Chernyobl and turn their fission reactor into a FUSION reactor. That was the scenario at the basis of it.

If you care to know more, PM me or Bob and we can send you a link; oh, and the reason I quoted the way I did was the thought that you were afraid that RL passing you by reffered to a move to fusion over fission?


Of COURSE you wernt expecting it!
No One expects the FANNISH INQUISITION!
RCW# 86


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Gryphonadmin
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19953 posts
Aug-02-19, 02:30 AM (EDT)
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4. "RE: Repair Bench: Exodus 2:3"
In response to message #3
 
   >and the reason I quoted the way I did was the thought that you were
>afraid that RL passing you by reffered to a move to fusion over
>fission?

No, I just meant in terms of the date. Exodus 5 is set in the summer of 2021. That wasn't that far in the future when 5:1 came out, and that was before it took me years to come up with the second episode.

I would be mighty pleased if commercial-scale electrical generation by nuclear fusion became a viable technology in the next two years, but it doesn't seem particularly likely.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Gryphonadmin
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19953 posts
Aug-02-19, 04:31 PM (EDT)
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8. "a few notes"
In response to message #0
 
   Castle Bravo half of central Maine - Castle Bravo (March 1, 1954) was the second test shot of a thermonuclear bomb, and the first of a deployable fusion-based weapon (the test device in Ivy Mike, the preceding fusion shot, was basically a building). It went much bigger than predicted, the equivalent of something like 15 megatons of TNT where around six had been expected, and made an absolute helluva mess.

power reactors aren't atomic bombs - Maya is keeping this simple for Misato's and brevity's sake, but it's mostly true. There is a theoretical possibility that, in a core meltdown, gravity could cause the collapsing fuel to assume a shape that accidentally assembles a supercritical mass that will try to go off like a "Little Boy"-style A-bomb, but such a shape would immediately disrupt itself by starting to explode, which would end the chain reaction before the explosion could reach what we might think of as "nuclear bomb" proportions. It would still be a substantial and dangerous explosion, but on the "blow up a building" scale, not the "eradicate a city center" one.

This phenomenon is called a fizzle, and some nuclear scientists believe it may be what the first of the two explosions at Chernobyl was, rather than the more commonly accepted view that it was a steam explosion from the hot fuel falling into the coolant reserve underneath the reactor.

750 megawatts of electricity... 2500 megawatts of heat - Nuclear power reactors make electricity by heating water to make steam that drives turbines, just like coal-fired power plants do. These generating systems rarely have an efficiency greater than about 35 percent, so the reactor has to make far more heat than the final electrical power figure suggests.

As an aside, 2500 megawatts (heat) is a pretty big power plant—gigantic for one used in a mobile application. By comparison, the A4W reactors fitted to Nimitz-class aircraft carriers are rated at 550 megawatts (heat) each. Even in a fixed installation, a 750-MW (electricity) reactor would be considered quite substantial. The RBMK-1000 units at Chernobyl were so called because they were rated to make a gigawatt (i.e., 1000 megawatts) of electricity apiece at full power, and they were considered enormous in their time. (There's an anecdote in Adam Higginbotham's Midnight in Chernobyl about a Soviet Navy veteran, trained in operating shipboard reactors, seeing an RBMK for the first time and demanding of its operators, "How can you possibly control this hulking piece of shit? And what is it doing in civilian use?")

it keeps making heat from fission waste decay - This is how reactors that have been shut down safely, such as the ones at Fukishima Daiichi, can still melt down if their cooling systems fail. Uranium fission produces a range of radionuclides which spontaneously generate heat as they progress down their individual decay chains. This means that the reactor will not just stay hot, but keep generating heat, for some time after shutdown—not as much as they were when fission was underway, but in a big reactor, even 10 percent of active output is a lot of heat to manage.

The only upside is that the initial fission products generally have short half-lives, which makes them very radioactive and kick out a lot of decay heat, but also means they're mostly gone within a short time. This means the core only keeps making significant heat for a few days, but during those days—especially the first few hours after shutdown—it's still fully capable of exceeding the fuel's melting temperature without active cooling.

This stuff, by the way, is the dangerous part of nuclear waste. It gets progressively less dangerous over time, as more and more of it decays into things that are stable and, if not harmless, at least a lot easier to manage (like lead), but some of the decay products fall into an inconvenient middle ground where they're just radioactive enough to be hazardous but not radioactive enough to decay quickly.

and starts making power again, if you're really unlucky - This is a similar phenomenon to the one that can cause a fizzle: the melted fuel happening to fall into a shape (say, by pooling in the hemispherical bottom of a reactor vessel) that can achieve spontaneous criticality without a neutron moderator. It won't explode in this condition, but it will make a ton of fissions, get very hot, and throw out a lot of neutrons and gamma rays.

In the old days, people used to think that if this happened, the spontaneous reactor would burn its way into the ground until it either reached the water table and went up in a giant steam explosion, or, rather fancifully, melted completely through the planet (this is where the phrase "China syndrome" comes from). Evidence from the Chernobyl accident suggests that, in practice, such a mass is too unstable to remain critical once it breaches containment and starts flowing. The basement of the Unit 4 ruins is full of melted reactor guts that did resume criticality for a while, but once it burned through the bottom of the reactor, it was no longer the right shape, stopped fissioning, and has been slowly cooling into weird shapes ever since. It's still so radioactive no one can get near it, but that's all decay radiation, not from fission.

plated with a zirconium alloy - This is a real thing (or rather family of things)! It's called Zircaloy, and was originally developed for the fuel cladding in submarine reactors in the 1950s. It works well in this application because it has a high melting point and a very low neutron capture cross-section (which means it doesn't interfere with the fission process). Nuclear engineers figure this outweighs its bothersome habit of causing nitrogen build-up if a mishap does manage to melt it.

A similar alloy is sometimes used to plate medical implants, since it doesn't cause immune reactions.

a puddle of red-hot crap - The technical name for this substance is, I kid you not, corium. It's like the nuclear equivalent of fordite, only much worse.

"I don't know why I'm even talking to you." - This instantly became one of my all-time favorite Misato lines.

ahh, zum Donnerwetter - Literally, "Ah, to the thunder-weather." Idiomatically similar to "ah, to hell with it."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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MuninsFire
Member since Mar-27-07
324 posts
Aug-03-19, 00:19 AM (EDT)
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9. "RE: a few notes"
In response to message #8
 
   >and starts making power again, if you're really unlucky - This
>is a similar phenomenon to the one that can cause a fizzle: the melted
>fuel happening to fall into a shape (say, by pooling in the
>hemispherical bottom of a reactor vessel) that can achieve spontaneous
>criticality without a neutron moderator. It won't explode in this
>condition, but it will make a ton of fissions, get very hot, and throw
>out a lot of neutrons and gamma rays.

Nuclear history has a -lot- of emphasis on shapes - because the amount of radioactive activity in an amount of a radioisotope depends very strongly on the shape it's in. Facilities that handle radioactive material, if they're doing things right, store the stuff in shapes that are long and thin and as far from spherical as possible - and often have to work out how to do that in plumbing, since some of these materials are handled in, say, liquid forms.

-Fascinating- stuff.


>a puddle of red-hot crap - The technical name for this
>substance is, I kid you not, corium. It's like the nuclear
>equivalent of fordite, only much
>worse.

One of the folks on Nuke Twitter that I follow used to do calculations for the behavior of corium. In Fortran. Within the past few years.

I guess if it keeps working...

--
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome
decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river,
ran
Through caverns measureless to
man
Down to a sunless sea


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Gryphonadmin
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19953 posts
Aug-03-19, 00:56 AM (EDT)
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10. "RE: a few notes"
In response to message #9
 
   LAST EDITED ON Aug-03-19 AT 01:00 AM (EDT)
 
>Nuclear history has a -lot- of emphasis on shapes - because the amount
>of radioactive activity in an amount of a radioisotope depends very
>strongly on the shape it's in. Facilities that handle radioactive
>material, if they're doing things right, store the stuff in shapes
>that are long and thin and as far from spherical as possible - and
>often have to work out how to do that in plumbing, since some of these
>materials are handled in, say, liquid forms.

Yup. The fluid packaging industry spent generations figuring out the most efficient volumetric shapes to make tanks, cans, bottles etc.—and then along came enriched uranyl nitrate solution, with its interesting habit of spontaneously becoming a reactor when put in a large enough container in any of those shapes. Atomic Accidents has a whole section that's just "people accidentally creating criticalities by mishandling fissionable liquids".

The most striking one involved a guy in a fuel reprocessing plant dumping highly-enriched uranium solution he thought was low-grade liquid waste into a giant stand mixer to homogenize it for some further operation. That one went prompt critical twice: once when the mixer bowl was full enough, and a second time when a different worker came in after the first one had been taken to the hospital and shut the mixer off, which caused the whirlpool of stuff to fall back into the bowl shape. Fortunately for the second guy, it took the mixer long enough to spin down after he shut it off that he was almost out of the room when it went off, so he "only" got a hundred rads in the back and lived (as opposed to the first guy, who got ten thousand square in the face and had all of 49 hours left in which to regret his life choices).

There was also the time during the Manhattan Project when Richard Feynman visited Oak Ridge, and discovered that though the workers there were putting the enriched solution in the long, skinny bottles as instructed, no one had told them why the bottles were long and skinny, so once said bottles were full, the workers were just stacking them up like firewood. They didn't manage to pile up enough of them to inadvertently build a reactor before Feynman noticed, but you can imagine the look on his face when he saw it.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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MuninsFire
Member since Mar-27-07
324 posts
Aug-03-19, 04:23 AM (EDT)
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11. "RE: a few notes"
In response to message #10
 
   > Atomic
>Accidents
has a whole section that's just "people accidentally
>creating criticalities by mishandling fissionable liquids".
>
Makes me kind of wonder what might happen with fuel for spaceborne reactors, if they ever use anything other than RTGs

>They didn't manage to pile up enough
>of them to inadvertently build a reactor

Congratulations, that is the single scariest near-miss phrase I have seen in a good long time.

>before Feynman noticed, but
>you can imagine the look on his face when he saw it.

Knowing his reputation, I imagine he got a bit -shouty- at that point.

--
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome
decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river,
ran
Through caverns measureless to
man
Down to a sunless sea


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Offsides
Charter Member
1234 posts
Aug-06-19, 09:40 AM (EDT)
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12. "RE: a few notes"
In response to message #11
 
   >>before Feynman noticed, but
>>you can imagine the look on his face when he saw it.
>
>Knowing his reputation, I imagine he got a bit -shouty- at that point.

I don't remember the scene in detail, but something in the back of my head in telling me that he was no longer allowed to visit Oak Ridge after he got done. Though IIRC it was a combination of "They're afraid to let you come back," and "Yes, you're 100% correct, but maybe next time we'll send someone who's a little more dipomatic about things..."

In any event, I suspect that anyone who was even remotely nearby when he went off never forgot it. :)

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>


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