Zirconium Quotes

Please be my friend.

How much time, after this realization sank in and spread among consumers (mostly via phone, interestingly), would any micro-econometrist expect to need to pass before high-tech visual videophony was mostly abandoned, then, a return to good old telephoning not only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a while culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and the slavery to high-tech fashion that people view as so unattractive in one another. In other words a return to aural-only telephony became, at the closed curve’s end, a kind of status-symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness continued to use videophony and Tableaux, to say nothing of masks, and these tacky facsimile-using people became ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to corporate PR and high-tech novelty, became the Subsidized Era’s tacky equivalents of people with leisure suits, black velvet paintings, sweater-vests for their poodles, electric zirconium jewelry, NoCoat Lin-guaScrapers, and c.

From the time I met Anne ten years earlier, I knew in my heart I wanted to be with her. Now that I’m out of college and pitching pro ball, there’s no reason to wait. I start by visiting an independent diamond dealer in Arkansas. My agent knows him and tells me I can trust him. I don’t trust easily, but as a man who would have a hard time telling the difference between the Hope diamond and dime-store zirconium, what choice do I have? I pick out a rock and the setting, and pray that it’s not a fake. When it’s all finished, the dealer mails it to me in Tennessee.

Preventing a radioactive release is the highest priority at any nuclear facility, so power stations are built and operated with a safety philosophy of ‘defense in depth’. Defense in depth aims to avoid accidents by embracing a safety culture, but also accepts that mechanical (and human) failures are inevitable. Any possible problem - however unlucky - is then anticipated and factored into the design with multiple redundancies. The goal, therefore, is to provide depth to the safety systems; akin to the way Russian dolls have several layers before reaching the core doll. When one element fails, there is another, and another, and another that still functions. The first barrier are the fuel ceramic pellets themselves, followed by each fuel rod’s zirconium alloy cladding. In an ordinary modern commercial nuclear plant, the nuclear core where the fission reaction takes place would be contained inside a third barrier: an almost unbreakable metal shield enveloping the reactor, called a ‘pressure vessel’.

At that moment, remarkably, there was a man in the expansive reactor hall of Unit 4 who witnessed all this.121 Night Shift Chief of the Reactor Shop Valeriy Perevozchenko saw the top of the reactor - a 15-meter-wide disk comprised of 2000 individual metal covers which cap safety valves - begin to jump up and down. He ran. The reactor’s uranium fuel was increasing power exponentially, reaching some 3,000°C, while pressure rose at a rate of 15 atmospheres per second. At precisely 01:23:58, a mere 18 seconds after Akimov pressed the SCRAM button, steam pressure overwhelmed Chernobyl’s incapacitated fourth reactor. A steam explosion blew the 450-ton, 3-meter-thick upper biological shield clear off the reactor before it crashed back down, coming to rest at a steep angle in the raging maw it left behind. The core was exposed.122 A split second later, steam and inrushing air reacted with the fuel’s ruined zirconium cladding to create a volatile mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, which triggered a second, far more powerful explosion.123 Fifty tons of vaporised nuclear fuel were thrown into the atmosphere, destined to be carried away in a poisonous cloud that would spread across most of Europe. The mighty explosion ejected a further 700 tons of radioactive material - mostly graphite - from the periphery of the core, scattering it across an area of a few square kilometers. This included the roofs of the turbine hall, Unit 3, and the ventilation stack it shared with Unit 4, all of which erupted into flames. The reactor fuel’s extreme temperature, combined with air rushing into the gaping hole, ignited the core’s remaining graphite and generated an inferno that burned for weeks. Most lights, windows and electrical systems throughout the severely damaged Unit 4 were blown out, leaving only a smattering of emergency lighting to provide illumination.124

The real reason, however, and the reason for their diversion into the Alpine countryside, was to meet an employee of Cezus, a subsidiary of Areva, the global leader in the market for zirconium. That metal was used, among other things, for nuclear fuel cladding. Iran needed zirconium for its reactors, and al Moussa and Najeeb had been led to believe that their contact could supply as much as they needed.

Four oxygen atoms surround a single zirconium atom in such a way as to make a geometric shape known as a tetrahedron, a four-sided pyramid, which is the strongest geometric shape possible.

I murmured the nesting order to myself, working outwards: uranium, zirconium, iron, copper, bentonite, gneiss, granite . . . I think back to the beginning of my journeys in the underland, and to the beginning of time, down in the dark-matter laboratory at Boulby Mine. At Boulby they encased xenon in lead in copper in iron in halite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to see back to the birth of the universe. At Onkalo they encased uranium in zirconium in iron in copper in bentonite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to keep the future safe from the present.

But by 1989–90, it became obvious that the majority of thrown materials didn’t fall into the reactor’s pit and didn’t fulfill their tasks. The combination of rated and measured curves should, most likely, be considered a result of the “hypnotic influence” of high science upon the results of incorrect measuring. Let’s consider some facts. The first one. Consider the Central Hall of the reactor. It’s covered by huge hills of thrown materials. This could be observed from the helicopters before completion of the Shelter that encased the reactor; and it was proved by the exploratory groups that got inside the hall after a long preparatory period. But this doesn’t exclude the fact that the major part of the materials landed in the reactor’s pit. The second fact. In the middle of 1988, with the help of optical instruments and TV cameras, researchers managed to see what was inside the pit of the reactor. They found practically no thrown materials. But here one can object that these materials fell into an area of extraordinarily high temperatures, and they melted and spread over the lower rooms of the reactor. Such a process could take place. On the lower floors, they did discover great accumulations of solid lava-like masses that contained nuclear fuel. The third fact. The presence of lead would indicate that those lava-like masses contained not only materials of the reactor itself—concrete, dolomite, sand, steel, zirconium, etc.—but also materials thrown from the helicopters. But there is no lead in the reactor and the nearest rooms, even though over two thousand tons of it was thrown in! After investigation of dozens of samples, it was found that the quantity of lead in the lava masses was too small. That meant the lead didn’t get into the pit. The other components of the thrown materials fell in such a small quantity, they couldn’t influence the behavior of the release. These are the known facts.