Nuclear power

One of the careers that I thought of when I was growing up was becoming a scientist. My friend santosh at that time had a big trunk full of science books. For him it was a treasure box. Thats from where I first got to read Yakov Peralman’s “Physics can be fun”. It was a wonderful book indeed, the ideas and the way in which physics was explained did have a great influence on me.

Years have flown by and instead of becoming a scientist, I have been a typist, laborotary assistant, salesman, banker, software programmer and several things except becoming a scientist. The journey still goes on. But still whenever I call up santosh, we discuss several topics, and one of the topics always has been physics.

We had discussed the nuclear power and how it can be used to help India. It’s one of those discussions that we came up with this idea. As India is estimated to have several nuclear warheads, which over a period of time becomes useless – due to the decay of nuclear material – we thought of another method. It was making a design of nuclear warhead, so that while it will remain a warhead, it will be used to generate power when kept idle.

So it will have all the shebang for electricity genration at the base part which will be part of a power generation facility, and it will be ready to be deployed when needed, where the central part of the design will seperate and act as a missile when the need arises. In short it’s a sort of a missile design with the capabilities of generating electricity at its base and serves as a nuclear deterrent as well.

But I really find it pleasing that scientists in India are making real good progress, even without our “great” idea contribution 😉 [India unveils safest thorium reactor]

India on Thursday unveiled before the international community its revolutionary design of “A Thorium Breeder Reactor (ATBR)” that can produce 600 MW of electricity for two years “with no refuelling and practically no control manoeuvres.”

Designed by scientists of Mumbai-based Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), ATBR is claimed to be far more economical and safer than any power reactor in the world.

I wish we had these scientists as the poster boys than the bollywood heroes.