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U.S. Declares 'Alert' At Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant In N.J. →

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that at “Alert” has been declared at the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Forked River, New Jersey, an event related to Hurricane Sandy.

The NRC said that the plant, which is in a regularly scheduled outage, declared the Alert at 8:45 p.m. Eastern time “due to water exceeding certain high water level criteria in the plant’s water intake structure.”

The Commission notes that an Alert is the second lowest of four NRC action levels. Before reaching Alert status, the plant declared an “Unusual Event” when the water first reached a minimum high water level criteria, the NRC says.

“Water level is rising in the intake structure due to a combination of a rising tide, wind direction and storm surge. It is anticipated water levels will begin to abate within the next several hours,” the NRC says.

The NRC added that as of 9 p.m. EDT, no nuclear power plants had to shut down as a result of the storm, adding that “all plants remain in a safe condition, with emergency equipment available if needed and NRC inspectors on-site.”

The government agency noted that the NRC has inspectors providing 24-hour coverage of all plants that could be affected by the storm, including Oyster Creek; Salem and Hope Creek, in Hancocks Bridge, N.J.; Calvert Cliffs, in Lusby, Md.; Limerick, in Limerick Township, Pa.; Peach Bottom, in Delta, Pa.; Three Mile Island, in Middletown, Pa.; Susquehanna, in Salem Township, Pa.; Indian Point, in Buchanan, N.Y.; and Millstone, in Waterford, Conn.

Oyster Creek is operated by Exleon, an NYSE-listed, Chicago-based power company.

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quantumaniac: Physicists Explain the Collective Motion of Fermions Some people like company. Others prefer to be alone. The same holds true for the particles that constitute the matter around us: Some, called bosons, like to act in unison with others. Others, called fermions, have a mind of their own. Different as they are, both species can show “collective” behaviour — an effect similar to the wave at a baseball game, where all spectators carry out the same motion regardless of whether they like each other. Scientists generally believed that such collective behavior, while commonplace for bosons, only appeared in fermions moving in unison at very long wavelengths. Now, however, collective behavior has been discovered at short wavelengths in one Fermi system, helium-3. A team led by Professor Eckhard Krotscheck — a physicist who recently joined the University at Buffalo from the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria — predicted the existence of the behaviour using theoretical tools. Independently, but practically at the same time, a French team observed the collective behaviour. “Knowing how nature ticks at a microscopic scale, we set out to develop a robust theory that was capable of dealing with a wide range of situations and systems,” Krotscheck said. “We demanded that our mathematical description is accurate for both fermions and bosons, in different dimensions, and for both coherent and incoherent excitations. Only after we were done, we looked at experiments.”

quantumaniac:

Physicists Explain the Collective Motion of Fermions

Some people like company. Others prefer to be alone. The same holds true for the particles that constitute the matter around us: Some, called bosons, like to act in unison with others. Others, called fermions, have a mind of their own.

Different as they are, both species can show “collective” behaviour — an effect similar to the wave at a baseball game, where all spectators carry out the same motion regardless of whether they like each other.

Scientists generally believed that such collective behavior, while commonplace for bosons, only appeared in fermions moving in unison at very long wavelengths. Now, however, collective behavior has been discovered at short wavelengths in one Fermi system, helium-3.

A team led by Professor Eckhard Krotscheck — a physicist who recently joined the University at Buffalo from the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria — predicted the existence of the behaviour using theoretical tools. Independently, but practically at the same time, a French team observed the collective behaviour.

“Knowing how nature ticks at a microscopic scale, we set out to develop a robust theory that was capable of dealing with a wide range of situations and systems,” Krotscheck said. “We demanded that our mathematical description is accurate for both fermions and bosons, in different dimensions, and for both coherent and incoherent excitations. Only after we were done, we looked at experiments.”

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quantumaniac:

Einstein’s Office

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Scientists Come Closer to Reproducing Energy of the Interior of the Sun A team of physicists and engineers at the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility said they fired an array of 192 laser beams, focused “in perfect unison,” and created a single pulse of energy that for 23 billionths of a second generated a thousand times more power than the entire United States consumes in a single second. The experiment March 15 delivered to the center of the facility’s target chamber 1.87 megajoules of ultraviolet light, amounting to 100 times more energy than any other laser system in the world, the scientists said in a report. A megajoule is a million joules of energy, the equivalent of a million watts of electric power. In this one experiment, the virtually instantaneous shot generated 411 trillion watts of power, the scientists said. The ultimate goal of the multibillion-dollar laboratory experiments is to safely mimic in miniature the immensely powerful thermonuclear explosions of hydrogen bombs so that experts can validate their bomb-making computer codes and verify the safety and reliability of America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons. [Photo by Michael Macor / The Chronicle]

Scientists Come Closer to Reproducing Energy of the Interior of the Sun

A team of physicists and engineers at the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility said they fired an array of 192 laser beams, focused “in perfect unison,” and created a single pulse of energy that for 23 billionths of a second generated a thousand times more power than the entire United States consumes in a single second.

The experiment March 15 delivered to the center of the facility’s target chamber 1.87 megajoules of ultraviolet light, amounting to 100 times more energy than any other laser system in the world, the scientists said in a report.

A megajoule is a million joules of energy, the equivalent of a million watts of electric power. In this one experiment, the virtually instantaneous shot generated 411 trillion watts of power, the scientists said.

The ultimate goal of the multibillion-dollar laboratory experiments is to safely mimic in miniature the immensely powerful thermonuclear explosions of hydrogen bombs so that experts can validate their bomb-making computer codes and verify the safety and reliability of America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.

[Photo by Michael Macor / The Chronicle]

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