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that plant was due for replacement/shutdown many years ago.

Browns Ferry, Oyster Creek, Scriba, Nine Mile Point, etc etc etc.
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/nukelist1.htm

"when a hydroelectric damn collapses..." the nuclear power plants which rely on the man-made lake created by the damn melt down. Take a look at how many nuclear reactors depend on man-made lakes as their ultimate heat sinks.. Here are the actual requirements: http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML0037/ML003739969.pdf Here is a list of reactors: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/nukelist1.htm

Easy there, no need for histrionics.

Did you happen to read any of the articles I linked to? At KSC, at least 1,000 people were protesting, and many were arrested trying to climb the fences. They even organized a shrimp-boat protest to prevent the launch. 15 congresscritters sent a petition to President Clinton. A statement was read the the UN.

It was a big deal, and with the help of the internet it flared up around the country and world. I remember it being a low point of hysteria vs reason.

There was grave doubt that Cassini would be launched at the time since it unfortunately followed on the heels of the ill-fated Russian Mars 96 probe that crashed into South America with 0.44 lbs of Plutonium onboard. IIRC the President had to sign off on its launch - that certainly is odd for something that should've been a routine scientific activity.

I agree that solar panels were likely the best choice for the MER rovers from a weight perspective, but so much capability was left back on earth because of that decision. I look forward to the new rover; bigger, badder, and powerful!

Easy there, no need for histrionics.

Did you happen to read any of the articles I linked to? At KSC, at least 1,000 people were protesting, and many were arrested trying to climb the fences. They even organized a shrimp-boat protest to prevent the launch. 15 congresscritters sent a petition to President Clinton. A statement was read the the UN.

It was a big deal, and with the help of the internet it flared up around the country and world. I remember it being a low point of hysteria vs reason.

There was grave doubt that Cassini would be launched at the time since it unfortunately followed on the heels of the ill-fated Russian Mars 96 probe that crashed into South America with 0.44 lbs of Plutonium onboard. IIRC the President had to sign off on its launch - that certainly is odd for something that should've been a routine scientific activity.

I agree that solar panels were likely the best choice for the MER rovers from a weight perspective, but so much capability was left back on earth because of that decision. I look forward to the new rover; bigger, badder, and powerful!

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/pumpglos/teslapum. htm http://www.animatedsoftware.com/pumpglos/discflo.h tm

However the point of Tesla Motors is not to make use of Tesla's pump or remote energy transmission technologies. It's to make use of his world-altering AC motor and create a practical, desirable, high-performance EV that can be produced today. The point as I see it is to jump-start the Electric Vehicle industry again and get more EVs out on the road, leading to less expensive, more-mundane ones eventually. In that regard Tesla Motors may turn out to be very significant.

AC motors and AC power transmission are two of Nikola's most significant contributions, and Tesla Motors *is* using both of them.

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/pumpglos/teslapum. htm http://www.animatedsoftware.com/pumpglos/discflo.h tm

However the point of Tesla Motors is not to make use of Tesla's pump or remote energy transmission technologies. It's to make use of his world-altering AC motor and create a practical, desirable, high-performance EV that can be produced today. The point as I see it is to jump-start the Electric Vehicle industry again and get more EVs out on the road, leading to less expensive, more-mundane ones eventually. In that regard Tesla Motors may turn out to be very significant.

AC motors and AC power transmission are two of Nikola's most significant contributions, and Tesla Motors *is* using both of them.

see here
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/pumpglos/wobble.ht m

then explain how this linkage works I still cant see how it rotates with two pistons fastened to it

"And, even if all of the nuclear weapons that ever existed were detonated right now, the Earth would still be a hell of a lot more habitable than the moon."

Ah...no it wouldn't.

Estimate of number of world nuclear warheads

http://www.web.net/~cnanw/a3.htm

Estimate of devastation: I do challenge you to read it all the way through.

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/ tenw/nuke_war.htm

No my friend If every Nuclear warhead were detonated at the same time on this planet...at their planned destinations...there would not be a single living thing on this planet for a long long time to come.

The moon is indeed much more habitable....it has Ice which means you can make oxygen...which means you can ultimately devise a way to live.

I hadn't considered any interstellar slow-down, dark matter you mean?

The simple fix is to beam more energy at the craft.

I'm not a rocket scientist either, but I tend to think of GIANT spacecraft when you are trying to get going really fast using propellant, the solar sails would either have to be GIANT as well in order for it to be worth the effort.

When you talk about nuclear rockets you are talking kilotons, a solar sail powered interstellar spacecraft could be 1 or 2 tons.

[...] a very poorly designed reactor, a shutdown of the insufficient safety systems, and a government that didn't care about its people. None of those conditions exists in US nuclear power plants.

I feel that it is because we have become completely and hopelessly terrified of danger. Many men and women died (yes, tragically) in those eras exploring the great unknown. But without their sacrifice, we would never have been able to accomplish what we have (please no "settling the new world = genocide" lectures).

Apollo 1, The Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia's losses were all tragic. And I am NOT saying that their loss should be shrugged off as "eh, someone had to die to explore space." What I am saying is that we as humans needed to grow and explore space, much as the Europeans needed to grow and explore beyond their continent. When there was a tragic event in colonial exploration (Jamestown), those people learned from their mistake and tried again and usually succeeded. When we fail today, we usually cower up and shut down all exploration for a half-decade or so.

Hell, look at how these stupid hippies tried to stop Cassini from ever occuring. They were so afraid of the 0.001% chance of Cassini crashing into Earth (which itself had a fraction of a percent chance of actually contaminating the planet with any plutonium) that they wanted the entire mission shut down.

Scared people like this, afraid to take chances are what almost kept us from everything glorious we're learning today and everything we will learn from Cassini tomorrow. And most scary, these people and all others who are afraid of taking chances have kept us from learning from all the cancelled missions and missions that will never be in the future because it's always "better safe than sorry" to them.

Thanks for a thoughtful reply from the other side.

Regarding your first point, a little bit of crypto experience taught me something about the entropy of large numbers: Time scales linearly, but the entropy of numbers B^N (here B=4) most definitely does not, given N. A 64-bit symmetric key is almost trivial to crack with a cluster of today's CPUs. A 128-bit key is 2^64 times longer than a 64-bit one, not twice as long, and will be well out of reach for a long time. That's why the NSA tried so hard to squash PGP.

Now, we're talking about the equivalent of 6 billion bits. I don't care how many billions of years you give for things to evolve, you can't get to 2^6,000,000,000. The complexity simply exceeds the abilities of our brains to grasp.

Note that the assumption that things will just evolve on their own is a charitable one. If my '66 Wagoneer had done any evolving in the 40 years it's been around, it might get better gas mileage and put out less harmful emissions than it does. But only more newly designed vehicles have those features.

Regarding your second point, perhaps the strongest concept of selflessness in humanity is that of laying down one's life for one's friend. Witness the outpouring of support for Pat Tillman, or the type of emotions stirred by the story of a mother who drowns saving her child, or the soldier who falls on a grenade to save his commander. Though I don't presume to be any judge of God's ways, what better way for the Creator to deliver a message about himself than to offer a part of him as a widely predicted and historically recorded sacrifice for his created humanity?

It would have been worse if the mission after the Challenger had exploded as it had plutonium onboard which would have taken out the entire state of Florida not just the shuttle. Which would you prefer: half a dozen people dead or an entire state obliterated in the blink of an eye? Its not nice to say that you are glad some people died, but think of what could have happened!

Damien

One atmosphere of pressure is about 10 meters of water. You can't pump water any higher than that. I smell exaggeration.

Wow. He seems to be a flat earther nut but HE TALKS LIKE A 419ER

Does anyone have an info as to whether this issue (the reaction wheel, not the asshat suggestion) was resolved?

This is a great day for science and I'm glad that we didn't give into the protesters back in 1997 (to prevent the mission) and 1999 (to stop Cassini from flying past Earth on its way back to Saturn after a gravity slingshot around Venus).

while we are talking about Cassini, let us remember the protesters who were so opposed to it.
Remember cassini is nasa's deadly space probe. It is nice to see that these groups have other stuff to protest these days. Hope that stuff is not as deadly as cassini...

There is simply no such thing as "safe" fission reaction.

The development of nuclear fission power production is inexorably linked to "weapons of mass destruction". We just wouldn't have(or need) these poison plants if it were not for The Bomb.

Here's a new one to ponder: in our ignorance, we've built permanently poisoned structures in places where our vaunted science has proven will be smashed to bits by the next ice age. No sarcophagus can hold back Mother Nature.

What a wonderful thing to leave to our children, and their children. Nuclear power supporters should be ashamed of themselves.

It's interesting that Aerogel is always mentioned as being the insulator on the mars Sojourner Rover (and current mars rovers) but it's almost never mentioned that the heat source inside the insulated electronics boxes is not merely waste resistive heating from the electronic components themselves, but from Plutonium Radioisotope Heater Units of a couple ounces each. Maybe it's a good thing they're kept low profile, the clueless luddites would have a field day.

FYI, that was the Cassini probe that they were protesting about, and they're still protesting it.

morons protesting progress

If you think the images from Spirit are cool, just wait until Cassini starts sending back close-ups of Saturn, it's moons, it's rings... and don't even get me started on the Huygens probe... coolness.

neat-o cool sciency-stuff

I am a fan of Dr Kaku (4:26pm EST Fri Jun 27 2003)
But, I need to respond with a resounding, HUH? to this blurb. Dr. Kaku has giving me invaluable insights into string theory, and his ideaas for public policy are well reasoned and logical, but what's with the report on needed to turn off artificial monkey brains? Heck, I am as liberal and prohuman as the next guy, but I feel that I could really use some murderous sim simians. - by IA my eye

Quack (5:06pm EST Fri Jun 27 2003)
I read Visions and had a high opinion of Dr. Kaku, until I realized he was the central figure organizing and supporting the protests against the launch of the Ullyses Saturn Probe.
He did this because he believed that the RTGs on the probe would contaminate the earth if they re-entered the atmosphere. The probability of this happening is beyond remot

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/geni/rh2000ge.htm

on fuller's global energy grid:
Some countries are at war with each other or internally. What happens when a war causes damage to the grid, hurting an uninvolved country, or a whole region? Who is financially responsible? But the world faces such questions regularly anyway -- it is not a good reason not to build for the future. Ideally, the grid will have many transmission paths, and many entry and exit-points, and it will be virtually impossible to "cut the grid", just as, nowadays, it is nearly impossible to completely cut off phone service or the Internet, because there are many paths which can take the place of the ones that have been cut.

and he thought this stuff up in the 50's and 60's...

Unfortunately, the problems haven't even started yet for this mission.

Pretty much anything going to the outer system must have a radiothermoisotopic battery aboard, which powers the craft by using the warmth of decaying radioactive isotopes. It's too dark for solar cells out there.
And to get out there, probes must use slingshot trajectories around inner system planets, usually including Earth. It is conceivable, if highly improbable, that a navigation error (insert unit conversion joke) would cause the probe to impact Earth instead of passing it by.

In sum, be prepared for a repeat of the Cassini craze.

Pumps are only expensive because the include nice housings, some logic circuits to control the motors, and include service warranties. It shouldn't be too hard to construct your own parastolic pump with some very simple components: a 12 volt battery, a small electric motor ($3.50 at radio shack, though you *may* want a little more power), some ABC plastic for the disk that holds the rollers, the rollers themselves, tubing, screws, and a piece of wood to carve the 1/3rd circle track. If they're already wiring up relays for the controller board, purchase electronic solenoid valves for fluid control. The system is less complicated, fewer moving parts, and more robust.

I believe if you actually run the numbers the amount of plutonium in a satellite RTG spread over the world would give everyone approximately the rad exposure of a day on the beach.

(I especially love how the stop cassini freaks talk about the "continued (but dimished)" dangers. What, do they think it's going to turn around or something?)

Does anyone remember a couple years back when they were launching the Cassini satellite? There was a huge movement to stop the launch because the Cassini had radioactive fuel, which in an accident above the earth (either in the initial launch or the "boomerang" across the planet) could potentially threaten millions of earth lives for centuries to come.

NASA at the time said that there were safety features that made an accident virtually impossible.

I wonder now, considering the fuckups w/the various Mars missions and this $825m satellite, whether they should be allowed to continue using plutonium fuel...

Thoughts? Are these protesters paranoid or do they have a valid point?

W

Yeah, I have to agree. Whenever you use Archimedes-generated power, you just get screwed.

how long? i'd guess now is an excellent time to start thinking about it. I read there is quite a problem already. But like most things, if mankind can figure a way out of it, or better, around it in this instance, I'm sure we will. Then some day something BIG will crash up there, and then all of a sudden people will do something about it (a la airport security)

This is the vulnerability of our Nuclear Piles

This is where you can cross the border undetected

This is how to make a Fake ID?

Well maybe I didn't say every single tiny little syllable but basically I said em, basicly.

Engine designers keep trying to use various pump geometries as engines, but the problems are different. Modern engine design is about combustion management, not just fluid flow.

Originally, NASA estimated the number of cancer fatalities from a maximum credible accident over a 50 year period to be 2,300. We detail how this figure of 2,300 deaths could easily be off by a factor of 100, i.e. true casualty figures for a maximum accident might number over 200,000. Furthermore, property damage and lawsuits could be in the tens of billions. In addition, the FEIS has over- estimated the difficulty of using alternate sources of energy, such as solar and fuel cells...

(And besides, I know from personal experience that going through engineering school does not cure stupidity. ;)

Michio Kaku, a renowned physics professor, didn't think Cassini was very safe:

"Originally, NASA estimated the number of cancer fatalities from a maximum credible accident over a 50 year period to be 2,300. We detail how this figure of 2,300 deaths could easily be off by a factor of 100, i.e. true casualty figures for a maximum accident might number over 200,000. Furthermore, property damage and lawsuits could be in the tens of billions."

So this is trivial and safe, is it? I'd hate to see what you'd consider a dangerous nuclear project!

I was just listening to (coincidently) Jello Biafra's piece "Why I'm Glad The Space Shuttle Blew Up". It sounds like he wrote and recorded it shortly after the accident. After making it clear that he is saddened by the loss of life, he informs us that NASA had plans to shoot a 72 pound load of plutonium into space. Enough Plutonium to kill all life on the planet. So he was glad because he thought this accident would make NASA think twice about radioactive payloads.

Interestingly, NASA finally did decide to undergo this mission, which received lots of opposition, but turned out okay.

Still, it gives you something to think about. We're placing all of our lives in the hands of a few NASA engineers. Missions like this are not comparable to designing and building a bridge, where, if an error was made, only a few dozen lives will be lost. We've seen that the engineers can make mistakes, and when the stakes involve the entire human race, maybe we should question giving NASA that kind of power.

Whups, you're right. It's even worse than I first stated. I should have dug up that link before posting.

Yep, putting 72 pounds of plutonium on top of a rocket that blew up twice out of 25 launches is not my idea of a smart move. Not that most slashdotters were very sympathetic to such concerns.

And yep, it is worrisome that there is so much plutonium still in orbit. I don't what else to say about that, except that it sucks.

Their general opinion was "nukes are bad, m-kay" ... but they managed to get a piece on 60 minutes as well.

There were also several more articulate explanations of the dangers involved, such as this or this.

The risk was non-zero, and NASA does not have what I would call a good track record on risk estimation. (See Feyman's tale in "What Do You Care What Other People Think?") Yes, there was ignorance among many who opposed the lauch; there was also plenty of ignorance among many who supported it.

Their general opinion was "nukes are bad, m-kay" ... but they managed to get a piece on 60 minutes as well.

There were also several more articulate explanations of the dangers involved, such as this or this.

The risk was non-zero, and NASA does not have what I would call a good track record on risk estimation. (See Feyman's tale in "What Do You Care What Other People Think?") Yes, there was ignorance among many who opposed the lauch; there was also plenty of ignorance among many who supported it.

You can also use decoy tactics -- sending a lot of fake encrypted messages in addition to your real ones. Some of my mathematician friends' ideas of a good time involve sending large blocks of white noise to suspicious overseas addresses. "Gotta keep the NSA on their toes." This has the added advantage of defeating traffic analysis (sometimes it's enough just to know when and where messages are sent, without knowing their contents).

And of course, if all traffic is encrypted then encryption won't be grounds for suspicion. This is a major goal of Phillip Zimmerman, who said in an interview:

There's safety in numbers. An argument could be made that as a matter of solidarity with the rest of the population you should encrypt your email.

If we lived in a society where everyone sent their messages on postcards instead of envelopes--I'm talking about written communications on paper--then anyone who decided to use an envelope would draw suspicion because while everyone else was using a postcard this guy decided to use an envelope, therefore he must have something to hide.

Fortunately we don't have that kind of social expectation. There's nothing suspicious about putting your mail in envelopes. So there should also be nothing suspicious about encrypting your electronic mail.

Because of Mr. Newton (and to a limited degree Mr. Einstein), the chances of a collision with the Earth during this fly by were approximately 0% (to any degree of precision you choose).

There's an interesting analysis of the Cassini Environmental Impact Statement here. I'd take it with a grain of salt, but I'd take NASA's statements on the risks the same way. (Check out pre-Challenger estimates of risk on the Shuttle, for example.)