GEOL 115: The Earth’s Energy Resources

It’s worth looking a little more closely at the Winner’s Curse. The term Winner’s Curse describes the phenomenon that the winner of an item in an auction is usually the individual that has most egregiously overvalued the item. Although the best examples are sealed bid auctions (apparently the term was coined to describe […]

If you are looking for energy resources you need to find thick sections of sedimentary rock. That’s a gross oversimplification. But its worth remembering that oil, gas, coal, and many of the largest types of uranium deposits are confined to thick accumulations of sedimentary rocks.  We will discuss why we need thick sections […]

The operators at the Chernobyl plant were performing a series of tests that required the reactor be operated at low power. The sequence of events is summarized in Mevedev (1991) and at http://www.stacken.kth.se/~foo/texts/chernobyl.html. Because of the high positive reactivity void coefficient and some other issues the crew was unable to control the reactor […]

One of the last elements of the Chernobyl disaster can be found in the design of the control rods. Control rods contain compounds comprising elements that are effective neutron absorbers. The Chernobyl RBMK control rods comprised primarily B4C and as a neutron absorber. The problem was not that this material wasn’t appropriate […]

The Chernobyl reactor was an RMBK reactor (Once again the link again is from the Paks Reactor web site in Hungary). RBMK reactors are graphite moderated reactors that also have water and steam. Water can moderate neutrons and absorb some neutrons whereas steam (because of its low density relative to liquid water) is […]

In order to understand what went wrong at Chernobyl we need to think about nuclear chain reactions. A heavy nuclide (a species of atom) is split using a neutron. The nucleus yields at least two free neutrons upon splitting. The freed neutrons proceed to split additional nuclei causing the chain reaction.
There are […]

From time to time we will wander off into non-geological territory. Like today! Twenty two years ago technicians at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine began some rather odd experiments. The result of these experiments was that in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986 one of the reactors at […]