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Comment Re:Hope for Smithsonian (Score 1) 129

That's incorrect. The Buran program included a number of airframes. One of them, OK-GLI, was an atmospheric test bed. It featured four jet engines so it could take off under its own power. It was used to test the glide characteristics of the airframe.
OK-GLI is now on display in Speyer.
Maybe your confusion stems from the fact that both the program and the first shuttle in that program to be used for an orbital flight (OK-1K1) were named Buran.

Comment Re:DC-DC conversion? (Score 1) 468

Agreed. If that's your goal, you could prepare an extension cord with appropriately-sized alligator clips [1], so you could hook it up to any car battery directly. You'll need to keep a roll of duct tape around so you can insulate the clips once you've attached them.

1: e.g. the ones found on jump leads.

Comment Re:DC-DC conversion? (Score 1) 468

Unfortunately my entire plant draws just a little too much for the cigarette lighter plug, probably 15 amps total. If I could invest in new phones / new servers / etc and ...

Your car can easily supply 15A. It's just the crappy cigarette lighter plug that can't handle that load. It's pretty simple to add a custom power socket to your car though.

If you do this, do get some heavy-gauge wiring to run from the car to your servers. At 12V, wiring losses add up, and cabling can get pretty warm if it's not thick enough. .

Comment Re:Dumb question... (Score 1) 560

In additions to the reasons already mentioned, keeping a big, heavy turbine running at 50/60 Hz in an earthquake is likely to (violently) destroy the turbine.
So you need to stop the turbine, which means you've got to stop producing steam. In case of a BWR, the steam is radioactive so you can't vent it so you have to scram the reactor.

Comment Re:Time to build big extension cords (Score 3, Informative) 322

The most compact nuclear power plants around (naval units used in submarines) weigh about 1000 tons. These use highly enriched uranium, so they would be seen as a security risk.
Containerizing this unit would mean at least 50 40-ft containers (with each container at its maximum weight), you probably need more because most containers won't reach this density. That would give something like 80 MW. Considering that a 20-ft container can hold at least a 1-MW diesel generator with its fuel supply, having a containerized nuclear reactor would seem to hold little advantage over diesel gensets.

There's also the problem that you really want the reactor vessel and the primary coolant loop as one unit, since you can't easily disconnect these once the reactor has been active and has irradiated the primary loop.
Now the reactor vessel alone is larger than a standard container. You'd end up with a very large and heavy undivisible central unit.

You'd be better off leaving the reactor on a ship and just running a cable ashore. For smaller power needs, existing containerized diesel gensets are a good solution.

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