Fun facts!

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
The mold used to produce soft cheeses such as Camembert and Brie, Penicillium camemberti, is not found in the wild. It is believed to be a novel mutation of the common grey mold Penicillium commune first discovered in the 19th century and was subsequently maintained and propagated by human.
 
The saying"more bang for your buck" was coined by president eisenhower as a code word for scientists working on making nuclear weapons. It basically means "make them bigger and more powerful but as cheap as possible."


From 1946 to 1963 atomic weapons testing was conducted so close to the cities of vegas and reno that many hotels and casinos advertised the chance to see a real mushroom cloud from a safe distance as a means of driving up tourism. The fact that photos of the army's nuclear weapons were getting circulated by Vegas is partly the reason weapons testing was moved to the pacific ocean, before the ban on all live testing in 1963
 
One pellet of uranium generates as much energy as 1 ton of coal or 3 barrels of oil.

How much uranium ore does it take to make a pellet, though? And how much energy goes into the enrichment process? I wonder what the actual net energy gain is.
 
How much uranium ore does it take to make a pellet, though? And how much energy goes into the enrichment process? I wonder what the actual net energy gain is.
According to the NRC, a uranium pellet is roughly 3/8" round by 5/8" long. Here is a video series about it:


It looks like the uranium is sintered without any additional metals, so those pellets are pure uranium. Some volume calculations should tell you how much uranium is used. Uranium dioxide has a density of 10.97grams/cubic centimeter.

Crude oil has a energy density of 44MJ/kg. Uranium has a ED of 3,900,000MJ/kg.
 
How much uranium ore does it take to make a pellet, though? And how much energy goes into the enrichment process? I wonder what the actual net energy gain is.
Commercial fuel is bound by a U-235 enrichment limit before it becomes weapons grade and uranium itself, mostly U-238, is plenty bountiful. The figures I gave are for fuel pellets before they're reprocessed and/or recycled.

Even then, the true reactor limits are moreso determined by thermal heat transfer capabilities (mostly conductive capabilities of the coolant)
and steel creep capabilities than nuclear considerations.

Bottom line, the true resistance isn't energy production capabilities but the capacity to hold all that energy without a fucking melt down.
 
Last edited:
According to the NRC, a uranium pellet is roughly 3/8" round by 5/8" long. Here is a video series about it:

My question was how much uranium ore has to be consumed to generate that pellet and what the actual net energy gain is over everything that goes into producing it. Fossil fuels are pretty simple in comparison. With coal you just dig it up and take out the rocks and shit that isn't coal.
 
Have you ever looked at your cat's eyes and seen a grayish "membrane" covering half their eyeball up? That's their palpebra tertia, their third eyelid.

Many animals have these but it is noticed more in cats since we are around them up-close a lot more. We aren't totally sure why cats have them, but the accepted guesses are extra protection from debris, since a cat eyes are very very powerful and complex.
 
Anutza Herling, the chick that held the 1st place trophy in Cruis'n USA for the N64...
Anutza_Herling_Shyla_Foxx_Cruis'n_USA_N64.gif

... is a porn star who goes by the name Shyla Foxxx

Personally, I wouldn't do, as fake tits do nothing for me.
 
You know those weird scene transitions in house of 1000 corpses? A lot of them were filmed in rob zombie's garage after the initial filming was completed in 2000 but before the films release in 2003. Ho1kc was originally filmed in 2000 under universal studios (which is how a few classic universal monster movies are seen in the movie) based on a dark ride Rob zombie designed for the 8th universal Halloween horror nights but universal scrapped the movie due to being over budget and because they were worried it would get an NC-17 rating. MGM picked up the distribution rights but kept pushing the release back so much rob ultimately had to but the rights to his own movie and finally found a distributor with lion's gate in 2003.



Bouns fact: the film was still edited down to an R rating but all the cut footage is lost with no trace of it left meaning we'll never get an uncut release of house of 1000 corpses (though Rob zombie himself claims to have his own personal uncut copy)
 
My question was how much uranium ore has to be consumed to generate that pellet and what the actual net energy gain is over everything that goes into producing it. Fossil fuels are pretty simple in comparison. With coal you just dig it up and take out the rocks and shit that isn't coal.
For your first question, In the video, it mentions the uranium content in that particular mine is 15%-20%. So for every imperial ton of ore, 300 pounds (15%) of it is uranium. A single pellet is just under 2 grams, so that 300 pounds of uranium would make about 71,000 pellets.

The NRC mentions that reactors use up to 10 million pellets, so you would need 21 imperial tons of 15% uranium ore to fuel a large nuclear reactor. I do not know how often those fuel rods need to be changed.
 
For your first question, In the video, it mentions the uranium content in that particular mine is 15%-20%. So for every imperial ton of ore, 300 pounds (15%) of it is uranium. A single pellet is just under 2 grams, so that 300 pounds of uranium would make about 71,000 pellets.

Yeah but over 99% (99.3%) of that uranium is U-238 which isn't what you want. Apparently they enrich it to up to 3-5% U-235. So it would be that enriched portion that they would turn into pellets, but not all the U-235 makes it into the pellets. Only weapons grade uranium needs to be of extreme purity.
 
I do not know how often those fuel rods need to be changed.
Each fuel rod lasts approximately 3-5 years before becoming spent. Most nuclear plants in the US shut down every 18 months (some are on 24 month fuel cycles) for a refueling outage, where around 1/4 to 1/3 of the rods are replaced with new ones.
 
The video game emulator for arcade machines MAME has a web page. On this web page is an old forum for just random stuff that has nothing to do with the emulator itself called The Loony Bin. There is a weirdo named Andrew on that board in which every post he makes on whatever topic, he posts a photo or drawing of a random slag. His taste in women is rather poor in places, but he did introduce me to the t-shirt, "Not everything is flat in Florida."
 
My question was how much uranium ore has to be consumed to generate that pellet and what the actual net energy gain is over everything that goes into producing it. Fossil fuels are pretty simple in comparison. With coal you just dig it up and take out the rocks and shit that isn't coal.
56wd468awd468aw.jpg

Source
 
Up near Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, the Giant Mine is a shut down underground gold mine full of toxic waste.

You see, the ore in the area is primarily arsenopyrite, and roasting the ore would release arsenic. The tailings, consisting mainly of arsenic trioxide, were used to backfill the mine. To compound the issue, the mine is near a lake that provides Yellowknife with water.

When the company running the mine went bankrupt in 2000, it left the Canadian government with a huge environmental project.
 
You know those weird scene transitions in house of 1000 corpses? A lot of them were filmed in rob zombie's garage after the initial filming was completed in 2000 but before the films release in 2003. Ho1kc was originally filmed in 2000 under universal studios (which is how a few classic universal monster movies are seen in the movie) based on a dark ride Rob zombie designed for the 8th universal Halloween horror nights but universal scrapped the movie due to being over budget and because they were worried it would get an NC-17 rating. MGM picked up the distribution rights but kept pushing the release back so much rob ultimately had to but the rights to his own movie and finally found a distributor with lion's gate in 2003.

That made me think of another movie that not many people have seen, some people here have seen it without a doubt but it is generally unknown: The Wizard of Speed and Time.

It was shot/produced over several years and the story of the movie was based on the experiences of the writer/director/actor getting screwed over in Hollywood. It's a comedic and lighthearted film that becomes very meta, the people he chose to play the guy that screwed him out of his rights in real life, the guy that fucked him over when it comes to money in real life, went on to fuck him over just like the people their characters were based on. So it's a movie based on a true story that also turned out to be prophetic, that must be some kind of temporal incest.

It's a fun movie and well worth watching if you own a working Laserdisc player or have a bittorrent client installed.
 
Back
Top Bottom