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Nuclear Booster Rockets
Logic Bomb writes: "According to the New Scientist, NASA would like to explore replacing its chemical-based booster rockets with nuclear versions. Engineers think it could be the first step towards major reductions in launch costs that would eventually lead to widespread public access to space. NASA is aware that such a project faces massive PR difficulties. As a non-expert member of the public, I can verify that. :-)"
Isn't it irresponsible to use a form of energy which creates a waste product which is jettisoned into the larger environment, and known to cause climatological problems?
Isn't it irresponsible to use a form of energy which is known to disrupt ecosystems over a range extending from mountaintop to ocean?
Isn't it irresponsible to use a form of energy where the production of the devices used creates chemically toxic substances in large amounts?
For extra credit, match these three statements with the following:
Solar
Hydroelectric
Fossil
Mining for uranium is a fairly minimal impact, compared to mining for coal or oil. Consider the amount of energy extracted per unit of pollution. Or heck, per miner death. Go to West Virginia sometime and talk to the folks there that are stuck in Chemical Valley and the surrounding areas... the rates of infant morbidity, birth defects, and mutation should be enough to make anyone swear off of coal based energy forever. Now, if mining for uranium (which is mostly mechanized) reduces those deadly effects, while still producing the same amount of energy... that's a good thing.
Everyone touts Chernobyl as "Why we shouldn't do this", forgetting that Chernobyl was an *awful* design. That's like claiming that we shouldn't use indoor plumbing because the Romans used lead in their pipes. Duh. Chernobyl was a positive feedback loop... something starts to go wrong, it just speeds up the process, and boom. French, US, and Japanese power reactors are negative feedback... anything goes wrong, it stops. Period. This isn't a case of a computer turning things off, but a physical reaction that can't be sidelined, forgotten, or glitched out. (Three Mile Island? Old design - none are still in operation, to the best of my knowledge. Besides, that was a worst case scenario... complete core meltdown. Did it go boom? No. Were massive amounts of radiation released into the atmosphere or ecosphere? No.) Contrast these with accidents at hydroelectric dams, coal fired plants, gas distilleries... suddenly nuclear isn't the whipping boy everyone wants to make it.
Our energy needs aren't going to be solved by any one technology, and all of our options are pretty nasty in one way or another. A balance has to be struck, and spreading FUD about nuclear, instead holding hands and chanting in a circle about how wonderful is, doesn't get us anywhere.
Anytime we extract energy from the environment, we disrupt the environment. Period. The only way I know of to minimally impact the Earth's ecosphere is to move outside it: solar collection stations in space, transmitting their energy back via microwave. (And oh *god* can you imagine the PR nightmare *there*.) Even then, you're going to (somewhat) heat columns of air at specific points in the atmosphere... :/
I don't fear nuclear power I have operated and have been trained daily in its use. Lets talk fuel how is it constructed? You take your uranium pellets and encase them in a very strong stainless steel you then clad that with another separate stainless steel which is very resistant to corrosion in such a nuclear geometry that can be only used to make heat not bombs, How does this solid "did I say solid?" block of fuel and casing become that scary radioactive cloud? People act as if nuclear fuel is a bag of flour. We then use that heat, to heat a isolated loop of water to steam, then that steam is used to run turbines. We currently use pressurized water Not liquid graphite "which was radioactive" as did Russia. If you research you will find that our worse accident involved enough Pico curries of radiation to equal 42 seconds of sunshine on 3 square inches of beach. The reactors only produce waste from fuel "did I mention that it was solid before?" once every 10 to 15 years Unlike that oil plant which for every kilowatt-hour of electricity you use, you also pump over two pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Besides we will get the waste even if we do not use the power. http://www.inel.gov/publicdocuments/1995-settlemen t-agreement/safs99.pdf
It would be nearly impossible to guarantee that a rocket explosion would not rupture the core. They could, and should, make it very very difficult for the core to rupture, but it still wouldn't be impossible.
Therefore, the slim possibility of a core rupture in the lower atmosphere would make me think twice before going ahead with something like this. Radioactive particulate is a bitch to clean up and a legal nightmare!
-Dan
Not all nuclear power is bad or evil. If people really thought that global warming was that bad then we should be building nuclear power plants. I'm sick and tired of every and any proposal to use nuclear energy is greated by howls of protest from the green-freaks.
I'm sure there are plenty of clueless anti-nuclear activists, but to dismiss them because the physics of nuclear power are sound and they don't realize that fact would be rather one-dimensional. It's easy to state that nuclear power is safe when it's used judiciously--it's also easy to point to Three Mile Island or any other disaster and say it's unsafe, but there's far more to the issue than that. An integral component of advocacy or activism should be looking at the safety track record of the parties involved and deciding whether they are capable of using nuclear power safely. The best-designed reactor could end up a smoldering heap of free radicals in the wrong hands.
produced sunglasses that were completely opaque.
Actually I think they were most likely peril-sensitive sunglasses. And were in the constant state you would expect to be in under a communist dictatorship...
Good post.
s s/ RTGs.html
s s/ RTGs1.html
The US RTGs are pretty stout, (Radioisotope Thermal Generators), if I remeber right, the Apollo 13 LM that went down in the Pacific went down in a very deep trench.
Here's a link from NASA about the RTGs on Galileo
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/messenger/oldme
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/messenger/oldme
As for all the Pu from these...it says on NASA here that "Plutonium-238 decays primarily by emitting alpha particles." I know that Pu is very poisonous...but if it's just casting alpha particles...the radiation danger from it isn't that bad...is it? It's been 12 years since HS physics...correct me if I am wrong.
I didn't say it was OK.
Although in some instances it's better for all involved to use an atomic weapon than to use conventional weapons. Like the Invasion of the Japanese Home Islands...more lives would have been lost on both sides than were lost by the atomic bombing.
I'd wager that a small tactical nuke from a Minuteman III or Trident C4 on the command and control center south of Bagdad in Jan of 1991 would have been a much smaller loss of life than Operation Desert Storm. And it would have achived the same ends. Elimination of the Iraqi command and control system, and surrender of the Iraqi Army in the field.
Yes...most "modern" atomic weapons are larger than the bombs used in the Second World War. The B-57 and B-61 bombs in US service can have thier yield changed to fit thier role, the yield can be dialed down to a point lower than Fat Man or Little Boy. Modern Atomic weapons are "cleaner" than those used in the Second World War, and in the case of the Enhanced Radiation bomb, much cleaner and less destructive to local infrasturcture.
War is bad, no doubts about that. But the goal of war fighters is to achive an end with the smallest loss of life. In *some* cases an atomic weapon could be better than conventional weapons.
I'd argue that the detonation of an atomic weapon that removes the centralized Command structure of a Soviet-doctrine army, coupled with the fact that the SCUDs did not have chemical or bio weapons fitted during the war, a single strke with an Enhanced Radiation weapon would have saved lives in the South West Asia theatre of operations.
But due to politcal and religous reasons it wasn't an option unless Iraq had initiated chemical warfare against Israel, US, French or British forces.
MAD only works if both sides know that they will totally be eliminated, in a tactical situation like the Gulf War, there was no MAD.
The First World War involved the use of weapons of mass distruction and it did not turn into a Pandora's Box.
A similar plan bounced around in the US Air Force in the 1950s for both a manned and unmanned nuclear bomber.
t m
The bomber in the 50s, had the reactor core dropped into the exhaust of the jet engines. It looks alot like the picture from the article.
There was a B-36H test bed that had a reactor in it as well.
http://www.brook.edu/FP/projects/nucwcost/anp.h
The B-36H didn't use the reactor for power but to test the effects of a reactor on an airframe. Flying alongside the NB-36H on every one of its flights was a C-97 transport carrying a platoon of armed Marines ready to parachute down and surround the test aircraft in case it crashed.
"One idea for an operational nuclear-powered aircraft involved detachable reactor modules that could be replaced as needed. In this artist's conception, the pilots were in the section forming part of the tail, which could be detached in cases of emergency."
Theres more on the percived atomic powered bomber programs of the US and USSR over on the Federation of American Scientists website. Not much but some.
There was a big writeup on it in the Air and Space magazine in the early 90s...I have the issue somewhere.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/space/c03anp.htm
Where are the Thalidomide kids from the Japanese bombings?
s k/ risks90.html
There arn't any.
http://rex.nci.nih.gov/NCI_Pub_Interface/rateri
"Much of our information about the effects of radiation comes from studies of atomic bomb survivors in Japan, among whom have been found increased rates of leukemia and cancers of the breast, thyroid, lung, stomach, and other organs (NAS, 1990). Female survivors who received a single dose of radiation from the blast were found to be at the same risk for breast cancer as women with tuberculosis who had repeated fluoroscopy exposures over a 3- to 5-year period. This suggests that in the case of breast cancer--but not necessarily other cancers--repeated small doses over the years may be as hazardous as a single, large dose. The risk, however, seemed to be inversely correlated to the age at exposure to the blast, with no apparent increased risk in women over the age of 40."
"While exposure to low levels of radiation before birth is associated with the development of cancer during childhood, especially leukemia (Bithell and Stewart, 1975), not all researchers are convinced that prenatal irradiation is the cause of childhood cancer. Individuals exposed prenatally during the atomic bomb blasts in Japan do not have higher cancer rates. The current practice is to use ultrasound, rather than X-rays, during pregnancy whenever possible."
http://www.junkscience.com/foxnews/fn020201.htm
"Scientists agree that exposures to sufficiently high levels of radiation increase cancer risk -- slightly. Among the more than 86,000 survivors of the atomic bomb blasts, "only" about 420 "extra" cancers occurred between 1950-1990. "
I think that Oil gives you Los Angeles, but Anti-Nuclear propoganda gives you bad information.
I'm sorry. But the idea that dropping the bombs wasn't right because the Japanese would have rolled over and surrendered without invastion or bombing is "Revisionist Propaganda".
And while we are far, far off topic from NASA using nuclear power for rockets...I'm going to respond.
Based on the experiances of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Allies (United States, UK, Commonwealth, Royal Dutch forces) knew that the two phase invasion of Japan would cause hundreds of thousands of Allied and perhaps a million Japanese casualties. With a combined American air bombardment and naval blockade, Japan had been defeated by the summer of 1945, if not earlier. But even in defeat the Japanese Army intended to fight in defense of the homeland. The Japanese Army was stockpilling weapons, aircraft and ships to oppose the fall invasion of the South. The Allies had about 1.4 million troops in the Pacific to oppose 5-6 million Imperial Japanese Army forces in the Japanese home islands.
US Army estimates for the invasion of Kynushu that of 767,000 allied troops...268,000 would be killed or wounded. Olympic, the invasion of Kynushu was going to be in the Fall of '45 with operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu in March of '46. The conventional bombing of Japan had not weakened Japan's will to wage war.
http://www.warships1.com/US_olympic.htm
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/
"We must be prepared to accept heavy casualties whenever we invade Japan. Our previous success against ill-fed and poorly supplied units, cut down by our overpowering naval and air action, should not be used as the sole basis of estimating the type of resistance we will meet in the Japanese homeland where the enemy lines of communication will be short and the enemy supplies more adequate."
Although the damage inflicted by the Kamikaze planes at Okinawa was superficial, they managed to kill 12,300 American servicemen and wound 36,400. For the defense of Kyushu the Japanese were to employ upwards of 10,000 kamikaze planes.
I stand by my claim that the use of nuclear weapons in *SOME* situtations will cause less military and civilian casualties that conventional weapons used in the same theatre or operation.
also, i think sending nuclear waste into the sun would cause some problems, wouldn't it? raising the temp and whatnot? not sure, just seems like it would. maybe we could store the stuff on the moon or something though.
You're joking, right? The surface of the sun (photosphere) is 6000 degrees K. That's goddamn hot. The core is estimated to be 15,000,000 degrees K. That, my friend, is a metric shitload of hot. Bottom line is, the sun wouldn't give two shits about anything we drop on it.
The problem you have with getting nuclear waste to the sun is that you can have an accident during launch/accent, possibly spewing lots of really nasty radioactive crap over a wide area.
> they need a powerful reactor. They energy
> density must be far higher than the reactors
> currently in use. There was a project in the
> 1960'ies, and they came to the conclusion that
> they need a 2000-3000 times higher energy
> density.
THIS IS COMPLETELY FALSE. I am shouting because you are absolutely nuts. The power densities (energy density is *not* the right term) of NERVA reactors that were actually built and tested in the '60s are *multiple* orders of magnitude higher than power reactors used for electricity production. Ballpark: 1000 times higher! They have existing designs which are powerful enough to be useful for upper stages right now. Primary booster designs are about one more order of magnitude larger and perfectly feasible.
> they need a conventional booster for
> the first 30000 feet...
Not if they simply provide the ram rocket (that's the correct term for the design which the article describes) with oxidizer and integral combustors for early acceleration. Then the hybrid design would be chemically powered at lift off, but nuclear powered the rest of the way. It need not use a separate booster, but could be a an SSTO (single-stage-
to-orbit).
> the reactor must
> withstand an explosion of the conventional
> booster
This isn't very difficult for the designs which are likely to be tried. Early graphite designs would break up and release radioactivity easily, but it sounds (from the uranium dioxide reference) like they will be making the fuel elements from a tungsten-UO2 cermet. This stuff is *really* hard, dense and tough. You would be surprised at how little a chemical explosion might do to it.
Furthermore, it is important to understand that nuclear fuel is only *very slightly* radioactive until the reactor is powered up and fission products are produced. A wrecked *fresh* core below 30 000 feet represents a near-zero hazard.
> they must convince the public that
> the radioactive traces that are released in
> the upper atmosphere are negligable.
This is going to be a political problem, not a scientific problem. It is important to understand that the thickness of the atmosphere makes a *really* good radiation shield. Radionuclides in the stratosphere may be released and emit gamma rays, but almost *none* of the gammas will reach the ground. You should realize that there are something like 7 (metric) tons of air over every square meter between you and the stratosphere!
Stratospheric fallout is perhaps hundreds of times less threatening to the environment than tropospheric fallout. There's no rain up there. In the troposphere, rainout is the primary means that radioactivity will reach the ground - in a few days. But with no rainout, finely-divided stratospheric fallout remains aloft - and on the preferable side of that 7t/sq.m shield - for months. Fission products are mostly short lived, and a tremendous amount of decay occurs before they will reach the ground.
Furthermore, the amounts normally released are likely to be very small - because of that tungsten-UO2 cermet again. The UO2 particles in the cermet will do a tremendous job of retaining fission products, and the fuel elements should be cladded with plain tungsten or a similar metal or alloy.
-- Mike Greaves
I've been thinking to myself... the ultimate goal is cheap space launch. However, NASA has been unable to do anything to bring down the cost of space launch via chemical rockets. The Russians launch a pound into orbit far more cheaply than we can; of course, some of that is because of the "fire sale" state of the industry, but the matter remains, it costs NASA far more to launch the space shuttle than fuel costs alone (by a factor of four or five); trying to save fuel is a false economy.
I don't think they're going to be able to change any of this by using a nuclear power source. Maybe if they hadn't managed to screw up DC-X (which was doing fine when it was at SDIO), and X-33, and the shuttle before that, and to stifle independent developments in the field, I'd think of them as competent to study a nuclear launcher. But thus far I don't think they are.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
I'm scared of radiation because it does horrible things. It caused Braniac's head to grow and he couldn't even find a toupee after all his hair fell out. It made Dr. Octopus turn evil. It ruined Mr. Fantastic's sex life and made the Thing the fondest desire of all women everywhere. It was even responsible for the spider that bit Peter Parker and ruined his self-centered little life. Worst of all, it created the incredible Hulk, who is still roaming around the southwest wreaking havoc at great expense to the taxpayers.
Given this history, I think its perfectly reasonable to be scared of Nuclear anything, and especially of what will happen when a Nuclear Reactor is exposed to cosmic rays above the stratosphere. We JUST DON'T KNOW what will happen under these conditions!
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
It's kind of impractical to both move out all the nuclear waste (which isn't just glow-in-the-dark goo, but also includes the chambers used to store the goo, up to very large portions of entire buildings) load it onto enough rockets to get it into space at all (without accidents, as you note) and then have those rockets be so powerful as to be able to transfer into an orbit that intersects the sun, which is not an easy task. (the last thing we sent into that neighborhood had to get a gravity assist from Jupiter, if I remember properly)
I'd call it an urban legend alright.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The US estimated 100,000 Iraqi casualties, mostly due to feul-air bombs dropped on the fix fortifications along the Saudi border and systematic destruction of the Iraqis fleeing Kuwait along the "Highway of Death".
A pro-arab journelist in Turkey thought the US was grossly underestimating the casualties. He did a fairly professional investigation. He was suprised by his own findings. The US grossly over-estimated the casualties. His conclusions were that the true number of casualties we around 20,000 Iraqi deaths. The reason was that the US pamphleted the the fixed fortifications and the big traffic jam on the highway out of Kuwait. Then they would bomb. Analysis showed that people took the pamphlets seriously and got the hell out of there.
Any use of a nuclear device on Iraqi command and control would have automatically set off Iraqi Chemical and Biological warhead SCUD missles. Those missles were targeted at Rhiad and Israel. There are terribly inaccurate, but with Chemical and Biological warheads they don't need to be accurate.
The US had tactical nuclear missles pointed at Sadam's head and the Iraqis had weapons of mass distruction pointed at civilians. Yet another game of MAD (mutually assured distructions. I actually think MAD is just a gamble that we've won sofar, but you only have to fail once.
The "Gulf War", aka "Sadam's Ass-Kickin'", would have gone out of Bush Sr. control, if the US had used Nuclear wepons, because of the default response by the Iraqis (C&C is not needed for this response).
So basically, I am saying you are full of shit. Nuclear wepons are weapons of mass distruction even small ones (that is why they are so usefull). Once you open war up to weapons of mass distruction, you open Pandora's Box.
-- I am not a fanatic, I am a true believer.
If we are to seriously get into space, we need something better than current chemical rocket technology.
No, we don't. The chemical fuel required to put a pound of payload into orbit costs a few dollars. The rocket launch to put that pound into orbit costs a few thousand dollars. We're not being limited by chemical fuels here. Wanna take a quick guess as to what is being paid for?
The answer is so obvious I'm almost embarrassed to be typing it: STOP THROWING AWAY THE ROCKETS! Would you ever leave your house, if every drive to the convenience store required you to buy a new car afterwards? And your car is mass-produced and cheap; space launches routinely throws away multimillion dollar rocket engines, not the piddling multithousand dollar thing under your hood.
Being able to put 45% mass into orbit instead of 10% is a vast improvement.
Not when the remaining 35% is all reactor and shielding. Nuclear engines are heavy. What's more, you've already lost sight of the goal. We don't have a space program hampered by the need to limit mass expenditure; it's cash expenditure that is keeping the human race grounded. And the cash cost of a rocket does not scale anywhere near linearly with it's gross liftoff weight.
Most of the health and safety issues spouted by the treehuggers are BS. OSHA standards dictate how much low level exposure a nuclear plant worker can recieve per calendar quarter, calendar hald and calendar year. These limits are constantly monitored and adhered to. Your average summer beachgoer recieves more gamma exposure per day than 99.9% of the nuclear plant personnel.
I also gaurantee that any system used to boost rockets would have to gaurantee 100% containment in the case of a catostrophic incedent to even be considered.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
The chief objection to this model is that the breeder reactors also create weapons grade fissionable material(plutonium). Paranoids worry that if the material were mass produced from spent nuclear fuel it would be more readilty succeptible to theft. The counter argument to this is that the breeder processing plants would dope the fast fuel with radioactives to make it less attractive to steal.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
It might be a merciful end to the parents and older siblings of the kids who drag them along to see Mickey, though. ;)
I'm not a nuclear engineer at all, but I thought that I had once heard of a nuclear plant design in which robs containing material designed to stop a reaction were held in place in a grid that would mesh with a grid of fuel rods below them, using (I think) electromagnetic fields. The idea was that if there was an emergency, the electricity to the fields holding up the upper rods would be cut, the rods would drop among the fuel rods, and the nuclear reaction would stop. I'm probably getting some technical detail wrong, but I think I heard about this on a CBC radio documentary. Does anyone know about this?
Wow! You could work for Greenpeace with that massive level of scientific knowledge!
(Disclaimer: this comes from an advocate of nuclear power. Add the appropriate block of salt.)
I've often wondered if your average anti-nuclear activist actually understands the physics involved. I'm not flaming, I'm genuinely curious. Through the media, I've seen many protests over the most trivial and safe use of nuclear technology (the Cassini launch comes to mind) but in all those news reports I've never seen an activist give a solid technical reason why they oppose nuclear power. Is that subtle filtering on the part of the media, or are these people genuinely clueless?
That's absurd! Thousands of people die every year from toxic coal waste (a good amount of which is released into the air, despite a complex filtering system).
Very, very true, and I thank you for bringing it up. In fact, less than a thousand kilometers from where I live, there's one of the world's worst coal-related toxin sites. Do a search for "Cape Breton tar ponds" in any search engine and you'll find tons of news reports on this problem.
The Sierra Club has put together a horrifying report on this site. By an astonishing coincedence, this place also has the highest cancer rate in Canada. Hmm.
And this is Canada, supposedly a bastion of environmental friendliness. Can any of you imagine what the situation might be like in countries where the local government doesn't care at all about the environment and doesn't have to be accountable to citizen's health concerns?
I'll be the first to admit that nuclear isn't a perfect solution, but stories like the Sydney tar ponds are what make me realize just how much more horrible fossil fuels can be. Nuclear waste may be more dangerous per mass unit, but at least there's a lot less of it.
Reminds me of Project Pluto, the "Flying Crowbar", a nuclear ramjet researched in the 50s.
The only situation in which I'd accept nuclear power would be that the waste would be shot out of earth (or 100% recycled) and the plants could be guaranteed 100% safe.
Nothing is 100% safe. Heck, there's a very small chance that all of the air molecules in the room you're in now might suddenly decide to move to the far corner, suffocating you.
Tell that to the folks in California.
Furthermore, the Chernobyl accident was a result of absolutely dismal upkeep and standards from the same idiotic Communist government that produced sunglasses that were completely opaque.
You mean they're not? News to me...
I think it's funny, personally. But then, most other people probably wouldn't...
What I *really* wish we could do away with is the American revisionism re: the War Between the States.
If I understand what you're saying (it isn't entirely clear) then naive would be a better word.
I'm all for more efficient everything but part of that is nuclear power (eventually, fusion reactors). Breeder's are a step in that direction.
Are the environmental regulations in CA *not* more strict than elsewhere? This would make it more expensive to build plants.
Are they not accurate? Please document.
is that power companies didn't just fail to build power plants in CA, they failed to build power plants in other western states as well.
Perhaps other states didn't have the demand (both current and projected) that CA had and therefore didn't NEED more plants?
The other problem with that argument is that the capacity in 2001 is adequate.
Document, please.
Power became scarce because sellers of power found it profitable to make it so, not because there is an absolute shortage.
Is there proof? Perhaps internal company memos that clearly indicate price fixing?
Skylab had a reactor aboard. It was eventually picked up in the desert some distance east of here. (-: <whine>Why are us Aussies always picking up after you Yanks?</whine>
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
At one stage, the US military designed a dirty no-holds-barred nuclear-propelled missile named (IIRC) Pluton. The main objection to that one was that the shockwave and radiation effects killed everything within a large number of kilometers of the flight path.
I imagine NASA have something a little cleaner in mind. It is relatively simple to produce a nuclear rocket which simply heats a non-radioactive propellant to extraordinary temperatures, and (again, IIRC) the expelled propellant isn't significantly radioactive.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Check it out:
http://www.megazone.org/ANP/
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Um, plutonium has a half-life of thousands of years. Are you willing to eat some plutonium?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
D.O.
In the long run, it pays off to be forward-looking. And I can think of a lot of money our governments spend on a lot less forward-looking programs than space exploration.
Why can't they use pressurised helium or hydrogen balloons made from ultrastrong synthetic fibre.
If the hydrogen could be used, accepting that there are possible explosive problems with it, once you got it up far enough you could tow the hydrogen to the International Space Station for fuel or maybe even suck it in via a port on the craft your launching and use it as a top up for the fuel already onboard.
I haven't really thought it through completely, but surely this could be a viable/preferable alternative.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
What really matters, in terms of reducing costs to orbit?
I think you have correctly identified that it is *not* necessarily ISP or payload ratio.
One answer is that the thing that needs to be minimized, is *complexity*. Sometimes it is stated with pride that the Space Shuttle is the most complex machine ever built. To me, that is a statement of utter failure. To be inexpensive and reliable, a spacecraft should *not* be the most complex machine every built. Duh.
Where are the Thalidomide kids from the Japanese bombings? There arn't any. http://rex.nci.nih.gov/NCI_Pub_Interface/raterisk/ risks90.html
Research sponored and/or conducted by the USA is not a valid source of information about effects of the atomic bombings used in their attach of Japanese civilian targets in WWII. It is suspect as American Revisionist Propaganda.
Although in some instances it's better for all involved to use an atomic weapon than to use conventional weapons. Like the Invasion of the Japanese Home Islands...more lives would have been lost on both sides than were lost by the atomic bombing.
Your statment is fuddle. Dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian target causes loss of life.
"The article is unclear"?? Did you read the article? It's very clear. Chemical launches up to mach 2, then turn on the nuke rocket.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
From your comment I'll guess you're not American? Either way, you're obviously not familiar with the phrase (except for seeing it too much).
"You are" = "your" is just a failure of grammar. "Deja vu all over again" is an ironic twist, a purposeful redundancy put in there in order to illustrate the true absurdity of the situation. It's not from stupidity, lack of knowledge, or laziness. It's actually very clever.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
1) Er, exotic and high tech? In what capacity? Hello, it's shit in a can! Maybe it's been sealed in glass first, maybe not. Probably it's perceived as high tech, but that's a problem of perception, not actuality. Yeah, it's radioactive shit in a can, but isn't that better than radioactive shit coming out a smoke stack and carpeting the environment? The only real waste product from a nuclear plant is heat: thus cooling towers and ponds.
2) Nuclear storage could have been/could be less of a storage w/ breeder reactors: Carter stopped this. People say: 'Argh, they make plutonium'. Yes, they do. You can burn that. Also, we pretty much know where the plants are (hint: it's where we're doing the breeding): i.e., where the potential for terrorism is.
Also, the nuclear industry was promised a permanent storage facility in like *1980*: I think Scientific American had an article about this some years back. But still the fighting over Yucca Mountain continues. I agree that some of the lengthy debate there had made good sense, but I don't think it makes sense to have waste continually building up on pads at the plant sites. It's a 'close your eyes and hope it goes away problem' for essentially every politician in the country.
So the nuclear industry can't burn/recycle their waste, and they're not allowed to get rid of it either. And yet, NO DEATH HAS EVER BEEN DIRECTLY ATTRIBUTED TO THE COMMERCIAL NUCLEAR POWER INDUSTRY. Of course, the government ignores the regulations it imposes on the commercial industry, witness Hanford, but note that number: 0. How many coal miners die every year?
'Course, despite the tense rhetoric there, I don't have any solid proof of this, so maybe I'm wrong. But ya gotta admit, it can't be a lot.
3) As far as the trusting leaders thing goes: you trust them to run fossil-plants in a reasonable manner, you trust them to keep our nuclear arsenal safe in a reasonable manner, etc. Why is the commercial nuclear industry under such almighty fierce scrutiny? RTGs have been used for years: have you ever seen videos of the tests they put those things thru? We should be so fortunate as to have things that are tested that well in common use. I expect the over-engineering on a nuclear booster (*especially* given Challenger) would be as high.
4) Again, booga! We might have a wreck. Do you smoke? Higher risk of death there than with this. Drive a car? Eat fatty foods? Have unprotected sex? Cross streets against the light? Swallow without the requisite number of chews? You could say the catastrophic results outweigh the minimal risks, but I see no evidence that everyone on the Right Coast would get cancer if the thing *did* crash. So chance of big problem ---- that big: chance of something really bad happening even if it crash: ---- even smaller. Amazing things that could result from having massive amazing boosters: quite a lot. Just think of the cool stuff that could go up if we had a proven, reliable booster: maybe the space station in a couple of launches instead of scads, etc.
Ah, it doesn't matter. All you need is one fearful pussy somewhere in the approval heirarchy, and you know there is one.
You have to realise that the USA isnt going to be able to convince the US public that this is a good idea. The outcome? They'll probably just blast it all off from the new launch site in AussieLand and our Govt will be more than happy to take to cash, and more than happy to shift the bill through parliement before the unsuspecting public find out.
meridian at tha.net
deja vu is French, meaning already seen previously. Whether it's happened 2 or n (where n>2) times before, deja vu still applies.
Now if you have repeatedly gotten the feeling of deja vu from a variety of different and unrelated experiences, then the expression "deja vu all over again" is quite appropriate.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
"Noo-que-ler", it's pronounced "Noo-que-ler."
--Homer Simpson
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
A good point, but you seem rather blind to the significant risks of fossil fuels (global warming).
Because the nuclear industry failed to hit its own engineering goals for safety and cost. Beause they failed to establish the infrastructure required for waste disposal before they discredited themselves with their expensive and under-safe plants.
I just love this one. Because rockets almost never blow up. Because lifting heavy payloads and sending them to the sun doesn't take much energy at all.
Dropping an atomic bomb causes loss of life. Loss of life on the part of an agressing nation. I know it's not cool to be nationalistic, but if you are involved in a war, is it not better that more off the casualties occur to the OTHER side?
Blar.
We're discussing the atomic bomb. Can you name the famous country which the United States dropped an atomic bomb or two on?
Blar.
There's a cliche that "once you get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere". It turns out that the thrust needed to get from the ground to low earth orbit is, to within an order of magnitude, about the same as the thrust needed to get from earth orbit to solar system escape velocity. In any case, you don't need to get it out of the solar system entirely. If you boost it to a high enough ellipse, it could easily be millions of years before the next intercept, by which time nearly all of it will have decayed down to lead.
--
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Do I look like I speak for my employer?
In the US, there is some law (or something like that) that prevents any commercial power generating reactor from generating (or at least, providing) any material for the weapons programs.
THe end result? You have to build extra reactors.
What a waste.
power plant failures, radiation, power plant waste and the boogy man.
I think Nukes are a great power source, and if we could just send the waste and used up fuel into the sun, we'd have most of the troubles fixed.
send it to the sun. problem solved,
scratch that. I was thinking about someting else. Soory for the lame comment.
I agree, that was sort of my point. There are a bunch of valid issues, then there's the boogy man. Peoples unreasonable fears are more powerful than facts.
The Apollo modules used for the US moon landings used a plutonium thermal generator for power during the trip to the moon. On Apollo 13 becuase the command module came back on an unexpected tragetory (compaired to a normal mission) the power source couldn't be diverted to miss earth. The plutonium sorce in its protective shell was jetisoned, it reentered and landed in the pacific...
Of course there's the possibility of mistakes. That's why you make the operational procedures of the plant as strict and simple as possible, and make sure there is (preferably both human and automated) oversight at all saftey-critical points. And of course equipment gets old. That's why you have routine maintenance and upgrades.
How can we hope to progress if we don't at least try? Do you shun airplanes because sometimes they crash and kill people?
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Chernobyl was poorly built, unsafe procedures, etc...in other words, a bad example of how to build a nuclear power plant. There's plenty of other nuclear plants in the world that don't make these mistakes. Don't blame the concept of nuclear power for Chernobyl...it wasn't the atoms' fault.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Because stupid people can't get the images of mushroom clouds and Chernobyl stuff out of their heads. Just like when someone hears you work with computers, they think you're an expert with anything that contains wires.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Which is, incidentally, true. Given a few years, the oil spill's effect is roughly nill. Go up to Alaska and take a look at where the Valdez spilled. I understand that the only damaged sections are those which were cleaned--those which were left to their own devices were cleansed soon enough. Of course, even the damaged sections are probably doing much better, as it's been many years since that spill.
Our planet is amazingly resilient.
Although, personally, ran I a nuke plant Blinky probably would be my mascot. I'd think it funny. Probably most other folks wouldn't, though...
Rockets are the only to get around in deep space, without an atmosphere. And perhaps the energy/weight ratio of a fission rocket is very useful once you've gotten into orbit--it would allow interplanetary travel at higher speeds, for instance. However, it sounds like the problem they're talking about here is going from ground to orbit.
Frankly, rockets are a horrible way to go from ground to orbit. They require you to carry all your reaction mass with you when you have a ready source of both reaction mass and oxygen--that being the air around you.
When the shuttle takes off from the launch pad, it uses solid fuel boosters and main engines, powered by liquid fuel from the Big Honkin' Tank. Liquid fuel is nothing more than hydrogen and oxygen. And to burn a pound of hydrogen, you need about eight pounds of oxygen. Since the system is built as a rocket, it never takes in an ounce of oxygen from the atmosphere--it schlepps all that oxygen around with it.
One simple way to reduce launch weight is simply to burn atmospheric oxygen until your altitude is too high. We call this an [em]airplane[/em].
IMHO, building a hybrid airplane/spaceship is a lot simpler than putting a reactor on a rocket.
--The basis of all love is respect
Fuel is not a limiting factor. There have been "30 years proven reserves" since forever. That is based on the current insanely wasteful "once-through" fuel cycle, in which most of the uranium and fissionable plutonium is thrown away as "waste". Simple reprocessing, to separate out the unburned uranium and plutonium to burn in new fuel elements, extends that a lot. (A reactor, at the end of its fuel cycle, is producing a significant percentage of its power from fissioning the plutonium bred in its fuel rods.) And I'm not talking specialized breeder reactors, here. If you do build breeder reactors, you're talking about 1000 years of proven reserves. And when uranium starts getting low, you can breed fissionable U233 from thorium. According to the CRC Handbook, thorium is "about as common as lead", and "there's probably more energy available from thorium in the Earth's crust than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
Beyond that, there's a Japanese ion-exchange process for extracting uranium from sea water at a cost of about $200/pound. That's too expensive to be economical now, but if fissionables are not available from other sources, it's not too expensive to rule it out for power generation.
Nuclear waste falls into two categories: Transuranics (including plutonium) which have very long half-lives, but are weakly radioactive, and fission products, which are intensely radioactive, but have short half-lives.
Plutonium, actually, is kind of intermediate - radioactive enough to be a serious problem, but not so radioactive that it's all gone quickly.
However, plutonium is not waste, not in any sane fuel cycle. Plutonium is fissionable, and works just fine in a power reactor. By the time a fuel rod is so full of neutron-absorbing fission products that it can't produce power any more, a significant percentage of its power output is due to plutonium fission. I'm talking about ordinary reactors here, not breeders.
Reprocess the spent fuel rods and put the plutonium into new fuel rods, and all the scaremongering about the unspeakable evils of plutonium is irrelevant. It's getting burned up.
Current thinking is that the other transuranics can also be put into new fuel rods. They'll alternately absorb neutrons and decay into other things until they hit a fissionable isotope of something, at which time they cease to be transuranics, and become fission products.
Fission products are the really nasty stuff. You can't run fast enough to reach the unshielded spent fuel rod alive nasty. But that's only true of freshly-removed spent fuel rods. That stuff decays fast. In 300 years (not 3 thousand, much less 30 or 300 thousand years) there is less total radioactity in the fission products than there was in the uranium ore that was originally mined to make the fuel rods.
The "thousands and thousands of years" scaremongering is entirely based on the half-lives of the transuranics.
No. Remember: when you spray a little oil over a town, the dirt gets sticky, everything gets kinda blackened, and maybe you get a few random fires, but that's about it. When you spray radioactive material all over a town, not even that much happenes -- that you can tell right away. Then, a generation later, everybody starts looking like Thalidomide kids, and all the people who've lived there for 30 years have leukemia or tumors, and all the plants and animals start looking really twisted.
Oil gives you Los Angeles. Radiation gives you Lovecraft.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
"Activated" has nothing to do with it. The main complaint of the anti-nuke people are that in the event of an explosion the Uranium/Plutonium would be blown into a power -- which is unbelievably toxic. It has little to do with the amount of radiation released on use -- which can be shielded.
And I don't know what you mean "activated". Fissionable Uranium is fissionable uranium whether it is on the launch pad or in high trajectory. In powder form it is one of the most toxic substances known to man.
If you mean "start the reaction", then again I would point out that it isn't the reaction that is the main complaint (but will be brought up).
Living in Central Florida, I sort of have a vested interest in not seeing a cloud of plutonium/uranium dust come floating over from the Cape.
(But I do think nuclear powered rockets are a good idea.)
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I would like to point out that the tendency of rockets to explode is in most cases related to the chemical fuel itself. Remove that (by replacing it with a nuclear booster) and you remove the majority of the explosions.
However, there is still the problem of rockets veering off course and being remotely detonated over the South Atlantic.
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Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It's not the radiation most people are worried about. When you vaporize (like in a big rocket explosion) a whole bunch of Plutonium or Uranium it turns to dust -- and is one of the most toxic substances known to man!
A cloud of that dust wafting over Disney from an explosion over Cape Canaveral is the bigger worry.
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Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Correct -- or even on the pad.
It might be worth considering going 100% nuclear booster, but I don't think the American public is ready to deal with that.
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Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I'm aware that it is very very difficult to vaporize Pu and U -- witness the mostly intact crew cabin in the Challenger disaster.
The PERCEPTION that a big explosion could vaporize it is the problem.
As far as eating a gram of it -- the problem isn't eating it but inhaling the dust into your lungs. The Sarin would kill me quick -- but you'd wish you were me after a short while.
There are things a lot worse than a quick death.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
In other words, some accident that didn't happen might be really dangerous, according to someone I never heard of.
I'm positively terrified.
You cannot destroy nuclear waste: it stays around for tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
Yes you can. As long as it is radioactive it can potentially be used for further reactions (actually it isn't even a requirement that it is radioactive, only stable iron cannot be used for energy production through fission or fusion).
We only need to store it until we have found a efficient way to harness the energy in these by-products.
A nuclear power plant, with all that tech, simply heats water to steam and moves a turbine. The nuclear part is just a better heater. This strikes me as silly.
Why do you think it silly? Heating water to drive a turbine happens to be an efficient way of converting energy of low refinement (heat) into energy of high refinement (electricity).
If all you are going to do with the electricity is to heat up some electric heat eement, then yes it's sliiy, otherwise: Do you have better suggestions?
Just because it doesn't sound high-tech doesn't mean it isnt (and iven if it weren't that isn't relevant anyway, only efficiency is)
Americans understand what the effects of Chyrnoble were, and what 3 mile island could have been.
No they don't. Media are still spreading the myth that thousands have died du to chernobyl. This is simply false:
AFAIK there are documented 8 cases of death due to cancer caused by fallout in the local affected area (That is there have not been found any increased likelyhood of cancer except for one form which have claimed 8 lives).
There have not been found any adverse effect on plant and animal life in the restricted area (except that they seem to thrive du to no humans in the area)
Except for the initial 240 or so diagnosed cases of acute radiation syndrome of which 28 died immidiatly and 14 in the later years (http://www.ibrae.ac.ru/english/natrep-2001.htm) there doesen't seem to be any major loss of life.
Oh no! newscientist.com is slashdotted. Did they mention experimental Russian/Soviet nuclear engine? It was half-tested in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. I think it was only thermally tested, nobody loaded hydrogen and measured dynamic characteristics.
Anyway, here it is, with a nice museum picture. Thrust(vac) 3600 kgf, Isp 910 sec, burn time 1 hour.
Its not all that unsafe to eat. If none of it gets absorbed then you might get cancer in 50 years. Of course you might get cancer in 40 years anyway because of the air quality in your city. Some of the products of burning coal in similar concentrations would kill you a lot quicker. That stuff gets spewed into the atmosphere where you breath it on a daily basis. The nuclear waste stays safely concentrated (probably) hundreds of miles away from where you live.
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!
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The Challenger disaster, and other launch failures, don't exactly paint NASA in an infallible light.
My point being that you have to consider the likelihood, as well as the magnitude of effects, when making decisions. Common sense.
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After lift-off, a chemical rocket would first be used to accelerate the rocket to Mach 2, before the nuclear engine was triggered. "You wouldn't fire this reactor up until we got about 30,000 feet off the ground,"
So there's still a significant possibility of an explosion at or soon after lauch, right?
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</pedantry>
Female Prison Rape in NY
By "people" I assume you mean primarily "managers". So, this differs from e.g. hospital managers how, exactly? Don't they mostly care more about deadlines and looking good than patient care?
Or CEOs? Don't they care more about profits and power and looking good than worker safety or public safety?
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Female Prison Rape in NY
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. ;)
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One thing I do like about New Scientist is that it treats its readers as if they had a reasonable amount of intelligence and general scientific knowledge - not quite the same as Scientific American.
New Scientist is a British publication. Draw your own conclusions...
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I think you meant to say a lot less harmful. Anyway. Does it, in practice? Or does it, in fact, keep it in "temporary storage" which was not designed to last more than a few decades? Or send it to "reprocessing plants" like Sellafield (formerly known as Windscale), condemned by official regulators (who I suppose you think are all commie tree-hugging eco-freaks) several times for appalling safety breaches, such as spreading dangerous levels of pollution over nearby beaches, or chucking nuclear waste into a hole in the ground, which now has to be dug up again because it's unstable at a cost of billions of UK pounds. Or does it manufacture fuel for nuclear weapons - by far the most life-threatening nuclear problem of all?
Oh, that's right, we're never going to actually use nuclear weapons - they're just expensive scarecrows. Ok.
Physicist Bernard Cohen did some studies a while back and determined that if all of the world's power came from fission, and if all the waste over 100 years were dumped into the ocean (which environmentalists would NEVER allow), the amount of radioactivity in the ocean would not increase by more than 1%.
What about localised problems? What about radioactively contamined beaches, such as those near Sellafield - or dangerous levels of radioactive waste building up in the food chain near a dumping ground?
It's a bit like saying "If an oil tanker spills, the amount of oil sitting on the world's oceans will still be only 0.000...1% of the total mass of the oceans, therefore there's no problem."
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NASA tried this before from 1955-1972 or so. The project was called "NERVA" (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications). Here's a link. Follow the Rover/NERVA link for the project I'm thinking of. The rest of the page covers other nuclear propulsion projects.
Personally, I'd feal safer with NASA fling nuke powered rockets over my house then with commercial nukes up the river. The commercial nukes have considerably more reason to cut corners.
Still, NASA nukes have the following property: First people protest NASA's use of nukes and NASA becomes unpopular. Second representatives looking for a place to cut spending figure that NASA's popularity is down. Third NASA can not afford to properly maintain it's nukes.. oops.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
As someone who has been doing alot of reasearch into the goverment latley. This is just another example of the leaders NOT listening to their own Science. Same as With the WAR on Drugs.
What Nevada needs to do is set up a nice way to tax all the waste coming in that's not too high the feds won't pay it. Then have 'waste' become Nevada's property in a few hundred years. After that amount of time the short lived fission products will have decayed away and reprocessing the 'waste' into fuel to sell could net a nice big profit. Of course you have to take the risk that no one is going to come around with a pesky tabletop cold fusion plant to make energy too cheap to meter.
I will eat a gram of it if you consume a gram of Sarin gas. Then we can sit down and discuss which is the most deadly substance on Earth.
Don't forget the lovely flashing light in downtown vegas that would warn of an impending blast. Don't think that would work to well now.
Everyone that visits Vegas should take a trip to the test site. See http://www.nv.doe.gov/nts/tours.htm for into on tours. The Sedan crater is awe inspiring when you realize that it was formed by only a 104 kT warhead. And I love the reason why the road is so bumpy getting there. It was too expensive to keep rebuilding it when after every detonation the shockwaves would ripple it.
Of course if we create breeder reactors or use some exotic mixes in the new pebble bed desgins we don't have to dig up the fuel anymore. Just make more in the reactors and burn that, we could sustain areselves for centuries on what's already been mined.
You should really look at the cask designs for transporting this waste. Indestructable comes to mind. I know of only one incident where one was involved in a significant accident. The semi carrying the cask took a switchback on a mountainside a little to quick and went over. The semi looked like a giant had took a hammer and made tinfoil out of it while the cask just rolled down the mountain and landed in a stream with just a few scratches.
Aside from a nuke going off these things aren't going to break open on accident. Even with the nuke I'd have to ask how close.
Now if you're talking about the boxes of P-32 that FedEx bounces around you may have something. Ask your local biotech research center how many wet boxes that just had lots of broken glass they've recieved.
Nope, right now nuke plants are one of the biggest money makers in the electric buisness. Most of the plants were designed before computers could do highly accurate power calculations so they were all horrendously overbuilt. Now that they've redone the calculations with modern computers they just adjust a few settings, make some minor modifications and you have tens to a hundred megawatts extra for virtually no capital cost. The glut in the uranium market with prices so low also helps. For the last year or so nuclear has been cheaper than any other power source and its getting cheaper every year.
Probably the last nail in the coffin for construction was the incredible interest rates of the late seventies early eighties. With the extremely high capital costs and the long construction times building new plants were just priced out of the market. Thats one of the big draws for the modular pebble bed design. You build in 100 MW increments and you're can be producing power very early in the construction process and minimizing interest costs.
They've met and exceeded their goals for safety. Its one of the safest jobs in the power industry now. And they've well exceeded their goals for cost savings now, generating power cheaper than any other source.
As for a waste stream the there is a plan in place for the industry. For every kWhr they produce a surcharge is added on and goes into a fund to pay for waste disposal that the government assured everyone that it would handle. Unfortunately the government reneged on its contractual obligations and the industry has been polite enough not to sue, yet.
When you provide a quote an attributation would be nice. Then I know who's spreading the lies.
The first quote doesn't really make much sense unless your spreading unfounded rumors. How many people, personal radiation dose, acute dose, chronic dose, contamination levels, source strength? For some you could make a case that Chernobyl was worse, for some Hiroshima.
More than half a million people dead or sick? Of what? Stress induced by radical groups? If we're going to do quotes like this I'll say that more fetus's were killed in abortions due to irrational fears of Chornobyl's effects than have died from it. Are you including those deaths?
And if you are talking about the potential of killing tens of thousands of people than using the same probabilities it could be argued (without the public perception filters) that a socioeconomic collapse due to radical world wide climate change from burning extensive fossil fuels will kill billions.
That's what drives scientists nuts and I feel for the Dubya's science advisor when he has to talk Kyoto. We can control the waste stream with nuclear and know how to contain it indefinitely with monitoring and for thousands of years without. But its only an educated guess what happens when we spew our wastes into the air and some of those guesses are not pretty.
But due to politcal and religous reasons it wasn't an option unless Iraq had initiated chemical warfare against Israel, US, French or British forces.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The option was seriously presented to President Bush. So it was on the table at the highest level.
It would take much more than a big rocket explosion to vaporize one of NASA's RTGs. They've survived reentry multiple times, one even being retrieved from the ocean floor and reused. We're talking a high temperature ceramic with a very low heat transfer coefficient. A rocket explosion is not going to do it unless you have an anitmatter rocket sitting around somewhere.
As far as Pu being one of the most toxic substances known to man I'll eat a gram of it if you eat a gram of Sarin and then we'll talk. Pu is far from being top on the toxic list except in public perception.
Fusion is great for low thrust high burn times and there are several projects in the works for interplanetary drives. The problem is that the fusion reactor needed for high thrust is currently too large and massive to reach escape velocity on its own.
What I found very amusing about all the doom and gloom stories is that they neglect to mention several Pu thermoelectric generators have already dropped out of the sky.
Apollo 13 is the first one that comes to mind, I think that one is still sitting at the bottom of the ocean. NASA lost at least two more to reentry although they recovered a few from the ocean floor. One of them they used in a later mission since it was essentially undamaged from reentry.
Of course the *reason* that people are so scared of nuclear disaster is the fear implanted in their brains by the government back in the day so we would all be good and hate the russians and put up with anything our government did as long as it was to "win" the cold war©
Conservatives now lament how uninformed and liberal the public is about this issue, but it really is a result of conservative forces from thirty years ago having such a huge affect on the western psyche©
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Well I think it maybe because of the fact most of us believe in the SEY (someone else's yard) theory,
What would be my share? If it meant cheap and clean power, I would be glad to store a couple kilos of waste in my back yard. Seriously. What is the cask size, a few cubic yards? Just dig the hole deep enough and use an indestructible cask.
A dingo ate my sig...
Well I am against it because they want to store those spent nuclear rods in my backyard. 90 miles from about 1.5 million people (las vegas) is Yucca mountain which is the prime site of a nuclear waste repository. =^/ I on the other hand, want to use the serveral mile long tunnel dug into the mountian to launch items into space (electromagnetic cannon).
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Yes, Nuclear propulsion for Orbit-to-orbit craft wouldn't screw up Earth's atmosphere.... but how would you get the fuel up there? There's enough people worrying when we say we're sending a small chunk up, but anything that's used for long scale is gonna need a slightly bigger chunk, or multitude of chunks.
Then you gotta worry about those who believe that if you launch within x km of Earth you will be leaving a nuclear cloud for thousands of years, which will slowly drift into Earth's atmosphere and...
(no, I'm not anti-nuke... but I'm looking at both sides of the argument. Nuke propulsion is lighter, but at a cost)
BTW, for those out there who say the word nuclear: It's pronounced Nu-klee-ur, not Nu-Cue-lar or Nu-Q-Lur. Don't believe me? Check the dictionary.
icanneverbereached@sogoaway.com aint my address.
Ok, what exactly are the odds of NASA getting something right on their first try within recent years? I dunno if I want one of these launching and exploding in the atmosphere and raining nuclear holocaust down on me. Suuuure, they'll get it right. Just somwhere between their 2nd to 7th try... Hence why they want to do things cheaper so they have better odds of doing it again after learning from their mistake(s). This one is just a little to big for them to mess with in my opinion. I wonder who'd get the cheapest contract for it... Is the tempature in F or C? Doah!
> There is no evidence whatsoever that environmental regulations have anything to do with the power crisis in California. In fact, the state government had been pleading for years with power companies to build extra capacity, and they just weren't interested because they didn't want to drive down prices further.
This is a common misconception. The reason California power companies didn't build more capacity is because of costs. A purely business decision. It takes almost twice the time and money to build plants in CA as any other state, because of heavy regulation. The environmental community wanted cleaner, more efficient power and pushed through laws and the resulting regulations (enacted by the CA executive branch) to attain that goal. So the environmentalists **DID** help bring about the current situation by raising the cost of doing business in CA through regulations.
Until the recent "crisis" raised the value of energy, the return didn't justify any new investment investment in additional capacity.
d4,...,Nf3, or maybe I should use a Ratfaced Mcdougal?
We have the technology to reprocess spent fuel into MOX fuel and reburn most of these isotopes. This is a PROVEN and decades mature technology. After 3-4 cycles in a reactor, all of these isotopes that would be dangerous for "tens or hundreds of thousands of years" are burned up and the waste will be benign in a few DECADES. This technology exists NOW. It was cancelled by President Carter in the '70's based on fears of Plutonium proliferation. These fears are unfounded IMO based on several factors. In any case, we have the ability to safely get rid of this stuff permanently, the decision not to use this ability was never a scientific or technical one, it was a political one.
BTW, those enormous ash piles from coal plants release 1.5 times more radioactive contamination than all 108 currently operating nuclear plants in the US. Plus a LOT of Mercury. Plus assorted other heavy metal pollutants.
Also, the US, BY FAR out produces any other nation on earth on a per capita basis. How are we going to become "more internationally competitive"?
And as for your comment on the US needing to cut down energy use through conservation, I live in California, and I really don't care if you believe it or not, (you won't because that would upset your applecart) Californian's already use less energy per capita than any other people in the industrialized world. We have cut energy use by 12% in the last year, and we are still short 6000 MW. 6000 MW is not going to be generated by any alternative energy source currently available. Not without a huge cost in money, and enviornmental impacts.
Look at my user info, I know a little bit about this. These containers are vacuum dryed then double welded shut. There is nothing to act as a vector to enable materials to "weep" through the barriers. There are always at least two independent vapor tight barriers of high tensile steel between the contents and the environment. And believe me this steel is checked very carefully for porosity, defects, and inclusions at several points in the manufacturing and qualification process. The testing process is pretty tough indeed. And even if a container were to leak, the affected area would be measured in a few tens of meters, and could be very easily contained and cleaned up.
I agree that advocacy can cloud your judgement. But you have to remember that some of these people have devoted their careers to this issue. You would hope they had done some homework.
Any location that will ship or receive radiactive material has to be ready to handle contamination problems. I am frankly surprised that someone was surprised that there is planning for this possibility.
Ok, time for some background from the shipping location's perspective.
To move spent fuel you have to lower a large cask (usually 100+ tons) into the spent fuel pool that the fuel is in. Now while these pools have installed purification/filtration systems, some activity (in the 1.0E-5uCi/ml to 1.0E-06uCi/ml range) will be present in the water. The surface of the metal canister will have micro pits and pores in it that can uptake this water. Then later after the cask is loaded and removed, this water will dry out, leaving a minute amount of dry smearable radioactive contamination behind. This I suspect is what the "weepage" you were referring to. Anyway, interestingly enough, if you presoak the surface of the cask with high purity water (no radiactivity), you can prevent (or at least greatly minimise) any uptake of the spent fuel pool water and it's contamination. Then later as the cask dries, the smearable contamination problem is greatly reduced. Also, the surface that comes in contact with the spent fuel pool would be inside the outer canister, so would be inaccessible in any case.
And one other point, these canisters are really freaking tough. I just can't see a way they could grossly fail. I mean they were tested to simulate a train wreck at high speed followed by a drop off a train trestle and landing on a pointy object. Like I said before, TOUGH testing.
And as for the Right Thing to happen, it seems logical (to me at least) to place the high level waste as orginally planned 30 years ago into one central federally controlled location, as opposed to the 100+ high level waste storage locations we have today.
Isn't there a treaty on nuclear powered space propulsion? I know there is a test-ban on explosions in space, but I thought there was also something saying you couldn't have nuke propulsion in space as well.
Thanks for the link to the picture. I now know where the idea for Thunderbird 2 was developed.
We have already designed devices to survive uncontrolled reentry. The RPG most deep space probes use for power are designed not only for surviving launch accidents, they are also designed to survive accidental reentry. Now of course the problem is slightly different but this particular problem probably can be solved.
Parallel to the equator may make for one hell of a fast train, but it's not going to get you into space very quickly :)
Oh, and the big problem with these lifts, is what happens if they come crashing into the earth? (cut the coupling near [a mile away from] the GEO point) and watch it wrap around the earth a few times.
Yes, I know you could cut the point at the bottom and pretty much keep it in place; but that doesn't make for much of a story.
Rod Taylor
Remember that oil *has* been used as a weapon -- both directly (primitive fire-based weapons), and, far more importantly nowadays, as an economic weapon. The Arab nations once attempted to blackmail the United States into dropping support for Israel via an oil embargo, if memory serves, and given how important oil is to our economy (not just transportation -- which affects a HUGE part of it, of course -- but also things like plastics).
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The drive in Footfall was what's known as an Orion type drive. Basically, putttering into space standing on a series of small nuclear explosions. I understand there were actually experiments done using conventional explosives.
Put the crew and cargo on top of a tower of big shock absorbers, on top of a big solid plate, and set of a bomb underneath it.
The problem with Orion drives is they toss a ton of detonation byproducts into the atmosphere, space, whatever, and contaminate everything in the area. Never mind that your "fuel" is a bunch of nuclear (or thermonuclear) weapons.
The engine in the article seems to be a relative of the Kiwi class engines from the same vintage. Basically a small reactor into which is pumped H2 or He which is heated and vented as reaction mass. This new drive adds an air intake which (it would seem) increase the thrust and reduce the weight of reaction mass needed. The problem with all of them has been contamination.
Nuclear power isn't bad. Venting large quantities of radioactive wastes into the environment IS bad.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Seems there's a rather large number (in the hundreds) of children from that area with thyroid cancer; NPR recently ran a story on the regular visits by groups of them to (I think) Boston for treatment. I believe that qualifies as a significant increase in the likelyhood.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
is that they will be operated and managed by the same sort of tie-the-safety-valve-down idiots who run many chemical power plants. A SAFELY operated and maintained nuke plant is a fine idea; my disquiet with commercial nuke plants (and I am a physicist/engineer who works with radiation sources) is that they'll be run by corner-cutters and bean-counters.
Of course, as one of my colleagues (the company radiation safety officer, and a damn' good scientist) says, "Isotopes decay. Arsenic is forever." He also points out that while stray radioactives are really easy to detect with a radiation counter, there are lots of chemicals that are lethal in milligram quantities and cannot be easily detected. I suppose it all comes down to waste management, and the human species is lousy at most forms of management.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
It's sad that even the term nuclear had been so villified in the United States. Environmentalist groups did their best to kill American nuclear power in the 70's and 80's - unwittingly allowing for more and more pollution from smog-emitting coal plants and inefficient natural gas plants. Good luck on NASA pushing nuclear rockets through - look at the trouble they had with the Cassini probe.
Considering that in 1993 then Vice President Al Gore killed both the lithium breeder and fuel pellet nuclear designs after tests showed them to be excellent energy producers and perfectly safe against radiation release, it's clear that the American attitude to anything with "nuclear" in the title is based off irrational fears and half-truths.
Breaking through this ignorance barrier is going to harder for NASA than sending a man to the Moon...
There was a study in the 50's called Project Pluto that was an air-breathing ram jet fueled by a nuclear reactor. Kinda cool, and some of the events around it were pretty nutso.
o ryreports/news&views/pluto.htm
m l
Richard Feynmen (sp? you know, the famous funny nuclear dude), while working on the really big bombs, had an idea that you could power a jet engine with a reactor. So he patented it. At that time the scientists were allowed to patent their ideas they came up with on the project. As a side note, they also got a dollar for each patent, but no one really bothered. Until Feynman found out, and demanded his dollar. Anyways, more funny mayhem ensued, which he talks about in his books.
He never really thought about the idea until Project Pluto came along independently. The scientists there found out there was a patent on the idea, much to their surprise. To they contacted who they thought was the expert, Feynman. He was surprised they contacted him and just said it was a back of the napkin patent, and he really wasn't the expert.
There's some info on Project Pluto here:
http://www.nv.doe.gov/news&pubs/publications/hist
http://yarchive.net/space/exotic/project_pluto.ht
http://www.merkle.com/pluto/
Kooky stuff...
Jason
John Walker, founder of AutoDesk, put the lie to the above quote in his paper "A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Costs Away".
Basically, the problem is operationalizing launches so you can walk down the learning curve the way you do with other industries -- and that means launch frequently. The closest anyone ever came to this was the USSR when it had those big bulky film camera spy satellites that had to be launched once a week. They got the actual operational costs of launch far lower than NASA has achieved, despite all their promises.
Seastead this.
Tell that to an ICBM warhead designer. True, they don't enter "unexpectedly" but they certainly come in at high velocity, are quite small, and protect their radioactive contents.
I am sure one can protect these devices. The question is whether one can build adequate protections within the weight budget and form factor requirements.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Too many people seem to believe that *any* radioactivity is too much. That is a naive viewpoint - you can't escape radiation. Fly in a commercial airliner - you get plenty of ionizing radiation compared to sitting on the ground.
So the issue, *assuming accident*, is how bad would it be, and how does it compare to other technologies and activities.
As far as nuclear testing in the atmosphere.. you are dead wrong about your parenthetical comment. The most dirty test is one on or near the ground. Air bursts release less radioactivity and distribute it much better.
The only good weather is bad weather.
The biggest real issue is whether the reactor contents could be adequately contained during a worst case accident. If this is possible, and I suspect it is, there is no real danger associated with this technology.
OTOH, the biggest practical issue is whether anti-nuclear hysteria will stop this thing because of the neglible amount of radiation produced at high altitudes when it fires. I am sure that too many people are happier with the amounts of CO2, toxic gases and (at higher altitudes) ozone depletion that is caused by current rocketry than they would be with the pospect of any tiny amount of the dreaded r a d i a t i o n products released into the stratosphere. Perhaps they fear mutation in the UFO's ;-)
Certainly in the US, where most people are innumerate and don't know physics, and Europe, where too many people are ecophobes, this will be the biggest problem.
The only good weather is bad weather.
...to get a nuke plant up and running. I believe the early nuclear power plants were a losing proposition: It took more money to build and run the plant than it could bring back selling electricity in it's operating lifetime. I don't know if this is true today or not, but it's still something to consider.
I think that we need to start finding ways to really conserve energy. Better building materials, more efficient lighting/heating/cooling, more efficient large appliances, and more efficient power saving on computer systems.
Once we do that, we might find that something like wind/solar/hydroelectric might fit our needs better.
Interested in weather forecasting?
Yes it does. And it should be noted this particular argument was started by someone referring to environmentalists as "green freaks".
Free Hans!
NASA's air-breathing design is new, but Timberwind, established by SDI, has been around since the mid eighties.
As I recall one of the primary difficulties with Timberwind was keeping your payload from being reduce to rubble during launch. It is very powerful.
Note that test engines were built, and fired.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
While "perfection" is impossible, it is possible to get very close and to lower risk. There is no zero risk, even doing nothing has a risk.
The idea is to take into consideration what could go wrong, and assume that everything that could fail, would all do so at once, and design for that. If the worst case failure mode is that a reaction self-quenches with no radiation release, that is 'perfect' for the application. It might still not be ideal, as it could make a mess within a containment structure, but this is far preferable to the failure modes encountered at Chernobyl, Windscale, Three Mile Island, or Brown's Ferry.
As for the 'too cheap to meter', that one will not be true anytime soon (for any means of generation), and as I recall if the speech it was taken from is read fully in context it wasn't that we'd have cheap energy 'tomorrow' but that if we (humanity) worked things right, someday in the distant future our succeeding generations would have that benefit from our work and research.
The waste products are a concern as fission is inherently dirty and I'd far prefer fusion to fission power, but fusion is still 20+ years away... just like it has been for the last 50 years. In 20 years, I expect workable fusion power to still be "20 years away."
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
This shows how little I know! :)
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Seems like this would be a good way to get rid of atomic wate. Use it in a power plant, when it is used up there, put it in a rocket to blast it off into space. This would solve two problems at once, you get rid of the waste and get a Satellite into orbit. Then once the bird is in orbit, fire the rocket towards the larest atomic reactor in the solar system, and problem solved.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Something for you to consider. We are going to change conversation that took place in the late 1400's to fit your argument.
Mr. Columbus- I think I have a quicker way to India that could cut our travel time in half. But I need to you to found our voyage to prove this.
Queen Isabella- Gee that sounds like a great idea, but we have this problem with the Moors right now we really need to dedicate 100% of our resource to it. Sorry
Now go find a History book and remove most of everything that happened after 1492.
As you should be able to see, exploration has great benefits; you should not abandon it because you have other problems.
You may not understand it but one the big reasons for space exploration is get a better understanding of how the universe works, have a better understanding of how the universe work we help everyone.
So don't just abandon something because the benefits are not 100% obvious. You never know we could just find the cure for HIV on Mars.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Yes there have been some unfortunate results. But humanity as whole has, benefited more than it has been damaged. And that's is true with anything for any type of progress, that the few must suffer so that the greater my benefit.
Best example I can think of chemotherapy, yes it is damaging to some parts of the body but in whole the body benefits more than it is damaged.
Second example, you work you but off everyday, but only your boss gets richer while you get shafted. It sucks that is how the world works.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"It really requires an education of the public," he says. "If there's an enhancement of understanding about what nuclear is about, we can benefit from that." [George Schmidt, deputy manager of the Propulsion Research Center at Marshall]
I really wonder what NASA thinks the public needs to learn to think this is a good idea. "Radiation is good for you?" "Rockets don't explode?" Maybe he's referring to the immense environmental damage caused by existing launches, which depending on your death model, may in the long run be worse than a few nuclear reactors exploding over the ocean. But I doubt that's what he means by "what nuclear is about."
~=Keelor
Spout your propaganda to these people.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Three Mile Island anyone? I can't believe you have never heard of it.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Well, it's impossible to tell sarcasm from ignorance in a text-only medium. Unless you start to use smileys or other hints.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Don't be redundant.
(yes, I'm an american)
XML causes global warming.
Well, besides the obvious answer, that without the space program none of the technology that allows this conversation would be here ... The computer revolution is directly attributable to NASA's demands for computing power during the Apollo program.
...
But if that doesn't interest you (i.e., if you're one of those Luddite hypocrites who seem to delight in using Slashdot to denounce technology) try this on for size. If you've been to a hospital at any time during the last ~30 years, you've benfited from the space program -- where do you think all that nifty medical technology came from in the first place?. If you drive a car, you've benefited in ways too numerous to count. If you live anywhere where there's a risk of severe weather, you've benefited, because modern weather forecasting and storm-warning systems simply would not exist without NASA.
Future benefits: space has a lot of room, a lot of raw materials (many asteroids are mountain-size chunks of high-grade ore), no ecology to screw up, and (effectively) zero-gee. This is the perfect combination for making damn near anything we want to, including many things we can't make at all on earth (aerogel, anyone?) without further fucking up the surface of our planet. And biotech works very well in zero-gee for all kinds of reasons, which means we may get a cure for AIDS faster in orbit than we will down here. And cancer, and diabetes, and heart disease, and Alzheimer's, and
Of course, for the Luddites, none of this matters. To them, space is a waste of time, nuclear power is eeevil, and the combination is anathema. They'll happily reap the benefits of space exploration, without ever knowing or acknowledging that they're doing so, while fighting it tooth and nail.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'm as anxious as anyone to see space open up. I have real doubts about whether a government agency like Nasa is the right way to do this. In the early days of aviation, the US government provided a bounty on for aerial photographs that were used for mapping. Private companies stepped up and got the bounties. Something similar could be done in basic space research(say a bounty for photographs of Mars or various asteroids).
Does the public _really_ need to go to space? I think a few too many people have watched Star Trek and thought "WOA, space is just great!" But would it really benefit our lives in anyway other than the entertainment value? Why not consider personally exploring the rest of the world before leaving it?
The Government has already pumped several billon dollars into researching nuclear propulsion. From the SLAM home page (check it out):
N .H TM
http://www.vought.com/y50-61/html/slam.html
Also, the Brookings institute has a lot of information on nuclear propulsion projects:
http://www.brook.edu/FP/PROJECTS/NUCWCOST/TOPTE
The rest of the articles on that New Scientist webpage look like the National Enquirer of science. Just how credible are this guys? The article seems a bit to sensationalistic to be all true.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
So instead of splitting athoms you want to
"split banana's"
42
Antartica and Auzy land would not work well to launh because ,
A) All current launch sites are as close as posible to the equator
(where the rotation speed of the earth is greatest (can't remember figures but it takes a lot less energy to launch from the equatorthan from the poles )
B) i dont think launching nuclear rockets from the artic is alowd by the international treaty
42
Besides that, a lot of rockets are hydrogen powered, and those only produce water vapor.
SeaLaunch does that. Works fine.
There are places isolated enough for nuclear rocket launch. In 1979, Israel and South Africa tested an atomic bomb in the isolated area between Africa and Antarctica. The only reason anybody found out was that one of the old Vela nuclear test ban treaty satellites picked it up.
This will probably get everybody all up in arms, but Nuclear Weapons are probably even more misunderstood than nuclear power. You say nuke and everyone thinks about those Japanese cities that we completely leveled (we didn't) with those two bombs and mushroom clouds and one bomb will wipe out an entire city and the radiation will contaminate the whole earth for 500 years. None of that is true. The deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki comprised somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the total Japanese deaths from American bombing raids. Hiroshima was hammered, but certainly not leveled (the firestorm did much more damage than the actual blast). For Nagasaki, which got hit in a hilly area, the area of really heavy destruction was somewhere around a mile and a half, and most of the people that were killed were not killed by the initial blast.
It is true that the nuclear testing done in the 50's and 60's was careless by modern standards, but that was mostly because we had a beast on our hands that we did not completely understand, but that we had to keep developing for the sake of our survival. The defense nuclear weapons industry of the 21st century is not the industry of the mid 20th century. The sad truth is that since nuclear weapons have been invented, people have them, and that means we have to have them. Even at that, the trend of recent history has been towards smaller and fewer. Our total number of warheads is a small fraction of what it used to be in the heyday of the 60's. Our big, scary Peacekeeper ICBM's carry smaller warheads (about 300 kT) than the Titans of yesteryear and are much more accurate (we can basically hit a football field with them). They are optimized for hard target kills (taking out the enemies weapons), not for wiping out whole cities. They are terribly destructive, but not the way people envision them. We really are not out to depopulate the whole earth, and I would tell any green freak to his face two things. One, that the only reason he is able to stand around protesting things he doesn't understand is because we have these weapons, and two, the people who work with those weapons and actually understand them are a lot less anxious to see them fired than he is.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
concerning the PR aspect. Let's tell NASA to shut everything down for a year, put the money from their budget into a trust fund, then bring them back online, and then force the entire motherfucking population to go through engineering school. Once the stupid is beaten out of them, they'll be less likely to argue about nukyooler things being bad and more likely to support silly things like, I dunno, making sure people have a way off the planet in case everything shits the bed. Anyone? Agree/disagree?
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
That's funny. A high school buddy's relatives lived practically right next door to the plant. You can look out their picture window and see the dome across the river.
They're about as healthy as you can get today. No mutated dandelions or cows or killer tomatos in their garden.
Three Mile Island was harmless, and I seriously question the validity of any of the claims on that website. There was no significant release of radiation, let alone enough to cause such massive deformities.
Derek
Who the fsck cares how you pronounce nuclear? Do you understand what they are saying? THEN WHO CARES!
Sorry, pet peeve.
Derek
Regarding nuclear material sent up with the help of rockets. Already these are widely used as power sources in Spy Satellites and deep space probes. Plenty of information is available. Then there are the UN/international guidelines.
I have complete faith in the overall safety of nuclear power when used in a proper design and manned by competent operators.
For evidence I offer up the United States Navy. For almost 50 years they have operated over two hundred nuclear reactors (submarines, aircraft carriers, cruisers and shore installations) without a single accident that released or had the potential to release radioactive materials into the enviroment.
I spent many years on submarines, and my accumlative total exposure (millirems) is less than I recieve during a day at the beach.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
See my comment posted here
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
The space program is, to date, the first and only goverment program that has completely paid for itself. The cost per citizen (using 1970 currency and pouplation figures) $187 USD, or 5 cents per day for the entire 10 year (Apollo) program.
Another poster mentioned the computer revolution as a side effect of the space program.
NASA has publiclly cited 46 applications of technology created for the space program that were spun of into the mainstream (TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE HANDICAPPED AND AGED, rudy Bell, NASA, July 1979). But that's just the first generation applications. It ignores the 2nd, 34d, even 4th iteneration of technology developed as a result of those applications.
If there is technology that uses any kind of miniatureization, then it ultimately came from the space program. Ditto with long life power sources, and remote manipulators.
How about weather satelites? One can argue that they are the space program. How many thousands would die each year if we couldn't track them?
I think it's obvious the space program is pretty damned useful.
The only difference between us and the dinosaurs, is that the dinosaurs didn't have a space program.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
stupid people can't get the images of mushroom clouds and Chernobyl stuff out of their heads
There are plenty of unlucky Russians who can't get the Chernobyl stuff out of their heads. Literally.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Right. Their nuclear reactor was an antiquated piece of crap, and their workers were took unecessary risks. Our reactors are shiny and new, and will stay that way forever. Our workers never make mistakes or run risky experiments. Right.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This is true, but it DOES NOT MATTER. The 90% of the mass that doesn't make it to orbit is fuel. Fuel is very cheap. The current Space Shuttle uses something like $20 million dollars of fuel to get to orbit (and the vast majority of that is the solid rockets, not the hydrogen). The total cost of a Shuttle mission is more like $1000 million. Even if you could make the fuel free it wouldn't make the shuttle any cheaper.
Hmm, you for get one important thing : if i can get twice the stuff up with one launch, i save one flight, cutting the costs to half of what it was before. They are talking about an increase of factor 4.5 (per launch) thus saving $3500 million ! (1 launch instead of 4.5)
Now that is what i call progress !
if the first use of Oil was as a weapon, would we have the same sort of public fear over the resource?
Just ask the current US president. Now if only he could bring Quayle back to improve his spelling...
The talk about nuclear energy is due to the rise in oil prices and skyrocketing prices of power in California. According to Bush, all we need are more electric wires.
Fight Spammers!
Nice post.
I think it is really funny how so many folks on this board characterize others concerned about the abuses (not uses, abuses) of nuclear energy technology universally as lobotomized hippies.
My sincerest apologies to any lobotomized hippies out there offended by this statement.
Anyways. I lived in a community situated near an active nuclear facility for several years. In that time, we learned A LOT about the people who run the plants and deal with the waste (and the waste IS dangerous folks). None of us were what you would call "environmentalists" "elitists" or "granola eating tree huggers". It was a farming community, and that is about as conservative as it gets. And, before you get your knickers in a bunch over how farmers aren't engineers, please understand that you actually need more than half a brain to be a successful farmer or rancher, and I have met plenty of engineers who could be called half-wits (and so have you, probably).
My apologies to any wholly-witted engineers out there. You know who you are, and wouldn't be offended by what I said. You know the guy in the cube next to you is a moron anyways.
First thing we learned is that the waste gets everywhere, at least in small doses. We found that the frogs near the plant were mutated after about 5 years of operation. Most of them ended up looking like giant tadpoles when fully grown. This is the same water that some of the local ranchers used on occasion for watering their herds, and the same water that was used for a recreational boating area. yech.
Second thing is, we found out that the people who run these operations LIE. They lie all the time. Never had an "incident" they said, never once had an accident. An independent investigation (independent of the NRC, too) found that there was at least one occasion where the reactor pools had cracked and leaked into the water table, as well as other incidents of spillage outside of that event. See frogs above. However, this was never classified as an "incident".
The third thing is that the numbers for the profit of producing power never matched up to the anticipated output. Yeah, if it runs at full burn for a year, it could pay itself off we were told. Riiight. Any farmer can tell you about supply and demand. Supply too much power, it becomes too cheap to sell. So our community had subsidized this leaking boondoggle that only ran something like 2 weeks out of the year. The rest of the time, we were buying expensive power from elsewhere, and still paying out taxes on the bonds that never got paid off from "all that cheapo power".
So lets review here, folks. One, dangerous waste. Two, an industry run by lying snakes (apologies to all honest snakes, snake dealers, and snake oil salespeople out there). Three, under less than perfect or ideal situations, a power source that is more expensive and destructive to maintain than to run under real world situations (ok, real world- most folks are average...they want to go home at 5pm, and bounce their kids around, and have a beer. They are concerned about having a good track record and paying their mortgage more than something amorphous as concern for their community or their fellow man- er, humans. This affects quality of labor and output of goods and services. Nothing ideal works well under those situations, and mistakes and problems always occur.).
Don't know about most of the folks here, but after first hand experience of having lived near one of those damned silos, the community in general decided we were better off shutting it down. It is not that it COULD work, because we knew it could, given the right care and effort. It is that the people who are the ones that need to care and put out effort aren't the ones running it. They rarely will be - that is just the nature of people, most of whom rarely if ever try to succeed beyond the average of the norm.
So while many folks here will sit back and quote neatly packaged facts and figures, please remember that it is a messy and disorganized world out there...and that maybe sometimes there are good reasons why people oppose "logical and rational" choices, such as the widespread use of nuclear power.
mrgoat
'Hail Eris, baby, hail Eris...pfffffffttt.' *cough* 'Yeah.'
Why is everybody in this country (USA) so against
nuclear power? We insist on using fossil fuels, then complain that we are producing 2 much pollution. But heaven forbid we allow for nuclear energy! Its cleaner than fossil fuel, safer, lasts longer... So honestly, why does the public of our country dislike the idea of a nuclear powerplant so much?
Let's look at some of the claims in the article:
"Nuclear systems give you a chance to reduce your mass and so your overall costs to orbit," Adams says.
This is a missile-builder talking. He's clearly obsessed with one particular engineering measure of "goodness", which is called "ISP". There has been any amount of research in the last twenty to thirty years that shows that maximizing ISP does not necessarily reduce costs. If NASA's current rockets were operating at the lower end of what you can do with chemical engines then he might be correct, but they are in fact several orders of magnitude off.
Nuclear propulsion could allow single-stage rockets to reach orbit - cutting the need for expendable boosters and allowing what he calls "airline-like" access to space.
Chemical propulsion allows single-stage to orbit, if you do it correctly. In fact, NASA has already built several rockets capable of single-stage to orbit operation, but they just haven't used them that way. The second stage of the Saturn V was one of them. Launched by itself, it would have been capable of making orbit with a small payload. It had the necessary ratio of fuel to total mass.
It would also be lighter and be able to lift a bigger fraction of its starting mass into orbit - perhaps as much as 45 per cent. "With existing systems, it's more like 10 per cent," he says.
This is true, but it DOES NOT MATTER. The 90% of the mass that doesn't make it to orbit is fuel. Fuel is very cheap. The current Space Shuttle uses something like $20 million dollars of fuel to get to orbit (and the vast majority of that is the solid rockets, not the hydrogen). The total cost of a Shuttle mission is more like $1000 million. Even if you could make the fuel free it wouldn't make the shuttle any cheaper.
What is important to cheap access to space is to make the vehicles *totally* reusable, like an airliner, not throw-away like a missile. The Shuttle is partially reusable, but it still throws away a huge amount of itself each flight, and has to be totally refurbished -- a process that takes months. Space flight won't be cheap until you can fly, come back down, fill-her-up, and fly again the next day.
Even if that means that 98% of what you leave the ground with is fuel it doesn't matter until you've got total costs down to well under a tenth of what they are today, and maybe closer to a hundredth.
If you're interested in this then I highly recommend that you go and read what the Space Access Society has been writing about this stuff for more than five years now.
Um, yes, they use chemical rockets up to 30 000 feet. And besides, the nuclear rocket is still blasting several tons of hot air out its ass, so the effect on the animals will be the same.
Okay, lets assume you didn't say Africa and actually picked a place with low (or zero) population, rather then people you just didn't care about - its still risky. First, if it explodes on take off, we're probably not too bad off, but its no fun - remember that volcano a bit back, that resulted in a cold summer? That spread ash over the sky world wide. This explosion wouldn't even be close, but it could still spread the nuclear fuel over a fairly wide area, and some of it could reach the first world (especially if we made our launch site the middle of the Nevada desert or something).
Second is the nastier possibility - high atmosphere fuck-up. These are more rare, like the Ariane 5 prototype and, to a lesser extent, the Challenger (the challenger didn't get that high). There, the ship has made it a long distance and is no longer near the launch site, and could be over civilization. Also, the high atmosphere explosion means that it will take much longer to land, giving the fallout time to spread worldwide. In that case, it doesn't matter where on earth you are, you're still gene-fucked.
Of course, I don't know how much they're using, how risky it is, how bad things could be if it went up exactly. This is simply explaining people's fears. Personally, I'm all for this tech, I think its important to the future of humanity, and could finally get us into orbit. Still, the enviro's are right, this is risky as hell, and even the best rockets have been known to blow up, so I'm not sure if I want this going on.
Just how much nuclear fuel is there on the planet? How does it compare to our fossil fuel resources?
Using up nuclear fuel on creating energy sounds better than it ending up in bombs...
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I don't think so. As far as I remember the difference is that that most western reactors use water both as a coolant and to slow down neutrons (which increases the probability that a neutron will lead to the fission of another Uranium core). In Chernobyl water, too was used as the coolant but carbon was used to slow down the neutrons.
The problem now is that in a western reactor your chain reaction starts slowing down is the water evaporates because the water can no longer slow down the neutrons. In a Russian reactor the reaction rate would increase if water evaporated because the coolant would be gone, the graphite however would still slow down neutrons.
how exactly do you define radioactive material? I mean U238 is radioactive and I'm sure the bricks out of which my house is built contain plenty of it. But U238 has a halflife of a few billion years...
So I highly doubt the figures you mention. If this were the case why not just release all the nuclear waste into some nearby river
Although I find the things you mention about coal and radioactivity highly interesting (thanks for the link!!!) I have to disagree with your claims about the use of breeder reactors in France. It is true that 70% (I found different figures in some articles, but this seems to be the figure that most agree on) of all power generated in France comes from nuclear reactors. However there is only ONE breeder reactor, the Super Phoenix. The rest of the reactors are ordinary ones.
May I also point you to a near disaster whcih occurred in the Fukui prefecture of Japan on December 8, 1995 when at an experimental fast breeder reactor, approximately two tons of liquid sodium leaked out of the system. The material was not radioactive and no explosion occurred however. It has been proposed that design flaw accompanied with metal fatigue led to the leak. This points at another problem with using liquid sodium as the coolant. Sodium is a very corrosive metal, making it hard to design a pipe to carry it to the heat exchanger.
If you have ever seen Sodium react with water you know what could have happened!
This all boils down to the usual arguments for and against fission as a power source, weighed on one side by the tendency of rockets to explode on the lanch pad. I would argue against on the grounds of contamination risks, waste storage issues, proliferation (hard to control access to weapons material when you're creating so much of the precusors), and hidden costs.
That last one is the killer. If nuclear power had ever been nearly as cost effective as it was supposed to be, people would have dealt with or lived with the health and safety problems. But controlled fission is just one of those things that looks a lot simpler on paper than it does in practice. That's what killed it, despite the convenience of blaming everything on kneejerk treehuggers who arrive at the anti-nuke rally in smog-belching busses.
Hey, there's plenty of kneejerking on both sides. If I hear that stupid -- and simply untrue -- cliche about Ted Kennedy's car one more time...
__
OK, Troll-Man, I'll bite.
What have YOU done for South Africa? How many starving kids have YOU fed? How can you sit there on a computer, a frivolous item, when you could have used that money to SAVE THE EARTH?
Sign me up too! I'd take 2 if they would give me one of those creepy experimental scultures they may use to mark waste sites. Check this link for a neat discussion of that.
In our nuclear adolescence we can barely handle plutonium... total conversion of matter to energy is something I wouldn't want us to play with for a long, long time!
If you do the math (E=MC^2) the results are pretty scary. Drop a half-kilo of antimatter and you convert 1 kilo of matter to energy, resulting in a 25 megaton explosion, if I remember right.
Luckily antimatter is hard to make in large quantities (like, over a few hundred antiprotons). Even luckier, no one has invented a magic field or ray that lets matter convert itself into energy.
Antimatter would be great fuel if we had the technology to create and handle large quantities of it... but man, I wouldn't want THAT factory in my back yard!
Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space...
So, they don't want nuclear power in space, do they? What are they going to do
I know that's not the type of nuclear power these people are referring to, but I think it unintentionally illustrates the point that many people don't understand that radiation is not always a product of human activity.
I only know what engineers were saying at the meeting. I agree that the containerization of rad material is extensive. I didn't do the analysis myself, but you will find that the problem is sufficient that there are rad hazard handling provisions (containment buildings, washing houses, etc...) in the plans where there previously were none. That is, and I am talking about the design of transportation canisters here, not fuel rod delivery cans, they expect some of the trucks to arrive dirty, and they are planning for it. This came as quite a surprise to a number of interested parties.
That being said, there is always another analysis out there that says that this isn't a problem, something along the lines of what you are saying. It's another reason I would not believe analysis from anyone other than a disinterested party. Advocacy has a way of clouding your thinking.
For example, here is something from the good folks at Nevada. Again, I take no side, here, guy. But I emphatically do want the Right Thing to happen. It may not be in the best interests of Clark County, it may not be in the best interests of Duke Engineering (or Framatome or whomever), but it will be the best path to take for the nation. And neither power companies nor hysterical zealots are the proper arbiters of that decision. Don't you agree?
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
As an example, let's look at the massive NIMBY effect, as it pertains to nuclear storage in Nevada. The near-violent opposition to building Yucca Mountain is a result of how the public perceives risk. A few factors play into risk. Whether or not the individual has control over risk is an important factor - e.g., cigarettes and driving are dangerous but we can elect to do them or not, but air pollution is out of our control and therefore more scary. How well the mechanism is understood, how simple the danger is can change our perception. The toxic effects of nuclear materials are exotic and subtle, while, say, getting hit by a foul ball at a baseball game is fairly straightforward.
The problem with anything nuclear is that it is exotic and high-tech, not wholly under control, the effects are unknown, and the public must place most of its trust in officials who have been duplicitous in the past.
Now my point: nuclear storage must be accomplished. I suggest that, before you condemn the 'green freaks' for lowering the profit margins of a few energy companies, you consider what it is they were 'howling' about. Lobbyists who were salivating over the prospect of a country run on 'clean' nuclear fuel all these years never revealed the massive challenges of waste storage, and this generation must live with their legacy: hundreds of temporary storage pools dotting the countryside, each nearing the end of their design life.
Now, even though NASA has much more credibility (even though it's eroding) with the public, the public is not about to take the risk of launching nuclear payloads and/or stages.
Besides, even if the probability of nuclear debris being scattered over the Eastern seaboard is e-6, isn't that sufficient to not embark on such a foolhardy venture, which in fact it would be under that statistical estimate, due to the fact that the dangers are so great?
Ya know, it kind of irks me when people trash environmentally-sensitive citizens. We are not all Druids, but we expect to be able to put our trust in our leaders that such matters will be managed with some of the same concerns for the country and our health that we have. We generally have no position of advocacy (i.e., we don't profit directly from these projects), and I doubt that the threat of rolling blackouts is enough to make us roll over and cry 'Uncle'. It's just more important than that. I would rather freeze in the dark than glow in it (both analogies are extreme, heh).
Likewise (to stay On-Topic), taking the risk of sending nuclear materials on a trajectory whose Instantaneous Impact Point (IPP) crosses the entire right coast, or even anywhere on this planet does not seem to weigh in enough to tip the scales. Now if we needed nuclear rockets to save some of the inhabitants of the planet due to the fact that this planet is so crapped up that it can no longer sustain life, then sure, do whatever it takes to send the telephone sanitizers skyward.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Well, name-calling indicates a weak argument. I think you made my point about how duped we were by power companies. While nuclear waste storage containers can be made such that the possibilities of accidental release are fairly remote (they do tests on the containers like simulate locomotive ramming and rolling down a hillside to spec requirements), it has been estimated that about 6% of all containers, whether delivered over road or rail, will exhibit 'weeping', or a detectable radioactive emission on the exterior of the package through diffusion. That was the main concern, last time I worked on it.
Another point you make for me: how hysteria can be transmitted from one impassioned but relatively uninformed citizen to another.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Uraninum and Thorium are the most common radioactive materials present in coal ash. Thorium has been linked to higher occurences of various diseases and cancers.
l ma in.html
People living near a coal-fired powerplant are subjected to over 250% more radiation than those living near operating nuclear reactors.
Here is a link to an article discussing this issue.
http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/co
Unfortunately I cannot find the refrence to the study I quoted before. I believe it was published in the late 70's or early 80's and refrenced coal-fired generation plants built in the 1930's and 40's without scrubbers. (These plants still operate, particulary in the east)
If you read French, there is alot of information about the French Nuclear program that may be of interest. France gets over 70% of it's energy by nuclear breeder reactors, which operate at higher temperatures & pressures than any other reactor in the West. (and are thus subject to greater risk) The French have had no signifigant accidents.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Hahaha... You are the typical ignorant "activist" aren't you? Why don't you go pass out some PETA leaflets?
Do you have any idea how much radioactive material is released from coal burners? The number I have seen quoted is that an older coal plant releases over 500x more radioactivty than 3-mile island...
"Chemical waste is alot easy [sic] to dispose of."
That that to the EPA and NYS DEC... GE dumped several million tons of PCB waste in the Hudson River a few years back, leaving all marine life in the river contaminated and unsafe to eat. It is estimated that if it ever gets cleaned up, it will cost between $800 million and $5 billion to complete, and whether or not the river can be cleaned is open to debate.
Also, all power plants by their nature take time to cool down... Steam turbines require steam, which is hot and pressurized and requires time to cool safely. About 20 sailors were killed aboard a US warship during the Gulf War when an oil-fired steam turbine exploded while they tried to shut it down.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Take a Valium and chill.
A bunch of maniacs like yourself went on the warpath when spent fuel & rods from a decommisioned reactor passed through a town.
People kept their kids home from school (school is 5000 feet from tracks) others picketed, still others tried to barricade the tracks.
A local "news" station conducted a test where it smashed a locomotive into a brick wall at 80mph...
Guess what happened?
A freight train with specialized boxcars with 4 foot thick lead walls passed through the town. It arrived at it's destination 2 days later.
There are alot of things that pose a real risk to you and your precious children.
-The corner gas station spewing gasoline into the water table.
-Insecticide sprayed by your town to combat mosquitoes. (Your kids play on the lawn the next day without even knowing)
-Highly toxic solvents dumped into your watertable by commerical & industrial enterprises.
-Deadly chemical & biological agents transported by rail on a daily basis.
You don't give a shit about this stuff though. You'd rather harp on about the remote risks associated with transporting nuclear waste, because the image of nuclear destruction in burned into your mind.
-- I hope you enjoy breathing the soot and smoke from "safe" energy generation methods, btw.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
From the source cited:
While this may be true, one would be hard-pressed to name another public health issue that is as well understood and controlled. Surely it would not be air pollution from burning coal, which is a million times more serious a problem. Surely it is not food additives or insecticides or such [the dangers from these have also been greatly exaggerated] that may well be doing real harm to our health. Pu hazards are far better understood than any of these, and the one fatality per 300 years they may someday cause is truly trivial by comparison.
While I can't completely absolve whatever "enviro-lefty" ideology you refer to, you'd have to be blind to believe that the purveyors of coal-burning plants have no interest whatsoever in denigrating plutonium as an energy source. Please keep the standard of debate somewhere above the Limbaugh Level.®
--
Freeper Logic
when I was 15 our school had an educational visit from some guys from the local (50 miles) nuclear power station. I asked this question "Isn't it irresponsible to use a form of energy which creates a waste product which will be toxic for thousands of years?"
The answer - he suggested that we can store it safely and that in 50 or 100 years maybe we'll find a way to use it safely, maybe we'll have a little slot on the side of our house where we'll put pellets of the waste to fuel our homes.
I never he felt he answered my question adequately and I still don't feel anyone else has.
will they still use chemical launches? the article is unclear..
if they wont then this is good news for the critters that live around the launch pad. ever seen the pics of the animals that got blasted by the escaping gasses and flew a few hundred feet, then *splat* on a fence? lol
,
faeryman
I always wondered about this "stick it in a remote place it can't escape from" philosophy.
Personally I'd like to see it placed in a highly visible (yet perfectly secure) location, so humanity always has to continuously see that the enclosing structure remains safe, secure, and maintained.
Sure, who knows what's going to happen to that rock or salt formation under the earth after we've burrowed into it, "sealed" something in, and gone away.
But if I build a pyrimid of iron, rebar, concrete, and multiple walls of thick thick stainless steel, ala "Fort Knox"....
I propose that for such a structure it might be much more likely that we can be certain that we'll KNOW what it will do for 100,000 years. Therefore, it's the safer option. (Might not be as cheap though, but hey, gotta pay the piper somehow.)
Somewhat off-topic, but I once read something about one of the most interesting occurrences of atomic radiation in nature. It seems that somewhere in Northern(?) India there is a region with natural deposits of uranium/plutonium/? Small deposits, but enough that when there is sufficient pressure from the mountain's own weight or seismic activity, occasionally there are actual micro-'detonations' with fallout, etc...
File it away somewhere,
E.K.
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
Wasn't reusabilty a way to make spaceflight cheaper. That is why the space shuttle was invented. And i have seen a lot of pictures of a rocket that can vertically land again, refuelled and launched again, on discovery channel. A nuclear engine cannot be just taken apart, refuelled, and lauched again, since after a couple of lauches it would be very radio-active. The one thing a nuclear rocket could be useful for is for interplanetary flight, but that is not what is talked about in this article. But i am not a expert with nuke stuff. (except in computer games.....). Didn't even do a google search.
Most environmentalists including myself oppose it due to it's saftey problems. I am aware that it can be very safe but its alot harder to controll then less effiecient gas/coal power plants. First off, you can not just shut off a reactor. You can turn off the current leading into the uranium but it takes over 24 hours to began to cool. Even with with adaquate water pumping. Suppose there was a serious problem with a few water pumps. How would you shut if off?
This problem actually did happen at three mile island in 1979. The engineers who designed the control boards overdesigned them with little emphesis into making them easy to use. When 2 major water pumps failed simultaneously several alarms and lights poped up and the engineers had no idea what was happening. By the time they found the problem with the help of president carter the core was already half-way dry out of water! They already gave the shutoff switch a try last night but it was still heating up. Eventually they found a way to pump water in while half the core melted until it was cool enough to switch off the whole generator. This would never happen at an oil plant. After 5 years it was cool enough to take apart the reactor and see how damaged it was. It was only 30 minutes from MELTDOWN! This and also the diaster in Russia make me very weary of nuclear power. I believe the problem russia was also due to a water cooling problem. A terrorist can also take advantage of a nuclear power plant because even a remote shutdown will not totally turn down the plant. I am sure if you have very qualified technicians and engineers a nuclear plant can be very safe but the risk is always their and not all plant managers believe in saftey over costs.
The second is pollution. Nuclear waste is terrible because it stays hot for so dam long. How do you get rid of it? Sure coal brings mercury in the water and air but I would rather live with that then nuclear waste build up. No matter what kind of waste facilities that are developed for it, its only a matter of time before they decay. Also do you really trust private waste companies to adequately dispose of the waste?
I am sure they are plenty of good and responsible waste companies but alot of them try to cut costs. Also no known strucutre can stay up under ground for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. WIth in a few centuries will anyone even remember where the sites are? I know one is close to the Columbia river in Oregon and there are signs of leaking which are scaring environmentalists. However no tests confirm its in the river yet but after a few centuries it will be forgoten. Oregon is also on the ring of fire and is prone to earthquakes. that is pretty scare for a long term structure. Chemical waste is alot easy to dispose of.
Nuclear has a well deserved bad wrap.
http://saveie6.com/
Magius_AR
What happens if we get another Challenger incident? How far will that spread radioactive material? Will it be dangerous? I'm all for nuclear power, but when its moving at high altitude I get a bit nervous. Not because its going to go boom. But because if and when it goes boom it may spew radioactive material all over florida where as standard fuel will simply burn up. I could be wrong but that's what NASA has to convince me of.
You're exactly right -- the well-known Magnetic Resonance Imagery (MRI) is actually called NMRI; yep, as in N)uclear! A nuke technology that's much safer, reliable, granular than the old X-Ray machine technology. Not that Nuke Medicine doesn't have it's downside -- such as kids in Latin America pocketing or EATING radioactive cobalt.
Zappy5000
But I take exception to the "nuclear is better than all the pollution-producing, inefficient coal and natural gas plants" view.
Since when does the radioactive waste from nuclear power suddenly become inert, non-polluting residue? Last I heard, that crap will be with us for about 200,000 years before it decays into something less harmful!
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
This technology obviously can't be used to replace nuclear-powered space travel. But for down here on Earth, geothermal power, sounds like the best future option of clean electricity w/o nuclear power.
Finally we see the benifits of bringing NASA in on the effort. Ok, sure, those meteors the probes kicked up off Mars haven't destroyed Wisconsin yet, but it's more progress than Perot had with that "Doomsday Cannon" bullshit. This new plan is the best yet! I know some people want NASA to bring it down to 1 experiment, but NASA knows we don't have much time before those bastards get a new circus going. I know Gates said he wouldn't let MSNBC report on them again after the election, but California still has some TVs left, and when was the last time Gates turned down an audience for those subliminal messages of his?
Anyway, I think 3 experiments is fine. I mean, the rockets are insured in California. The only cost to the movement is the bees, and that won't be more than $1, maybe $4 at most to get Jeb to catch some. And plus, NASA's going to tape it, so with luck, we'll get to watch him get stung! Oh yeah, make sure your dues are paid up if you want a tape. Nobody wants another fiasco like that one with Cheyney's heart.
You dont need challenger type accidents for trouble, think Ariane type accidents. Lets assume it will go wrong, I need something more than hand waiving "amount of fissionable material needed would be minimal". Im sure it would be the minimum amount required, Im sure it would be only a fraction of the amount in nuclear reactors and nukes. What Im more worried about is if its say the minimum amount required to double the leukemia rates for the entire south west in the case of an accident.
We need to know if a rocket engine that can safely harness that power can even be made first, without assuming no accidents will happen preferrably, jumping to the conclusion that it can is no better than the reverse.
... if you're NASA and want to stifle your opposition.
Look at this from NASA's, point of view. Let's say you want to keep the current pork-barrel shuttle launching. Anything that makes it cheaper to launch will cost your department jobs. So you come up with the bright idea to put nuclear material next to a BIG TANK OF FLAMMABLE HYDROGEN!. This will make environmentalists sh*t their pants, despite the fact that both of the SRBs survived the Challenger explosion (relatively) intact - look at the footage if you don't believe me (incidentally, nuclear boosters wouldn't have the O-ring problem... but I digress.)
OK, what does this accomplish? Simply, it puts the stigmata of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island on a new launch vehicle. And by saying that nuclear rockets can get into space with a single stage, it also puts a big glowing scarlett letter on other single stage to orbit concepts, which may or may not involve muclear rockets. Thus, the public outcry keeps anything new from being built by NASA, and makes people nervous about private initiatives. And hundreds of superfluous middle managers at Johnson Space center keep their jobs.
So, kudos to NASA for this bit of judo politics - you've just kept your own race on this stinking mudball for another generation.
It is said that getting to orbit is like climbing out of a well a thousand miles deep - most at NASA would build a stone roof over that well rather than see anyone else get out.
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Vpered na Mars!
Second reason - waste disposal. These things are going to be dangerous for hundreds of generations to come! This may not be a problem just yet, but I'm fairly sure it's going to be a hell of an issue in a few hundred years. The amount of dangerous waste is going to be too big to handle properly. What do we do then, start dumping the stuff on other planets, and so on ad infinitum?
Third reason - disclosure, lack of. The energy industry has never been completely honest with the public about the hazards of its operations. Ditto the American government. These guys were trying to tell us nuclear plants were completely, 100% safe from the very dawn of the nuclear age, when they had no idea yet of the dangers involved. This doesn't inspire me to trust them now.
Fourth reason - two-headed fish. He may have been trying it on, but I have a friend who swears he has caught two-headed fish in the water near his local plant in Britain. Again, I'm not sure whether to believe him or not. But it's a nasty thought.
And I suppose you are going to personally guarantee that once launched, it keeps going until it safely leaves the solar system, instead of hanging around the system for the next ten thousand years before we hit it? You are aware that it's fairly difficult to actually get out of the solar system, aren't you?
Google results about the accident
Lasers Controlled Games!
2p?
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
And it took 1500 years before people started actually using it for other purposes. I better start saving now if I want a nuclear powered motorcycle in 3502...
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
...then the first thing they should do is help Ford, GM, et al put nuclear reactors into Explorers and the rest. Then if people wanted to keep buying their blessed SUVs, they'd HAVE to accept the risks that go hand in hand with the advantages of nuclear power.
For a pretty decent what-if concerning a nuclear powered space vehicle, check out Voyage, by Stephen Baxter. That is but a small part of the book, which is BTW quite a good read, IMHO.
~Philly
I think most of the public's (anticipated) negative reaction will be do the "uh-oh, this Nuke is gonna someohow hit my house" phenomenon. This could be solved (rather simply) by finding the lowest pop. density on the planet. The Outback was the first thing that came to mind, but there're probably "unofficial" Aboriginees (sp?) that must be taken into account.
Now, the next solution would be Antarctica. The only problem I see here is the prohibitive transport/ personnel costs. People might not like to live down there ya know? But still, it's a viable option. Who would care if a Nuke (ahhh!) blew up in down there. (NB: I know there's no real danger of it blowing up like a big bomb).
My final option, which is purely a guess, I dunno if this would work or not, is to do it on the water. I'm talking in the middle of the ocean. We have these huge super-tankers (I think they're being give names like "Ultra-Super Cargo Carriers" now) why can't we use one of them for a launch? Or, if they're too unstable, (they're fairly stable, and would be more so if you loaded them with a lot of ballast, but that's no guuarantee) make it a barge. For this, the only problem is weather, as the ship roll way to much to even carry a rocket into the ocean.
This would be pretty cool, IMO, and I think a ship could be made stable enough to put a rocket into orbit... Could a rocket handle a few feet off level? The whole setup would need to be tested extensively, but I bet it could work.
No sig for you.
The "purveyors of coal-burning plants" are not the ones promulgating absurd lies about the toxicity of plutonium. The enviro-wackos are the ones doing that. But thanks for taking the time to read the article. I'm trying to get Cohen to put this article and others on his own website with better formatting.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
For some enlightening background, check out The Myth of Plutonium Toxicity by Bernard L. Cohen. This article exposes an insidious enviro-lefty lie. Cohen has authored six books and over 300 papers in scientific journals, and he was awarded the Health Physics Society Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award, among several other major awards.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
That was a damn cool article. They actually built and ran the engine!
-
well this was an old summer camp song....
Oh, they built the ship Titanic, to sail the ocean blue.
For they thought it was a ship that water would never go through.
It was on its maiden trip, that an iceberg hit the ship.
It was sad when the great ship went down.
Chorus:
It was sad, so sad.
It was sad, so sad.
It was sad when the great ship went down (to the bottom of the....)
Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants.
It was sad when the great ship went down.
Oh the moral of this story, the moral of this song,
Is that one shouldn't go where he does not belong.
For in the good Lord's eyes, you're as good as other guys,
It was sad when the great ship when down.
Repeat chorus
Houston we have a problem! There is none of our population left to send into space. ( :
I live in Australia. We don't do stupid things. </sarcasm> Well, at least they don't tell us about them (I have to read about them Here ).
OK, so the main opposition would be to radioactive materials potentially being released into the atmosphere... Well, what about orbit to orbit craft? When we get to the point of building really big ships in Earth Orbit, nuclear propulsion would be ideal, since there would be no atmosphere to mess up. Just food for thought...
-Ignatius Gunnarsson
I didn't say that there would be actual environmental problems, but rather that the primary opposition would be from those who would fear such environmental impact. A really good way to overcome such objections would be to effectively use nuclear thermal rockets in an environment that can't be messed up (i.e. Orbit), show that there is no risk, and adapt them to atmospheric use.
-Ignatius Gunnarsson
Space research is very important for the future. Just look back through history and you'll see that the Earth has been hit with extinction-causing space objects several times in the past. In fact we're just about due to be hit again within the next half million years or so. (Which could be, oh, next year, even, might not be so far away). Learning as much as we can so we can either 1) avoid this, by using our space technology to deflect such objects or 2) get some people colonizing other planets is very important. While it sucks that people are dying and living in poverty I think it would suck a lot more if the entire human race were wiped out by something we could have dealt with if we had properly planned.
You have a good point there. Perception is key. If the public doesn't think of it as nuclear then suddenly it isn't nuclear and thus doesn't have the associated negative baggage.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
There's the fact that the safety systems at Three Mile Island worked as designed, resulting in there being NO radioactive materials released during the incident at TMI. That's right, *none*.
Yeah. That's sure scary there...
Of course, if you really wanted to be scared, we could contrast the risks of radiation exposure from commercial radiation accidents in the western world versus your chances of dying in an automobile collision.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Just to explain a layman, why the hell should this be more effective than buring the hydrogen itself to very hot water, like it's done with all rockets today?
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Yeah, that was how people thought in 1970.
Who can assure it doesn't get back to earth?
Who can assure it doesn't x-ray astrounauts?
Who can assure it doesn't destroy our satelites?
Who can assure if throwing heavily into sun, it doesn't alter it's radiation.
Who knows?
Back in the 1700 if someone told that heavily buring stuff will alter the earth climate they would have loughed at him, today it's the same with all the throw into the sun, store at the moon, jetison to outerspace, etc bullshit.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
I mean I'm a layman, but I still don't understand why a nuclear core would be more effective than the hydrogen?
How I understood rockets today you've a tank full of hydrogen and a tank full of oxigen. Highly compressed and kept cold. On start you start burning up the hydrogen with the oxygen leaving behind H20. Water.
Now with a nuclear core, I would have water already stored in my rocket? And with it I heat it up to steam to leave it behind? Or did I undestood false? But why then should be storing water in the rocket more effective than storing it as hydrogen-oxygen tanks, and why heating it up with a nuclear core is more effective than simply holding a match to the hydrogen-oxygen mixture.
---
Other poltical layman question, say I am france, now lets say an american nuclear powered rocket DOES get out of controll, just suppose for once things did went bad, and say it exploded over france - does this give me the right to start a nuclear counter-attack against NewYork?
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
... just don't call them 'nuclear'.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
I don't get why everyone's calling this a nuclear-powered rocket.
All the radiation does is heat the hydrogen to a point that it reacts at an efficient rate with the ramjet flow of normal air (20% oxygen) instead of with a huge tank full of LOX.
You still need a huge tank full of hydrogen, and you need an atmosphere full of oxygen. Which, guess what, there ain't none of in outer space. You can't get to ramjet speed without some other propulsion system that works in the atmosphere, and you can't navigate into orbit without some other propulsion system that works outside the atmosphere.
Robert Heinlein told a story 55 years ago (Rocketship Galileo) about a couple of kids who reach the moon using atomic power alone as propulsion. They evaporate zinc*. No oxidizer involved.
Basically, I'll be impressed when they make the heater for this hybrid ramjet solar powered.
--Blair
* - That link is way cooler than just the book mention. Way, way, way cooler.
People were scared by radiation in the '50s. All that "duck and cover" stuff. All that "godless commies" stuff. All that "godless commies are gonna irradiate the American Way of Life" stuff.
Three Mile Island just made the scare local and palpable. Until then, people blindly bought the promises of safety made by the nuke plant builders. Unfortunately, so did the nuke plant builders, and the nuke plant operators. So the promises and the safety went blind as well.
Chernobyl made it worse, but what made it worst of all is debacles like Seabrook, which failed to contain the politics surrounding its construction in the wake of Three Mile Island.
Nuclear power generation is safer and cleaner and less expensive than coal or natural gas, and the disposal of the spent fuel is less polluting than spewing it into the air. But the people who jumped into the industry are very sloppy with their P.R., and didn't react properly to negative publicity. They look like shills. Or they really were shills, cutting safety measures to reduce costs even more. Either of which degrades their position and keeps the polluter-fired powerplants in operation.
--Blair
Okay. This is too funny.
I post talking about Seabrook's P.R. retardation, then I go browsing their website some more and find that Blinky*, the three-eyed genetic-deviant fish, is their freaking MASCOT...
These guys are truly, truly clueless...
--Blair
* - that site is a horrific mutant freak, too...
>"evil bad guy conservatives and righteous selfless liberals"
I never said that, but hey, you're entitled to your opinion.
--Blair
It's not a lie, it's a metaphor.
If I was running a nuke plant, I wouldn't go within a million miles of selecting a mutant as my mascot.
But thanks for playing.
--Blair
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
back to the future part 2. first scene, the doctor pulls up in his nuclear powered time machine. he needs more power, so he looks through the Marty's garbage dump for fuel. how long will it be before we can start using a mass to energy converter? is it even remotley possible to start using banana pells, left over food etc and use the mass it contains to convert it into energy? how long before thats possible?
From the article: We've taken chemical rockets pretty close to as far as we can
As long as they can keep them short
</bad-puns>
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
No one should be compelled to explain why they choose to engage in risky behaviour that doesn't put others at risk. Engaging in risky behaviour doesn't remove one's right to join the debate about risks imposed on you, whether you like it or not.
Drive a car. Eat red meat. Smoke cigarettes. Smoke crack cocaine! Go skydiving. Date high-strung supermodels! People should be allowed to do these things, when they don't put others at risk, without exposing their reasons to scrutiny and ridicule. They shouldn't have to say what their payoff is. That is private.
Maybe I would like to try dating a beautiful, high-strung supermodel? Don't try and stop me! Don't try to make me explain why!
You only have a real democracy when you have healthy, informed debate. Let's let majority rule after we have had a full, healthy, informed debate.
Perceived risk? Actual risk? Of course there can be huge variance between the two.
You can make predictions of risk through modeling, through statistical examination of similar things from the past, using other intellectual tools.
It is still just an estimate.
If you are going to be honest about using modeling to estimate a risk, you state your assumptions up front. State the ones you know about at least, as there are always going to be unstated, unexamined assumptions.
The assumptions a model is based on are all good provinces for informed debate. Your opponents get to ask you searching questions to determine your credibility.
Yes, I saw Armageddon and Deep Impact too. They were highly diverting. And Liv Tyler and Tea Leoni are beautiful gals, but let's not insult the other people in this discussion by turning to a pair of movies to back up your reasoning over a serious issue.
I challenge you to cite any deeply thought out reasoning predicting the dangers of nukes in space. And, as for the difficulty of diverting even the smallest comet? I challenge you to show you have done any serious research on this question.
Here is a link to a review of Deep Impact by an astronomer, who addresses some of these questions, just to get you started. It is aimed at the average intelligent person.
I challenge you to cite any hard numbers for the estimate of how often comets smash into the earth. How many orders of magnitude separate the direst prediction from the most optimistic? Let's be frank, the estimates are very fuzzy. They depend on all kinds of assumptions we can't be accurate about. So these predictions are ballpark estimates.
Let me suggest that it is a big mistake to cite ballpark predictions as hard facts. You weaken your own side of the debate when you do so. Human nature being what it is, you taint your colleagues who do back their arguments up solidly, by association with your sloppy thinking.
So what does it mean when you say the one risk "outweighs" the other? How much credibility should we attach to your comparison of these two risks?
You try to use this second comparison to bolster your first comparison. Nuclear reactors are safer than cars.
Cars last about a decade, and we have about a hundred years of statistics on their use. And we have built and junked hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of cars. So, I won't challenge you to show that we can use statistical analysis of past events to make a very accurate prediction of how safe my next trip in an auto will be.
We have been building Nuclear reactors for fifty years, and we have built thousands of reactors for power generation. I don't know if you have noticed, this is a lot smaller statistical sample.
Nuclear reactors last longer than cars too. Should we assume they last thirty years? Opponents of nuclear power generation would challenge that assumption. They would argue that the real lifetime extends far beyond the period when it is actively generating power.
In a healthy democracy we get to challenge one another's assumptions.
May I suggest that an ongoing debate over the real lifetime of a nuclear power plant very seriously weakens a statistical argument for the safety of nuclear reactors?
But let me return to your first point.
You've got a heck of a lot of nerve telling others what reasoning they can and can't use when your own reasoning is so specious.
I kidded about wanting to date a supermodel because the risk of choosing to date a super-model obviously has nothing to do with whether I get to share in the debate over nuclear energy. Choosing to drive a car also has nothing to do with my right to join the debate, but it is not so obvious.
They come from space?? Jeezus man where have i been for all my life....
And biotech works very well in zero-gee for all kinds of reason
Give me one.
Is the cost/benifet ratio worthwhile?? Billions of pounds on space travel (which i do admit, does accelerate research in other fields) or billions of pounds on _existing_ drugs to 3rd world countries.
Lets admit it - sometimes money could be spent in better ways (millenium dome anyone?). But, alas, we are greedy: I like technology & science & exploration, and spend much money on it and encourage my government to do the same. But their are definately peoples out their who need it more.
[Disclaimer: I'm at work, and haven't access to my data, so my #'s are indubiably off by a fair margin. Close enough for government work, ha, ha.]
There is precious little uranium. It's not that common, and the high-grade ores are approaching exhaustion. Even the Canadians have nearly stripped their deposits (remember that almost all of France's power, and >5% of U.S. power is from nuclear, and still requires fuel! Just 'cause we ain't building new ones, doesn't mean we're not fuelling the old ones! But I digress...).
Assuming power prices stay high, and the lower-grade ore deposits are economical to process, we have about 50-years of ore left. If we start building new plants, or use a significant amount in these spacecraft, we drop that figure even lower. We have more oil left than uranium (using energy as the equivalency measure).
OTOH, we have >500 years of coal in the U.S. alone. Sure, we'll choke to death, but we'll have power! It's difficult to imagine using nuclear over coal, when coal is _so_ much cheaper (BTW, coal burning releases, in the form of concentrated potassium isotopes, more radiation each year than 3-Mile Island, almost as much as Cherynobyl. Dissipated over more area/time, thankfully.).
Are there solutions? You bet! One poster already mentioned the lithium reactor that was scrapped (by Bush Senior, not by Gore, I should point out). It had the nifty capability to burn, to some degree, spent fuel from our "standard" reactors, and was passivly regulated (i.e. far safer).
Not sure why these issues aren't being mentioned, most likely because 50-years is way too long term for most people, and new designs require thought, development, and an initially higher expense.
A witty saying is worth nothing - Voltaire
For an antidote to Michio Kaku, read this appraisal of the actual dangers of the deliberate injection of plutonium into the air or water of a city. Kaku is waaaay overstating the dangers.
--
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Leave some fission products in to make it "hot", and the people who weren't in their right minds wouldn't survive long enough to do anything with the fuel they stole.
--
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
--
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
The pollution from coal and oil may be very harmful in the short run, but it degrades over time, and the carbon dioxide does get reabsorbed over a time span of at most hundreds of years.
Furthermore, there doesn't need to be "more and more pollution"--the US could get with it and cuts its energy use down to a fraction of current levels by conservation. Many of the things you do for conservation have other, non-energy related benefits as well, such as reducing road congestion, improved quality of life, creating job opportunities, making the US more internationally competitive, and spurring innovation and research.
The only "ignorance barrier" is the one created by existing energy companies and conservative interests, which mislead people into thinking that their lives would be miserable if they couldn't drive a gas guzzling SUV or live in energy wasting homes.
NOVEMBER 1996: Russian Mars '96 space vehicle disintegrates over Chile and Bolivia, likely spreading its payload of nearly half a pound of plutonium. Searchers found no remains of the spacecraft which was believed to have burned up. Eyewitnesses saw the flaming reentry over the mountains in the region. FEBRUARY 1983: Soviet Cosmos 1402 crashes into South Atlantic ocean carrying 68 pounds of Uranium-235. JANUARY 1978: Cosmos 954 blows up over Canada with 68 pounds of Uranium-235 and other nuclear poisons, much of which is thought to have vaporized and spread worldwide. APRIL 1973: Soviet Rorsat lands in the Pacific Ocean north of Japan. Radiation released from the reactor was detected. APRIL 1970: Apollo 13 lands near New Zealand with the 8.3 pounds of Plutonium-238 believed to be still in the spacecraft at the bottom of the ocean floor. 1969: Two Cosmos lunar missions fail. Radiation detected as crafts burn up in the atmosphere. MAY 1968: U.S. Nimbus B-1 lands in the Santa Barbara channel off California with 4.2 pounds of Uranium-238 but was recovered by NASA. APRIL 1964: U.S. Transit 5BN-3 hits the Indian Ocean with its 2.1 pounds of Plutonium-238 vaporizing in the atmosphere and spreading worldwide.
"Get them before they get....
Just becuase these two are currently the cheapest doesn't mean that you shouldn't work towards better technoligies for the future.
If NASA wants to persue this option, I would encourage them wholeheartedly, except for one reservation.
They would do well to invest heavily in fusion research, and particularly the containment problem. As this would be a much safer and dare I say more powerful solution, as opposed to a fission reactor.
Despite the naysayers, we are much closer to a fusion power reality than many think. We are able to initiate a fusion reaction, we just havent been able to contain/sustain the reaction. (And containment is not the safety hazard many would think, as the plasma gas cools off to quickly to do any damage when it escapes.)
Am I right here? At least that's what the fusion web sites are telling me.
Anyways, if NASA were to pour a bunch of money into this problem, we could concievably kill two birds with one stone.(No pun intended.)
Then again, maybe I'm fishing off the deep end. But this at least SEEMS to be workable possibility. I am open to correction though.
Fission is not such a problem, assuming the proper safegaurds are in place.
Any thoughts?
McDoobie
...This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine.
And people have to label the pipe with high temperature as 'thermally hot' instead of 'HOT'. The word 'HOT' might mean a lot of thing to different people.
http://www.tmia.com/Cow.html
http://www.tmia.com/antlers.html
http://www.tmia.com/spider.html
http://www.tmia.com/mmaple.html
http://www.tmia.com/dandelions.html
The main home page is:
http://www.tmia.com
Most of Marvel's characters got their changes by radiation.
Lets turn our attention to the altentives?!!?
____________________ Congrants, I have just wasted 2 seconds of your life.
Such "massive deformities" are not that out of the norm. 4 and 5 leaf clover are common enough (certanly occuring more often than a 1 in a million chance). 4 leaf clovers tend to occure in patches, spending a hour looking through your lawn you will probably find some. I have found 4&5 leaf red clover like the article said and I live in virginia.
The vegtible and flower section showes me nothing I haven't seen before.
Two headed calfs are also somewhat common (we have millions of cows in america and they have short lives so...) there are cases of two headed calfs all over america. There are 32000 on google
http://www.google.com/search?q=two+headed+calf
The only thing desturbing was the claims that the farmers died of thyroid cancer and the phallic appearence of that dandilion.
Interetsingly enough, the safety systems at TMI worked just fine. Unfortunately, it was the human beings in the control loop that failed and caused the accident. Had they not intervened, there would have been no accident. Instead, here's what happened:
e x. html
The pressurizer relief fails open, causing water to excape from the reator's cooling system. (TMI relied on high pressure water to cool the fuel). Due to a design error, the valve is shown as closed on the control panel.
As the water level drops, emergency cooling pumps kick in to keep the level up and cool the core.
The operators, worried that the pumps would over pressurize and crack the reator vessel or piping, shut them off. At this point, water level continues to drop and confusion reigns as alarms start going off. Eventually, the water level drops low enough so that the fuel overheats and breaks. The rest is history, and well covered by PBS at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/three/filmmore/ind
What is often overlooked is an almost idintical chane of event occured at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio. Operators there shut anotther valve that stopped the water from escaping from pressurizer, preventing further problems. Even though they reported the event, there was no good way to get lessons learned to other plants, so TMI didn't benefit from experience.
What are the lessons from this for other industries:
1. Engineers and techies are generally are the wrong persons to put in front of the public. They assume everyone understand the tech the way they do, and realizes (as they do) that things that sound absolute really aren't. Put people there that can explain but understand the dynamics of dealing with the public, so you don't say stupid things that haunt you later.
2. Sharing information to solve problems is good. The airlines have done it for years, because they realize a major crash hurts everyone involved in the industry (literally and figuratively). That's the adavntage of open source - everyone helps create a more stable base, and competes based on value added services or by targeting specific market segments.
3. Nothing is fool proof - we fools can be very ingenious. As long as humans are involved, there is no fail safe computer, no perfect data security, no crash proof OS. Assume people will do stupid things at the wrong time, and train them not to.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
They even changed the name of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance tomography. They now call it MRI. Nuclear is BAD!
That's not the point. The point is the lack of progress, the failure to accelerate.
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
This is good stuff. Or so it seems on the surface. Faster cheaper access to space! Who in their right mind wouldn't want that?
But here's the catch: if we had another Challenger, the environmental costs could be very huge. The quick answer is that we could modify existing radiation containment technologies, such as supermagnets, and send them along for the ride. The problem with that is the weight of the craft goes up, eating away a good portion of the initial benefit gained from leaving the heavy chemical rockets - and the cost goes back up too. I seem to remember an article in AIAA's mag (expensive subscription, but fascinating) about these issues, and it seemed hopeful - but only over a long stretch of time.
Now here's my question: If, decades ago, we could develop planes like the U2 and the SR-71... why can't we now? The SR-71 is, to put it simply, the most advanced, highest-flying (officially 80,000 feet, more like 120-130k), fastest (mach 3.2 officially, more like 3.9) non-spacefaring thing we've ever taken off the ground. If we could afford it back then (yes yes I know, cold war funding was to all intents and purposes unlimited), if we could design it back then, if we could test it and actually RUN it back then... why the hell aren't we doing bigger and better things now? Why has our aerospace technology, as far as launch and flight are concerned, practically stagnated? There's the old list, including money, time, etc.... then there's the real answer: Aerospace technology is tied to politics, and politics is tied to pleasing most of the people most of the time, and your average citizen these days has no vision, no daring, no courage, no balls. No one will take a chance, no one will stand up (because these days, the one who stands up is the one who is attacked)... everyone is under some don't rock the boat mentality, everyone is terrified of taking charge, taking the lead, moving forward, taking risks. Why? Well, look at NASA: their recent mission failures (the various Mars probes) have drawn a lot of criticism. People forget that the first permanent settlement in America failed (Roanoke Island), people forget the countless sailors who lost their lives or were forced to turn back in centuries past... people want results, and now. As the ET told her, in Contact, 'Small steps, Ellie.. small steps' - but that does not mean to drag your feet, evade the necessities of the day, and pretend that we can afford, and what's more, be satisified with, the methods and results of today. We can't. We're an ever-changing, ever-growing species of curious, intelligent, driven creatures - and today will never be as good as tomorrow might be.
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
Just to explain a layman, why the hell should this be more effective than buring the hydrogen itself to very hot water, like it's done with all rockets today?
Effective? I can't say that it would be more "effevtive", the technology that we have now works. It would be more "efficient". Do we have any hydrogen mines? Do we have any oxygen wells?
The most efficient way we have to get large quantities of these two gases is to fracture water molecules with electricity. It takes a LOT of energy to do enough to obtain, say, enough fuel to propel several thousand tons of material into orbit.
To use steam is cheap, in terms of energy loss through conversion. It's easier to store water than hydrogen and oxygen gas. It's also safer. Water does not explode.
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
As a layman++, I don't see why there would be such a problem with this. The amount of fissionable material needed would be minimal.
Since there are no chemical propellants involved the risk of a Challenger-type accident would be eliminated.
As of right now, the link seems to be slashdotted, but I assume that water vapor would be a source of propulsion. Safe, clean, easy. We just need some R&D to make a rocket engine that can safely harness that power.
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
I made the same suggestion to Dr. Stanley Borowski, who is doing great things with nuclear propulsion at the Glenn Research Center, at a conference a couple of years ago. He explained to me that they (I assumed by "they" that he meant either NASA in general or at least the nuclear propulsion community at Glenn) figured that they would not be able to keep the press and the protesters from figuring out that they were launching radioactive material just by changing the name, and that it was better to be up front about it and get bad press for the radioactivity than to try to be sneaky with the American people and then get in trouble for both the radioactivity AND for trying to deceive the public by renaming the technology. I suppose that the right thing to do is to convince people on the merits of the technology, but if it were up to me I'd still change the name. I learned from Nadar's _Unsafe_at_Any_Speed_ which wins out in the public's mind: hype or technological merits. Then again, perhaps Dr. Borowski's efforts will pay off; I do seem to remember an AP poll a couple of months ago that claimed nuclear power had a greater than 50% approval rating.
Has it occured to you that the power necessary to raise a Saturn 5 into orbit & on to the moon could be extracted from an ounce of uranium. Consider the alternative of 5 million lbs of rocket exotic fuel being injected into the atmosphere... FURTHERMORE since we wouldn't need a Saurn5 to carry the 5 million lbs of fuel, much less energy would be needed therefore even less uranium would used & by product created
If we could go to the moon several times a week we could drop off the expired 'ounces' of uranium/ceramic almalgam from ALL OVER THE WORLD & clean the fuel nodules for further use. If the Ship was shot down it wouldn't take too much to parachute this nodule to a retreival location to be used again.It took mankind 1000000 years to develope the science to purify uranium into a pure energy source... embedded in ceramic it can't explode. The alternatives are living on a planet buried in haze to keep 10 billion people in a style to which they would collectively kill for.
We have had some weather that is highly unusual for any period in history. This is most probably due to government modification of the earth machine which cleanses the air & water & maintains given temperatures & air composition to within a few percentiles of what we believe they have always been. At the present time a group of scientists are toying with the chemistry of the AntArtic Ocean with a view to increasing the fish poulation of the area to save the penguins. The fact that the inceases of plankton over thousands of square miles [by the introduction of ferric oxide &phosphate]will cause a 'green bloom' changing the albedo of & solar heat absorbtion by 10% or better; doesn't seem to disturb these knot heads & may well cause the start of a polar cap melt... to save the penguins.
Amzinglyly now that these people are activily screwing with our environment, the american government has odered a ban on travel to Antartica. Interesting huh. Maybe the government doesn't want us to realize that the ozone hole[only found over the south pole] is magnetic in origin pulling down hydrogen from space to create water from ozone [climatologists have all agreed that the ozone hole will only be explained when an explanation of the extra water in the region is explained]
The same ferric oxide bloom technique can be used to cause hurricanes & create 'tracks' to lead these weather anomalies to their targets or even activate el nino. You can stop a lot of right wing organizing by drowning the mid west for instance... or causing energy drains that would keep the New England Leftist next to their air conditioners.
Richard Feynman (Nobel prize winning Physicist and team member on the Los Alamos project) proposed this concept and was awarded a patent on it. He was required to turn over the patent to the US Government for $1. He wrote about this in his popular books. Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393316041/ qid=994525411/sr=1-3/ref=sc_b_3/002-4882526-314484 8, and What Do You Care What Other People Think? http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393320928/ qid=994525411/sr=1-4/ref=sc_b_4/002-4882526-314484 8
The writer(s) of the Tom Swift, Jr. Series used the idea in some of those books for Tom's inventions.
According to the article, this not a mainly nuclear powered rocket, but a chemically fueled ramjet which uses fission rods to preheat its fuel (hydrogen) to increase efficiency.
The idea of a rocket is to throw out any mass you can lay your hand on at the highest possible speed in the opposite direction of your your flight. Your own speed increase then is proportional to the speed decrease of your fuel (and the ratio of masses, of course).
In a chemical rocket, the mass of the propellant is limited at start, so you try use propellant that will give a maximum of expansion when burned.
To achieve this, you try to get the exhausts as hot as possible, because the pressure in your combustion chamber rises with temperature.
A Ramjet uses air scooped up in the athmosphere as one part of the propellant, so it does not have to carry it along from the start. The oxygene (app. 20%) is burned with the fuel, while the nitrogene making up most of the rest is heated up along with it. A hydrogene-powered ramjet has the additional advantage that the fuel is very light (2 parts per molecule) as compared to the oxidizer (oxygene, 16 parts per molecule) or the nitrogene (14 parts per molecule).
You burn two hydrogene molecules together with one oxygene molecule and heat up four nitrogene molecules.
The idea of this "nuclear booster scheme" seems to be to use the fact that one hydrogene molecule has almost twice the specific heat capacitance as a nitrogene or oxygene atom.
Thus, the hydrogene molecules, weighing in at only 5% of the mass of the exhaust gases, contribute over 40% to the thermal mass that needs to be heated up the exhaust temperature.
If you pre-heat them to half the final temperature, you would probably gain a maximum of a 25% increase in exhaust temperature.
But is this really worth carrying a nuclear reactor into orbit ?
After all, once the air gets too thin, you have to rely on real rockets for the last few km/sec into orbit, and then you carry your reactor and its shield as dead weight. You also need fuel for maneuvering in orbit and reentry.
Finally, how do you heat hydrogene to 2000 degrees Centigrade with nuclear fisson rods if uranium melts at 1100 degrees and plutonium at 650 degrees ? I think in reactors they use zirkonium tubes, but even that melts at 1800 degrees.
Ever tried to cool one of these newfangled processors ? How much area does your heat exchanger need to heat up helium at a rate of something like a ton per minute ? What do you do, once you are in space and have cut the engine, and the fission-by products keep on generating heat even though the main nuclear reaction stopped. (remember, you were using a ton of Hydrogene per minute just keep it to somewhere above 2000 degrees a few seconds ago !)
And as for the potential cost savings, I really do think this is utter nonsense !
You can easily generate hydrogene at home by throwing the hairdryer in your bathtub (please do this only when your mother-in-law is not in!).
Your utility will burn somthing like ten tons of oil for each ton of hydrogene you generate, so a 100 tons of hydrogene for your rocket will set you back some 200,000 dollars (after some hard bargaining, and only outside california)
You would probably have to send the entire population of Houston up on a weekend trip to eventually recoup your engineering costs.
I think a nuclear drive only has its merits once you are in orbit and have all the time in the world to use generated electricity to speed single ions to several orders of magnitude faster speeds than chemical reactions could, using a small and lightweight reactor.
But then, near the sun, photocells could probly do that better.
remember chernobyl? that's why. duh.
for those born after 1986 and everybody else who hid in a nuclear fallout shelter: check out www.chernobyl.com
a few quotes about the disaster:
- "The people of Chernobyl were exposed to radioactivity 100 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb."
- "More than 600,000 people were involved with the cleanup many who are now dead or sick."
i don't know about you - but i think these are perfectly good reasons to give up on the technology. and don't get me started on the cost of safely storing nuclear waste.
the advantages of pollution vs radiation should be clear: there are filters for pollution. and it generally doesn't last 10.000 years. doesn't have the potential to directly kill tens of thousands of people, either.
Manned Ballistic Projectile...
Seriously, there is enough "space junk" out there, without it being nuclear...
Remember SkyLab falling? Yea, imagine that, but radioactive...
- colin
I don't think this stuff is risky for enviro or humanity, it's risky for politicians to keep their income.
Based on the limited and informal associations I have with nuclear engineers, most US citizens became afraid of Nuclear power right around the time of the Three Mile Island accident. The feeling I generally get is that the majority of Slashdot doesn't remember three mile island.
Back in the 70's and 80's, Nuclear power was considered the clean solution to all of our energy problems. And they were considered increadibly safe. Until one melted down. Most Americans seem to remember Murphy's Law ("Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong"), and as such, prefer to err on the side of safety. Furthermore, there _is_ a problem with disposing of Nuclear waste. That stuff doesn't just disappear.
In response to a comment I saw earlier about how the first use for nuclear power being a weapon. That really doesn't apply. We detonated the first atomic weapons back in the 1940's. Our Nuclear Power industry was booming in the 60's and 70's. It died in the 80's. People didn't just wake up and realize that this same technology had intentionally killed thousands. No, they were more afraid that it might _unintentionally_ kill thousands more.
---
George Bush:
Uranium Depleted Bullets!
Georgie Bush Jr.:
Uranium Depleted Soldiers!!
:)
Well I think it maybe because of the fact most of us believe in the SEY (someone else's yard) theory, we don't mind it as long as it is in someone else's yard. People don't like the idea of nuclear waste potentially falling in thier yard. Yes I do realize it has a small probability, but when have you know the news shows to say that? Sensatinolism is all the care about, and nuclear rockets to them are gold. If they were smart they would just use a different name for them. The general public is too stupid to care or notice
Nuclear is actually a pretty safe source of power, it's just had a rough history. We should most definitely pursue nuclear-powered rockets. If we don't, we might be delayed even longer before daily access to space is a reality. If the Bush administration safely shows the safety of nuclear power to the masses, perhaps resistance will drop. We need an army of experts citing how it's safe, why it's a better source of energy, and how it will propel our nation into the future. The average joe who knows what nuclear power is probably has his doubts.
On a serious note, it is harsh that we spend billions of dollars to lose mars landers and whatnot, and yet South Africa suffers from 50% HIV infection. *sigh*