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None of this makes sense. But if you are river a.k.a current, that's not a surprise. An amber warning light to that effect has come on. 1) Metals take part in chemistry just like any other chemical substance. "A metal has nothing to do with chemistry" is an absurd statement. 2) If they did not take part in chemistry, a lead/acid battery would not work. Such batteries rely for their operation on electrochemistry, in this case the reversible reaction between Pb (metal) and PbO with H2SO4. 3) The transmission of sound waves in water is not a chemical process. If you have a source that says to the contrary, I'd like to see it. 4) Uranium is denser than lead because its atomic nuclei are more massive. The nuclei play no role in chemical reactions. Chemistry is all about the valence (outer shell) electrons. It is the therefore the number of atoms and the behaviour of their valence electrons, not their mass, that is responsible for the energy change obtainable from the chemical reaction in a battery. 5) The notion of a battery that might last "long enough to replace fossil fuels" is nonsensical. Batteries are a temporary energy store that needs to be recharged. 6) John Hutchison [sic] , i.e. not "Hutchinson", is a crank and self-publicist whose ideas don't work: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_Hutchison

Probably just a few "Chernobyls" with contamination limited if the weather is favourable, and with only slightly raised radiation levels beyond countries bordering Ukraine...nothing much to worry about.

Asking members to support assertions with evidence is never tedious. "Volodymyr is a twat" is just venting, but saying stuff like Volodymyr started the war and lied about Russia calls for factual support of some kind.

He fights to overcome a stutter, which isn’t about energy.

Yes I've been thinking about that, and I'm sure he as as well. In the information age, and as an actor, he will I'm sure be well aware of the impact that a dramatic public confrontation with his potential executioners could have - a bit like Yeltsin with the tanks. If they gun him down in cold blood, that will put Putin and the Red Army beyond the pale permanently and will ensure a rolling resistance movement against the occupiers for years to come. If they are wise they won't do that. But he may not want to be taken alive, for fear they may torture him, to or use his captured family against him to get him to surrender. A grisly choice. Putin wants him dead, I have no doubt, more than ever now that he has thwarted the original plan. Zelensky has his place in history already, though.

I'm going to step away from this thread as a poster, since it seems all the mods have been involved. ! Moderator Note mistermack, it doesn't present a conflict of interest for me to say that your objection to providing support for assertions you make isn't acceptable here or anyplace else on the site. "Tedious" may be your definition of "rigorous" and "reasoned" and "well-supported", but nobody else here is that sloppy. If you want to keep posting here, you need to follow the rules. Some people like to take a conversation to places it's never been. They don't care if it's dirty and uncomfortable and their conversational clothes get filthy. Conversations like that are interesting, and most folks learn a great deal from such discussions. Your discussion style, however, doesn't take us into the filth; it starts out with dirty hands, and insists on making everybody else deal with it. Our clothes don't get dirty because we were mucking about in unfamiliar places, but rather because we have to keep refuting the information you refuse to support, and get frustrated when you can't even be bothered to acknowledge it. There may not be any overall resolutions to any of our discussions, but most would like to see something close. That's only going to happen if everyone involved is arguing in good faith.

Money is probably a factor. You need to buy these items and maintain these systems, both of which cost money. In a pressurized water reactor a turbine is in a second loop. You have more opportunity for leaks with each new penetration. Plus the fun of either potentially having a thermal shock if the loop is cold and all of the sudden you fire it up, or if you keep it hot you are wasting some of the generated heat, making the plant less efficient. It's risk/reward, which is skewed by the nature of the beast: you want to make money, so a certain amount of value engineering goes on, cutting back on costs that are deemed unnecessary. Are four layers of redundancy required, or can you get away with three? And if you are having problems with the reactor, perhaps it's best not to rely on the reactor itself. Some reactors can use natural convection and not rely on pumps, but it might not work on a commercial scale plant. Decay heat can be something like 7% of full power, so if you have a 1 GW plant, that's 70 MW you need to remove - that's a lot of water that needs to be moved, and you aren't pulling the energy out by driving a steam turbine. I'm not sure how much "broken by an invading force" gets considered in the design of a plant.

What are the same are the speed of light (in a vacuum) and the speed of gravity waves. Gravity waves are not gravity itself, but more like ripples traveling through the gravitational field. Put another way, you can't have gravitational waves without there already being a gravitational field, but you can have a gravitational field without gravitational waves. Light interacts with the gravitational field, which is "already there" As already mentioned, light has no "rest mass". However, it still can interact gravitationally. While in Newtonian physics you need mass to do so, under our more recent understanding of gravity(General Relativity), mass is just one factor that can contribute to gravity. Energy is another, and light does have energy.

Thanks, yes the Russian U (y) is an "oo" sound, not an "uh," and I should know that. @String Junky needs accurate teeshirt info. Now he just needs teeshirt weather. 😀

In the context of using it in a battery, that has to be the dumbest statement I have heard in a while. What did you think you meant? Uranium chemistry is complicated; I'm not saying it would be impossible to make a battery with it. A flow cell battery might be the best bet; something like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery But the high atomic weight of uranium is a drawback, not an advantage. That's why lithium is so popular; less mass to carry around for a given number of electrons. However, none of that could possibly outweigh the problems that uranium is toxic and radioactive. (with even bigger problems for uranium mining waste)

Perhaps we should go for a reset here ? The actual thread topic / question is a very reasonable one put in a very reasonable way. And you did the right thing in asking if your idea was viable. Unfortunately the title included a somewhat perjorative term that clearly antagonised other members. Setting that aside, it is not unreasonable for a lay person with some scientific interest to have picked up some idea that uranium metal is fairly unreactive as is lead and so propose it for electrodes. Unfortunately the chemistry is against this proposal. The electrodes in electrochemical cells come in two varieties. Those which take part in the chemical reactions and those which don't and are merely the to provide electrical contact. In the traditional lead-acid battery the electrodes are of the first type and are not both pure metal as the underlined passage notes in the first attachment. Lead oxide is the actual chemical involved at one electrode. The attachment also gives outline working of the chemistry of the cell along with resultant cell voltages, around a useful couple of volts per cell. This should be compared with the second attachment for uranium. One thing about chemical reactions is that they have to be not only energetically and chemically feasible, they have to be fast enough at working temperatures to be useful. I have underlined the appropriate uranium reactions which are noted to be very slow and high temperature. Also note that uranium has many more oxidation states than lead, which leads to undesirable potential side reactions. It would be difficult to get a simple reaction to obtain useful output voltage reliably, as can be seen from the oxidation voltage diagram. This really is off-topic but I do wonder if you have misheard or misremembered what was said. Perhaps the scientist said, or meant but was not clear, that the sound was generated by a chemical reaction? Here is another example of 'only part of the story' and I thank swansont for this as I did not realise about the dust so I would say +1 if he did not already have too many plus points. So thank you to the 'expert' on that topic. Thanks also to exchemist for his work in debunking John Hutchinson. +1

I didn't ask you to establish the matter as a fact. I asked for evidence to support your assertion. You could have told us how Putin acted in similar situations, or told us about the article you read that led you to that conclusion. You could have laid out your reasoning. Anything could have been provided. But if all you do is make bold assertions and don't give us any way to gauge if what you say is reasonable, then you are not participating in the conversation. You are just contributing noise.

Thank you for your valuable contributions to this difficult thread on this important topic. It’s been really helpful and is appreciated.

Yes.

I think the spelling should rather be, Фак Путин. I agree either way.

I put that in Translate and in the GB vernacular it would be: К черту Путина (Fuck Putin). Yours looks stylishly better though. Gonna see how much a t-shit costs with it on.

If my clock is accurate, our UK members include some serious night owls! And the breaking news is not terribly soothing for anyone wanting to sleep. Фук Путин

These are precisely the points I was making to my son, and he was asking, well what if he does this, or what if he does that, and there was a pause where we both had to grapple with what could be so heinous an act, so blatant a war crime, that it would be worth it to cross the line into direct intervention. I really don't want to find out the answer to this, but... crikey! Shooting at nuke reactors is a pretty blatant threat to all of Europe and beyond. And certainly has potential for serious loss of life, as well as ruined food supplies, etc.

It is quite common to to see such a post end with 'imo' or 'I think'. Try not not to make your post look like an assertion if you don't want to be pulled up for citations. This IS a science forum and one does well to clarify the veracity, or not, of a post. In my opinion, your current posting style is distracting from this serious subject. Chill.

Because you asserted it as fact. You cannot know what you claim to know, and we could equally claim that Zelensky giving in would’ve resulted in immediate nuclear actions. Such speculations rest on the same baseless footing as yours.

Why not ask questions about what you don't know, rather than posting nonsense ?

Just saw that on AP. Putin is going to really scrape the bottom of the barrel, like this, to win. I wonder what it will take for us engage him directly.... https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-live-updates-cbd6eed3e1b8f4946f5f490afd06b4be

I guess we will never know what dinosaurs ate since they didn't write it down either.

I knew I could get you to respond to me if I followed your lead and simply made unsupported claims. I admit I cannot confirm you are paid by Russia. Can you please either admit you cannot support your assertions, or provide some sort of evidence if you can? The problem you are facing here is that you are coming across as a troll when I assume that is not your intent. Please engage in a meaningful and professional way.

Realistically, in my house it's gonna be a Mossberg 500 loaded with Winchester #4, because that's what's in the safe. But if Andrzej Duda wants to give me a Mig 29 I'd do my best with it.

Is that a fact, or is it just your opinion ?? Yes, I see now, it is confusing.

Love it. The two stories I'm thinking about most right now? That Russian tank that swerved to crush that civilian vehicle, and how the tough old man survived while his fellow Ukrainians helped free him from the crushed wreckage. I'm juxtaposing that with a story I heard about what the Ukrainians are doing to Russian soldiers they've captured. They're encouraging them to phone their families and friends back in Russia. "Let them know that you're safe and unharmed, because your loved ones must all be freaking out that you were fighting and now you're captured, right?" These are the kinds of things Putin can't stand up to. Right isn't always in might's corner.

You are wrong in thinking that religion has some basis in reality. It doesn't. At least not to any degree that matters. For example, I believe in ghosts and the paranormal. So to me, such things are a reality. Does that mean some god created you and controls your life? Not in the slightest. Also, I saw some female black doctor on the news once who was a Trump supporter. She must have come from Africa. Because on the news they said that she had said that she believed that diseases were caused by evil spirits. That isn't a "reality" worth mentioning. Next, in regards to the christian religion, you can't BS me. I read the bible. If they were mentioned at all, the bible had nothing correct to say about astronomy, genetics, geology, paleontology, geography, zoology, electricity, chemistry, microbiology, mathematics, etc.etc. etc. As far as evolution goes, Pope John Paul II is reported as saying that evolution was more than just a theory. Pope Francis believes that both evolution and the big bang theory are a reality. How these leaders of christianity can support something that isn't supported by the bible is beyond me. As I said, religion has nothing to do with reality. It is faith that matters. Faith in what is a different matter. Are you kidding? Most religions began before there was even a written language. So how can you say why they were formed. That isn't rational. I guess you are a true believer. Also, for believers there is no difference between believing and knowing. Samuel Clemens once said, "It isn't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you're sure of that just isn't so." Being beyond responsibility isn't rational. Maybe it is to a member of the Mafia. But to normal people it isn't.

I find your tedious mantra of "can you support your assertions" a bit pathetic. You do it all the time, not just to my posts, but to anyone and everyone. My posts are like most other people's, a mixture of fact and opinion. If you can't work out which is which, I'm not here to be your nursemaid. I try to make it obvious, I think I DO make it perfectly obvious, but some people, I guess, are determined to struggle even with the obvious.