One Russian blogger has paid a visit to the modern Russian nuclear plant. Normally it is forbidden to take photos there, but they have made an exception for him. So now we have a rare chance to see what’s inside of the Russian most modern power plant.
This power plant is situated near Smolensk city. Its power generation potential is 3 Megawatt and it was build for 8 years, from 1982 to 1990. There were planned to be four nuclear reactors, but because of the panic after the Chernobyl accident the forth block has not been completed, so there are three of them for now.
Let’s go inside.
In Russia there are now 10 active power plants. This one produces 1/7 of the overral electricity outcome of Russian nuclear powerplants, so it is a big one.
Because this powerplant was completed after the Chernobyl, they paid a special attention to secure it from alike accidents. There is even a saying that “The sci-fi writers are on the second place by richness of imagination, the first place is occupied by the nuclear plant security engineers”, meaning that they need to make it safe just for some unimaginable events that not very likely to happen, but still the security system should be ready for them.
The outside structure that secures reactors themselves can stand the blast that exceeds ten times the power of atomic bomb blast, just imagine.
There is a 30km (18 miles) security zone around the plant itself. It’s literary filled with all sorts of sensors and monitoring devices that measure the condition of the environment and should report any smallest deviation from normal radiation doses. There is also a water pound, the normal thing on such an object, that stores strategic reserve of water, which is said to be very clean and is fishing there is the big dream for every local – it doesn’t freezes in winter and has plenty of different fish species.
The entrance to the station has a few protection levels, including palm scan, checking weight (it shouldn’t) differ from the number on profile.
Everyone should be dressed into uniform.
Everyone gets personal radiation checker.
The turbines.
The main reactor hall, the reactor itself is in the concrete reactor cavity
The nuclear fuel used is Uranium255
It is placed in those green tubes.
One can see the blue glow at 2.5 meteres (8 feet) deep. It is because of Cerenkov effect “electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through an insulator at a speed greater than the speed of light in that medium”.
The main control point.
That’s it!
photo credit: Ilya Varlamov
Ahans 76, member of the Playstation Collecting Community, probably deserves the title of King of PS2 Collectors, after he managed to acquire a brand new, sealed copy of every game ever released for the PlayStation 2.
We’ve featured some pretty impressive collections on Oddity Central, bust as a fellow gamer, I find this one particularly awesome. What I can’t understand is how someone can just collect these games and not be tempted to open one of them and just pop into the console, to check it out. But that’s just the kind of self control and ambition that describes a video-game completionist (a person who goes after every title ever released for a console) and that’s why we don’t see that many of them. The PS2 game library is particularly large, with 1,850 original titles released, and many would have said trying to collect a copy of each is impossible, but not anymore.
Ahans 76 says his passion for collecting video-game related items can be traced back to when he was 16 years old. He saw a Sega Game Gear handheld, in the window of a Game Crazy shop, and since he had always wanted yo own one as a kid, but never got the chance, he bought it on the spot. This awakened his collector’s spirit and made him consider collecting more video games and consoles. As far as his unique PS 2 game collection is concerned, he didn’t go for the full library from the start, he more like fell into it. He was buying a lot more games than he could play, and at one stage he had about 300 to 400 sealed games, so he looked on the Internet to see how many other games here were and landed on a website where it said the PS 2 had 800 games. Seeing he was already half through, he decided to go for the whole collection.
By the time he learned there were actually a lot more games released for Sony’s most popular console ever, he had already acquired too many video-games from shops going out of business, to stop. Most of the games in his collection were bought at retail price, but for some he was willing to pay hundreds of dollars, in order to get sealed copies. Such was the case with “Wizardry: Tale Of The Forsaken Land” of which he already had 4 copies, but all of them had a whole in the case’s barcode, and that wasn’t acceptable. He ended up paying $300 for it. The last game in his collection was the first “Moto GP”, he got it off eBay for $9.
If the Recording Industry Association of America doesn’t send you a nasty letter in the mail for that Steely Dan album you downloaded, you might not necessarily be quite off the hook.
Internet service providers in the States are considering slowing down connection speed and even kicking customers offline if they are caught with copyright violations.
Those are some of the “best practice” recommendations that Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Cablevision Systems — some of the biggest ISPs in America — said on Thursday that they were discussing. The Center for Copyright Information is suggesting that Internet providers adopt these policies in the ongoing effort to discourage customers from downloading and sharing material illegally.
Internet providers are insisting on a “six strikes” plan that will give customers half a dozen warnings as they are caught with copyrighted material. Major entertainment companies, including EMI, Sony, Disney and Warner Bros all seem to think that this process could cut illegal file sharing by up to 70 percent.
A 2007 study from the entertainment industry says that online piracy costs the US economy over $50 billion every year, which includes 373,000 lost jobs.
"Frequently, independent producers and distributors are hit the hardest by content theft. This agreement is a textbook example of the private sector working cooperatively to help solve a glaring economic problem while protecting consumers," Jean Prewitt, President & CEO of the Independent Film & Television Alliance, tells the IB Times.
For each infringement, the content owner will have to contact the accused’s ISP and inform them of an alleged violation. Strikes one through four will be email warnings of increasing severity, but strike five will discuss “mitigation measures.” Here is where ISPs might suspend your Internet connection for a time until you speak to them about "educational information" regarding copyright laws. They also might decide to limit your connection.
The fifth strike might not necessarily lead to punishment, but it is mandatory at strike six. Once you hit strike five or six, ISPs could consider terminating connection altogether.
And if that sounds like a problem, you could always file an appeal. For $35, that is.
"We anticipate that very few subscribers, after having received multiple alerts, will persist (or allow others to persist) in the content theft,” reads a statement from the Center for Copyright Information.
"We are confident that, once informed that content theft is taking place on their accounts, the great majority of broadband subscribers will take steps to stop it," says National Cable & Telecommunications Association President James Assey in a statement.
The White House too has commented, saying that the CCI should “have a significant impact on reducing online piracy.”
File-sharing has been a hot-topic among artists and industry big-wigs since it became fast and easy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Rock group Metallica famously sued 20 of their fans in 2000 for sharing their songs on the Napster platform. Back then drummer Lars Ulrich made a statement that "[It's] sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is."
Eleven years later, downloading “Enter Sandman” might not get you in a courtroom, but it could cost you your connection.
