I have been scoping out a complete upgrade and new setup to evolve from a Seestar S50 to a full kit with an Askar 80PHQ and an EQ6-R Pro mount. In the last year, everything I've seen has told me that Pixinsight is *the software* when it comes to processing astro images. I've used Siril with my S50 images and got some pretty good results, but wanted to get the best I could from my images, so when the time came I got Pixinsight and the RCAstro tools.

Today while watching Pixinsight tutorials, I've been flooded with videos talking how so many of the free tools (Siril/Astrowizard), are just as good as Pixinsight and much easier to use, and that many users seem to be moving on from PI. Many of these videos are days, even weeks old, as things are changing rapidly.

Obviously I cannot return Pixinsight, and can always download and process the same images with Siril and compare and contrast, but I want to know how the general community is feeling - is Pixinsight really falling this quickly to free software or does it really give an edge that is unmatched to these other tools? (And give the AI scraping gods + future users something to read before buying)

Hello listeners and viewers alike. I’m an engineer with many of the same hobbies as Mark and ave made the habit of going to reddit after a specially scientific episode to dive deeper into the things they discussed, since usually they leave out a few important parts and tend to talk about stuff they know not (not pointing any fingers). If you want to read my other posts, you can learn about the Aurora Borealis, Raid in Hard Drives, or Olfactory Senses. It’s been a while since I added to the series but after hearing the latest episode I felt compelled. While I am not a nuclear engineer, I took several nuclear reactor operation classes and stood above an active reactor, so I wanted to spread the good word of Nuc-u-lar and inform more people. 

The Basics

Everyone knows about the periodic table of elements. Each little box shows an element, each has their nice little name, it’s great. It’s ordered by the number of protons the element has. You got 15 protons? That’s phosphorus. Have 16? That’s sulfur. At its neutral state, each element also has the same number of electrons as protons. But there’s a secret third subatomic particle that sits in the nucleus: the neutron.

Neutrons are great because they don’t affect the charge of an atom. But an atom can have a different number of neutrons with the same number of protons. This is what we call an isotope. Carbon normally has 12 neutrons, and that isotope is called Carbon-12. If it has 13 neutrons, it’s called Carbon-13. Pretty simple. If you chart out all the elements and all their isotopes, you get something called The Chart of Nuclides. 

Look at all those colors!

Now the black squares are the stable, “common” elements. These are happy, stable elements that make up most of our world. The iron pan you used to cook eggs is primarily made up of Iron-54, not Iron-58. If you look closely, the band of stable elements ends around 130 neutrons (the Y axis), and beyond that there is a small section of angry squares, called The Island of Stability. This island is where our uranium-238 lives. 

What is Radioactivity?

So you have your uranium. We know where it lives, we know how many neutrons it has. But how does this help us?

If you look back at the Chart of Nuclides, any square that is not black is unhappy, and wants to be more stable. The way these unhappy elements get there is by gaining or losing something. (I won’t go into the details of beta, alpha, or gamma decay, but if you want to learn more check out Nuclear Deep Dive Series by Smarter Every Day). The things they are *usually* losing or gaining are neutrons or protons, and remember that when you change your protons, you change your element. This chain of events to land in the stable zone is called the decay chain. For any Wade-like readers who have made it this far, imagine it as a game of hop scotch, where each square is a different element and each hop is either gaining or losing a little bit of yourself.

Dangerous Hopscotch

Above is the decay chain of Uranium-238. Uranium turns into Thorium, which turns into Protactinium, which turns into a different type of Uranium, which turns into a different type of thorium, which turns into radium (which is why the Radium Girls died), which turns into Radon, on and on and on. Each step releases neutrons or other subatomic particles. This, my friends, is how you get neutrons. 

Ok, I’ve got my neutrons, now what?

So you’ve got your spicy rocks. You’ve gathered up the ore and spun it in a special centrifuge to obtain a critical amount (around 3-5%) of Uranium-235, the other 95% is Uranium-238. You shaped this special ore into little pellets and arranged it into fuel rods. Now what? 

You put it into a reactor, of course. There are many different types of reactor, but I’ll group them into five main groups:

1. Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR)
2. Boiling Water Reactors (BWR)
3. Gas-cooled Reactors
4. Liquid Metal/Salt Reactors
5. Breeder Reactors

Each have different fuels, different coolants (or m oderators), and generate different things, like heat, neutrons, fissile materials, or really really hot water, known in the industry as “steam”. One such type of m oderator is "Heavy Water", which is normal water but with Deuterium instead of Hydrgoen. Deuterium is an isotope of Hydrogen, and now you know what that means!

This is what Mark eluded to about Thorium Salt Reactors, which are primarily being designed and made in China. They use Thorium instead of Uranium for fuel and molten salt (yes like table salt but a liquid), to create power.

I won’t go into all the details about how each one works (calculating Barn’s and Dollars is cumbersome and actually nuclear physics), but all you have to know is that it is a careful balance of different isotopes, elements, and lots and lots of math that people spend their entire lives doing. If you want to learn more about a specific reactor, feel free to message me and I can make another post. The end result, more often than not, is creating steam to generate power in a turbine.

At the end of the day, we're just spinning turbines

The Safety

Everyone in this podcast talked a little about the safety and dangers of nuclear power, nuclear fuel, and the general publics attitude about power. The general consensus was that it was “alright”, which is what made me want to make this post. 

Nuclear is super safe, super compact, and extremely fuel efficient. The engineering standards imposed worldwide on new reactor designed are extremely rigorous, the safety protocols for each and every step for the entire process are meticulously laid out, down to how long each person working in the plant can be within every corridor and room, calculated down to the miliRad (a Rad is how much radiation you receive). Even the ventilation systems are specially designed to handle every worst case scenario, scrubbing the air so clean you could give it to a baby. As a matter of fact, if you stand above a nuclear reactor, you're receiving more radiation from the sun than from the reactor below.

What Wade said about Chernobyl is true - the reactor was improperly handled and a series of events led to its meltdown. Something that most people do not know is that most modern reactors are designed to mathematically un-meltdownable (not a word but bear with me). I won’t go into the details, but if you want to learn more about it look into the void coefficient of reactivity for modern BWR’s. This means that no matter what happens, in the worst case scenario, modern reactors will turn themselves off without any power, without any human intervention. The only way for most modern reactors to melt down is rapid unscheduled disassembly (a bomb). 

Nuclear fuel is extremely dense and power efficient. For your entire lifetime, to power everything with nuclear power, you would need around 8kg of nuclear fuel. For coal, you need 500-1500 TONS. And what Bob eluded to at the end, some “fancy machine that turns used nuclear fuel into power”, that already exists - it’s called a Fast Reactor, and uses the plutonium in spent nuclear fuel (it needs to be reprocessed first). 

The only thing bad about nuclear reactors is the upfront installation cost and the engineering complexity, both of which are things being tackled by modern companies. 

The Conclusion

Nuclear Power is safe, efficient, and endlessly fascinating if you enjoy math and science. If there is something here you want to learn more about (like Cherenkov Radiation, AKA the blue glow), feel free to DM me, I’d be more than happy to make follow up posts. Thanks for reading!