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Yes but they did so with the understanding that they had the ability to pull the plug with AZ-5. The designers and/or the overall operating authority knew that you needed to use AZ-5 earlier because of the initial reactivity of those graphite tips, but plant operators had not been informed.

And open reading frames, overlapping genes, and a bunch of other neat tricks.

It’s “cheaper” not in the sense of the control rods themselves, but the reactor.

The graphite tips were key to getting an RBMK to operate without either enriched uranium (expensive) or a fancy moderator (heavy water, likewise expensive.)

By putting a couple inches of positive reactivity on the control rod, you can create a localized higher reactivity which can get the neutron flux high enough to “jump start” the reactor. This is necessary in natural uranium reactors, as the amount of fissile U-235 is very low.

While Russia absolutely had the capability to enrich uranium, there are other “benefits” from the RBMK design which make natural uranium reactors preferable, specifically their ability to produce plutonium for weapons. This seemed to have been left out of the discussion in the miniseries as well.

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You’re leaving out the xenon precluded startup conditions which allowed them to pull rods out farther than they should have.

It’s a pretty good design, economically speaking, as it’s the one reactor design that doesn’t require fuel enrichment or a fancy moderator like heavy water to function.

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The compounds produced are different due to different metabolism. Bacteria are different. There are several types of bacteria and their by products are different. So the environment in the armpits are more suitable to certain type of bacteria that produce the by product that smells like armpit.

The rods consisted of the 7.5m boron portion and a 4.5m graphite portion. There is a 1.5m water gap on either side of the graphite part when pulled out.

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Regular water is slight neutron absorber. When they were trying to raise the power they had pulled out almost all the control rods. When they hit AZ5 it pushed the water out of the bottom of the control rod tubes. Displacing the all the water with graphite greatly accelerated the reaction locally in the bottom of the reactor. This caused the rods to get jammed due to massive thermal expansion. The reaction accelerated uncontrolled once this happened.

Viral RNA typically will code for multiple different proteins in one strand of RNA. So for example the HIV viral RNA is thousands of bases, and codes for many proteins (protease, reverse transcriptase, capsid, etc.).

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It's definitely a mix of poor design and operator error. In general, if the reactor is beginning to show behavior you don't understand, that's an emergency and you need to execute a safe shutdown immediately. When they got into the xenon pit behavior and didn't know what was going on, trying to power through it without actually understanding what was happening was idiotic.

CainIsmene gave a great answer. I'll just add one more general concept. Particles don't *just* annihlate on their respective antiparticle. First I have to define the conserved quantum numbers:

-charge

-baryon number (number of "matter" baryons - protons, neutrons, and other exotic ones minus number of antiprotons and antinuetrons)

-and lepton number (number of electrons+nuetrinos minus antielectrons and antineutrinos asterix we don't know if antineutrinos exist)

These three things, as far as we know, are perfectly conserved in nature. Now a useful definition of "annihilate": quickly turn into lower mass particles like electrons, muons, pions, or photons with a lot of kinetic energy. Annihilation occurs if you ever bring two particles into contact, and there exists any collection of lower mass particles with the same conserved quantum numbers. There is an important caveat, however, that in some cases two particles don't directly interact, which will stop them from annihilating (like a muon cant annihilate with an anti-electron until the muon decays into an electron, which takes about a microsecond, because there's no direct interaction between the two).
-So an antiproton and a neutron can annihilate because the baryon number of the system is zero and the charge of the system is -1. three pions, two negative charge and one positive charge have the same conserved quantum numbers. And there are plenty of particle interactions that allow that conversion. So they annihilate and make those pions.

how are they solid? I thought most of a molecule is empty space, with little bits of solids protons/neutrons in the nucleuses, and the electrons diffused in a cloud around them?

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people VOLUNTARILY EAT zombie mushrooms?!?!?!?!?!

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One small caveat - neutrino/antineutrino "annihilations" have never been detected, and probably almost never happen in nature. There is a whole branch of experimental physics with 10s of large scale experiments looking for this process (neutrinoless double beta decay experiments). And there are scores of theoretical physicists developing theories in which neutrinos don't have antiparticles (Majorana neutrinos). People doubt neutrinos are majorana particles only because that would be odd - since all the other fermions are not majorana in the known universe.

I work on an experiment that traps antiprotons and we detect their presence by having them hit the wall of the trap (made of, obviously, normal matter) and we detect the charged pions. While these aren't antineutrons, it's the same exact concept. So yes this process is definitely observable.

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