The pebble bed reactor...

MIT PEBBLE BED SITE

Project Objective

Develop a sufficient technical and economic basis for this type of reactor plant to determine whether it can compete with natural gas and still meet safety, proliferation resistance and waste disposal concerns.

What is a Pebble Bed Reactor?

* 360,000 pebbles in core;
* about 3,000 pebbles handled by FHS each day;
* about 350 discarded daily;
* one pebble discharged every 30 seconds;
* average pebble cycles through core 15 times;
* Fuel handling most maintenance-intensive part of plant.

Project Prospect

Many believe that HTGRs are not credible due to past failures. Our work is meant to turn that belief around with substantive analysis. If successful, propose building a reactor research facility to 鬼license by test贡, explore different fuel cycles, process heat applications, and advanced control system design, helium gas turbines and other components. (Within five years!)

Prepare the regiment for fording...

Wikipedia has this image on their website of a T-64 Tank. The T-64 would have been a competant weapon against Nato forces of the period. THe T-64 combined all those progressive and daring elements of Soviet armor engineering. It had a powerful, smoothbore cannon, improved suspension from the t-62 series using live track, auto-loader which was very fast, and advanced armor (layers and cermiamic as opposed to rolled homogenous slabs of uniform steel). Also the tank had excellent NBC provisions, which for the warsaw pact armor meant that the tank could be fully sealed.

The river fording operations were very dangerous, and proabably seldom practiced. Tanks would line up together with each attached by towing lines. A lead tank would ford followed in turn by each tank in the regiment. The flotation of a tank was a difficult matter to estimate, and a stalled vehicle could be difficult to escape should something go wrong. I don't think SCUBA systems were ever employed, but the russians probably accepted that tanks could not be safley evacuated under water under any conditions. So what's a Soviet tanker to do? Well, ideally you stayed "buttoned up" in the vehicle and ride under the water until you safley come out on dry land. I can imagine the tension that such crews must have felt, and while I have no source for numbers, I suspect such operations were rare indeed. Wheter such tactics would have been used in war time is another matter.

Russian Strategic Nuclear forces Blog

The authors have a very polished webblog which keeps defense analysts up to date.

Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces Webblog