Trivia! What the heck are these?

[Akula]

OK, taking a look at it closely...

 

1) They are behind a concrete berm.

 

2) They are shell shaped.

 

3) I can see the remnants of a what could be a loading gantry.

 

4) they are very large.

 

5) They could very well be in shipping containers. Note the large bottom cylinder and the caps over where the fuses should be.

 

I'm going to make another guess that these are shells for a large (14-16") coastal battery.

[wombat1417]

If that's a building truss from a pre-fab building, they have to be pretty big things.

The caps seem to have holes through them, so some kind of cable could have gone through them.

For some reason, it's looks sort of WWI-ish.

Could these be concrete anchors for the mines of the North Sea barrage?

[noxious]

Sea buoys parts ? Nah.

Torpedo warheads ? Shaped Charge, big ones (I think one is right to say there is a building truss in the picture)

What are they ? Or do we get hints ?

[CV32]

I've already hinted that someone's answer was in the ballpark, but I can give another hint or even the answer if everyone is ready to know it. You decide.

[wombat1417]

Enough! Give!

[CV32]

Enough! Give!

 

Hehe, I think I'll let it stew over the weekend while I'm away. Who knows, someone may have an epiphany.

 

If no one has figured it out by then, I'll post the answer.

[VictorInThePacific]

I'm sure it's either

 

1) a giant-sized bed of nails; or

2) amphorae.

[CV32]

Answer (short version):

 

They're concrete containers for spent nuclear fuel assemblies taken from Soviet nuclear powered submarines.

 

Answer (long version):

 

The photo depicts an open storage area at Andreeva (Andreyeva) Bay, on the Kola Peninsula. It is a part of the Zapadnaya Litsa naval base for the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet. Also known as Installation 928-III, it is apparently the largest storage facility in the Northern Fleet for radioactive waste.

 

The concrete containers (TK-11 and TK-18?) in the photo are used to store spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the very first refueling operations carried out on Soviet first and second generation nuclear powered submarines. They were placed there in 1962.

 

In 1991, about 20 of the 52 containers stored there were emptied and their contents transported to Mayak (a reprocessing facility in the southern Urals). The remaining 32 containers are believed to hold between 200-220 fuel assemblies.

 

The containers had already been exposed to the elements for over 30 years by the time the photo was taken (probably in November 1993), causing corrosion and cracking of the containers, allowing water into the container (so that they cannot be reprocessed in the usual manner) and radioactively contaminating the surrounding area.

 

As far as I know, the containers are still there, at least as recently as 2007.

[eclipse_trb]

So they aren't the travelosity gnomes but anybody who has kids in a radius of 100 miles or so chances are their kids look like the gnome. It surprises me sometimes that their only real big one was Chernobyl the way they have handled nuclear materials over the decades its a big surprise more of the country doesn't glow in the dark.

[VictorInThePacific]

The photo depicts an open storage area at Andreeva (Andreyeva) Bay, on the Kola Peninsula. It is a part of the Zapadnaya Litsa naval base for the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet. Also known as Installation 928-III, it is apparently the largest storage facility in the Northern Fleet for radioactive waste.

 

The concrete containers (TK-11 and TK-18?) in the photo are used to store spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the very first refueling operations carried out on Soviet first and second generation nuclear powered submarines. They were placed there in 1962.

 

The containers had already been exposed to the elements for over 30 years by the time the photo was taken (probably in November 1993), causing corrosion and cracking of the containers, allowing water into the container (so that they cannot be reprocessed in the usual manner) and radioactively contaminating the surrounding area.

 

As far as I know, the containers are still there, at least as recently as 2007.

 

It was my intention to post some silly reply after CV posted the answer, but now that he has posted the answer, I don't feel like doing that any more.

 

This sort of s#$% is why fission power will never be safe.

 

And if you think the Americans do it better, please research Hanford.

[Warhorse64]

Victor, I am in no way trying to be disrespectful, but if you think fission power is bad, you need to look into the health and environmental side effects of coal power.

[noxious]

Victor, I am in no way trying to be disrespectful, but if you think fission power is bad, you need to look into the health and environmental side effects of coal power.

 

And how dirty bio-diesel really is, without going into the energy waste to make it come about...

And I've been advocating "green" for 20+ years, and still think properly managed nuclear power is the way to go if we want to cut on some of the most pressing problems of humanity, among them the direct correlation between hunger and energy : research the real cost of your 1500-2000 calories diet in the US, between 10k and a 100k calories per person per 1000 calories consumed, depending on sources, vegetarian, omnivorous or full on carnivore doesn't matter

 

I'll counter Three Mile Island with France : slighlty more than 80% of their power comes from nuclear fission, they also take care of the waste of a lot of other nuclear using EC powers and they haven't had a single, serious incident in 40 years.

 

You might also want to research the obfuscated chemical incidents in Italy, including one from a soap plant which released dioxine in the atmosphere (yeah, the lethal agent in Agent Orange)

Makes a few radioactive russian containers seem really minor, compared to the effects of nuclear weapon testing in Kazhaktan : genocide we use to call it (and not the first time Great Russians try to annihilate the Kazakhs)

 

Nuclear power is, for good or worse, our most efficient mass energy transformation process, bar none.

Pretty obvious why that is so, if you know physics just a bit

[VictorInThePacific]

When I posted my March 11 comment, I was actually quite angry. It may well be that what I was trying to say didn’t come across very clearly, so I will be more explicit.

 

Industrial-scale nuclear fission produces an enormous amount of toxic waste. These by-products and end-products remain deadly for such long time scales that we can realistically use the word “forever”. The only safe way of disposing of this stuff is to drop it into the Sun. There are low-risk Earth-based disposal methods, but they are not risk-free.

 

If reactor design, reactor production, reactor operation and maintenance, fuel production and transport, and waste product collection, transport, and disposal are all done properly, then nuclear fission as a source of energy can be quite safe, barring natural disasters or human sabotage. Where the process breaks down and becomes dangerously unsafe is when somebody decides to cut corners for whatever reason (generally personal profit) and do something irresponsible. In the case of the pictures Brad showed, somebody decided to just leave the toxic waste lying around in an open field. In the case of Hanford, it really isn’t much better than that.

 

Of course, nuclear weapons are not safe to use in any way. So far, we have managed to keep that particular demon in the bottle. Probably anyone who is reading this will recognize the following exchange: “God help you if you’re wrong.” “If I’m wrong, God help us all.”

 

Regarding coal power, without getting into any details, we know that it is dangerous in at least the following ways:

 

1) Immediate deaths and injuries in coal mining;

2) Long-term disability and early death of coal miners;

3) Immediate atmospheric effects (China and Poland provide good examples);

4) Less-obvious toxic by-products.

 

The unfortunate reality is that we will at some point run out of cheap fossil fuels. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil) I just want to make one comment about that: the Hubbert model is a purely empirical model and is not intended to provide a detailed explanation of anything at all. Once the cheap oil is gone, we can go back to coal, or use more solar, wind, wave, or fission power. One of the biggest problems with all the alternatives is that none of them is directly usable for cars and airplanes, which means that transportation becomes a huge problem.

 

Different fuels have different energy contents.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density)

Benchmarks on that table are wood, coal, gasoline, nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion. There are good reasons why the human race moved to coal and then gasoline as a power source, and some of them are contained in that table. Nuclear fusion is, of course, the holy grail. It is fundamentally safe and clean. We may even be reasonably close to achieving it (as a power source).

 

It is not enough to consider the energy content when choosing a fuel. You also need an engine that can use that particular fuel, and engineering considerations become very important. In the case of coal power, for example, the best that we were able to come up with was the steam turbine, which is really only suitable for stationary power plants and ships.