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Bio-Weapons That Eat Ammunition and Fuel
1gor writes: "This article in The Observer mentions Pentagon's plans to use genetically modified bugs that 'eat' the enemy's fuel and ammunition supplies without harming humans (they also want to to pacify the enemy by spraying Valium). Imagine an escaped virus destroying the Earth's oil reserves and its whole industrial potential? Curiously, the military may implement the environmentalists' ultimate dream!"
Nuclear power is an environmentalist's dream. they're just too busy protesting about the word nuclear they don't see it.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Once again Timothy couldn't let something by without stupid editorializing.
Very few environmentalists want us to drop off a petroleum-based economy precipitously. It will take a few years for the excess 5 billion people to die off as the population returns to what's supportable in a pre-mechanical society, and they won't go quietly. You'll find few trees and few wild animals outside of the remote Canada and Siberia.
What we want is wise use, not no use. E.g., it's better to have 30% of the car fleet using hybrid gas/electric motors with 80 MPG, not 30% of the fleet monster SUVs with <15 MPG while the idealistic zero emissions cars are <1% of the fleet because few people are willing to buy cars that can never go more than a few hundred miles.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
This has already been going on for years now. Several companies now do this for toxic waste/Superfund/oil spill sites. There are LOTS of strains of bacteria and fungi that are 'customized' for different wastes; usually engineered from strains already surviving on the existing waste. Has not seemed to get out of hand though this was an initial concern (and could conceivably happen).
And you can get yours here!
PHase III PDM-7 Microbial Cultures. Visa and MasterCard accepted. Call for pricing.
"PDM-7 Microbial Cultures contain a blend of live, synergetic, all natural ATCC (American Type Culture Collection) Class I Bacteria. These bacteria were specifically chosen for their accelerated ability to metabolize Petroleum Based Products, Greases, Fats, Food Particles, Hair, Cellulose, and Detergents, converting them into carbon dioxide and water."
Don't rub them on your head.
Or here!
Or here!
Or here!
Sounds like me someone doesn't really know a virus from a bacteria. A virus does not have a metabolism, hence it can not 'break up' an oil spill.
I like science fiction, but not if the authors leave the science part out of it, and replace it with 'words that sound cool'.
Nuclear radiation or spent rods? The prior isn't an relative issue since coal plants release exponential magnitudes more radioactive material than nuclear power plants. The latter is a strange issue; the "spent" rods are actually have more potential energy than the new, or pure uranium rods.
;)
There are many atomic derivatives of uranium fission, not the least of which is plutonium. It is very possible, indeed much easier, to reach critical mass with spent rods than pure uranium rods. (technically, all you have to do is smash them together). You can put a pure uranium rod into a pool, and nothing happens, but if you put spent rods in the pool it glows blue/green (ala Cocoon, the movie) for a day or so. (YMMV)
The point would be that there is a harvestable energy source in "spent" rods, that can be remanufactured. Thermodynamics of course comes into play, and there are stil residuals, but nevertheless, the waste from one nuclear chamber is potential fuel for another. There are marginal returns in many cases, nevertheless the eventual breakdown leads to non-radioactive materials.
I only know this because I worked at a nuclear power plant; this is what I soaked up.
Cheers
They are part of the italicized text, and so, part of the original submitter's comments.
Nearly all military vehicles, with the exception of aircraft, use diesel as fuel, but kerosene is not that different anyway. Anyone who is around large amounts of it knows that it's a constant struggle to keep "bugs" out of it so they don't consume it or clog fuel filters, you have to put additives in to kill them. What fantastic high-tech bio-weapon is needed when it's already happening?
Allow me to repair your ignorance. It is actually NOT possible.
A nuclear explosion requires a certain (high) concentration of fuel, as well as a certain ratio of volume to surface area - or it doesn't happen. This is why making a nuclear bomb is actually very difficult. In a fission reactor, the material isn't concentrated enough, and it isn't unstable enough. Further, the material isn't in one large chunk - it's separated into rods. And further, there's no mechanism for imploding the reaction material to reach critical mass. So no, actually, despite what you read in old sci-fi, it's not physically possible for a fission reactor to explode. Take the rods out, overheat the thing, whatever. The ABSOLUTE worst is that it gets really hot and melts - which is very bad, but very rare, much rarer than a coal or gas explosion (so the overall risk is lower).
The only major nuclear disaster in history is Chernobyl, which was not a nuclear reaction but a chemical reaction; the graphite coolant caught fire. The graphite reactor was a bad design, and all reactors today are water-cooled. Further, Chernobyl had no containment building to speak of, and was run by idiots.
People speak of Three Mile Island as if it was some kind of disaster, but it didn't hurt anybody or anything. The worst that happened from TMI was the destruction of the reactor itself (which is a bit of a disaster alone, since those things cost billions).
A complete meltdown is a disaster, but not the end of the world. It would be nothing like the destruction wreaked by even a small nuclear weapon.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Each year, more petroleum seeps up from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico into the world's oceans than in every human-caused oil spill in history combined.
There are entire ecosystems near these oil seeps whose primary source of energy is not solar photosynthesis, but breaking down petroleum and natural gas.
Yes, petroleum spills by people cause temporary and localized deaths of organisms and disruption of ecosystems, but they just aren't that big a deal in the overall scheme of things.
I mean something called bio-diesel. Apparently, Mr Diesel (Rudolph?) who invented yon diesel engine originally planned for it to be used on vegetable oil, and it got sidetracked for petroleum. And bio-diesel is far less polluting, easy to produce (about as difficult as home brewing beer), and, depending on your country's excise etc, can be cheaper than petro-diesel.
But for me the truly funky thing is that it can be made from *used* cooking oil: how's that, just empty out the chip pan and brew a bit 'o' diesel. And it makes your car smell like chips instead of icky hydrocarbons. Any vegetable oil will do, so a variety of crops can do the trick on a large scale, which makes it renewable as well.
Oh, yeah, and most diesel engines can run it *without* modification, or with only very minor mods. I know of someone who's gone to bio-diesel on his farm: he goes to the local fish and chip shop and relieves them of their old oil (and they used to pay someone to take it away, so they're happy) and makes enough bio-diesel to keep all his farm equipment running. No engine mods, bugger all pollution, and that there oil kept out of the ocean. Truly funky.
Close enough for half a cigar. The cause of the explosion was hydrogen. The RMBK reactor is almost unique in that it uses a graphite moderator and a water coolant (which also acts as a moderator).
When the control rods were removed, there were more neutrons in the reactor, more power was produced. Steam formed in the water system, steam absorbs fewer neutrons than water, the reaction increased.
Eventually a coolant pipe failed, steam was sprayed on to a mixture of red hot graphite, hit uranium and hot zirconium - all of these produce hydrogen (and in the case of graphite, carbon monoxide). There was a hydrogen explosion that blew the core apart and started the graphite fire which pumped the volatile radionucleides into the atmosphere.
As for being idiots. Hmmm a tricky one. Certainly the experiment was badly designed, and they definitely did the wrong thing. But the experiments needed to be done.
The Soviet plants relied on diesel generators to provide electrical power to the pumps in the event of a powergrid failure (nuclear power plants rely on off-site power for driving their pumps), however no one knew how long it would take to start the diesels. So they did the experiment.
And there are a number of reactors that are not water-cooled. Whilst the US PWR is clearly the most common design in the World, there is a substantial generation from gas-cooled reactors. Mainly in the UK, which has the Magnox and Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGR).
Magnox was designed to provide plutonium for the British Bomb (it allows on-line refuelling which ensures that the plutonium has a low percentage of Pu240) and is now being phased out. The AGRs are the mainstay of British power production, but have turned out to be economic disasters. Britain was moving to the PWR when the entire programme was cancelled because of its spiralling costs. One station was completed at Sizewell on the East Coast.
And finally, those people who are talking about reprocessing as being clean. Sorry, the British have more experience of this than anyone else, and it is a nightmare. Environmentally, you are left with huge amounts of high-level waste that needs to be stored, low-level waste is produced in enormous quantities (most of which has gone down the pipe into the Irish Sea). You produce plutonium that no one wants (MOX fuel will age reactors faster than uranium fuel) and the recycled uranium is far more expensive than fresh fuel.
If it wasn't for (Uranium) Jack Cunningham MP, a senior minister in the 1997 Labour government (who happens to have the Sellafield reprocessing plant in his constituency), Britain would probably have closed down its reprocessing operations. Now after a scandal involving faked quality control at the MOX plant, we can't sell fuel to Japanese power plants which was the justification for THORP and MOX in the first place.
Sellafield is a scandal which is poisoning the whole nuclear industry. British Nuclear Fuels Limited (inspiration for IIF in 'Edge of Darkness'*) would dearly love to sell its Westinghouse reactors around the World, but no one trusts it. Well apart from the US DoE who is employing it to clean up Hanford in Washington State.
Oh and Tony Blair, who wants to privatise the profitable bits and leave the taxpayer to clean up BNFL's mess.
Best wishes,
Mike.
* What do you mean you haven't seen it - go get it now! Trust me, it is one of the best TV programmes ever made.
"but they just aren't that big a deal in the overall scheme of things"
What argument is that? Neither is the WTC event (tm) - especially given that the same number of people die in the states every few days from obesity. Whats a few dead fat fucking americans between friends?!
Your argument that oil spills are not a big deal is invalid. I am not saying that it is wrong, you may very well be right that oil spills are no big deal, but the argument you have laid forth here to prove it does not work. And instead of proving that they aren't a big deal, this argument actually supports using the microbes.
Your argument suggests that because areas where great amounts of oil are released (the sea floor) do not receive damage, that areas where much smaller amounts of oil are released (surface spills) will also not receive damage. For this to be true, both areas would have to deal with the oil in the same way. You yourself suggest this is not so.
Setting aside the matter of different concentrations on the surface compared to that seeping up through a large volume of water, there are the oil-eating microbes. In areas where there is regular seepage of oil corresponding populations of oil-eating microbes have formed to metabolize the oil. This serves to remove what is toxic to many plants and animals and use it as positive for a niche player in the ecosystem. In areas where there is not a regular seepage of oil, the populations of these particular microbes would be small to non-existent, certainly not large enough to handle the increased concentrations of oil that a spill would present.
As the two environments would react differently to the presence of oil (one ecosystem using it as a food source for one part of the stable ecosystem, the other being contaminated to a large extent as it lacks a sufficient population of the microbe), the syllogism does not hold. What would make the syllogism hold would be a constant, uniform level of the oil-eating microbe in all areas of the water. Unfortunately, having little to eat on the surface most of the time, oil-eating microbes would not thrive there naturally. It would take artificial introduction of these microbes to make the two environments equivalent. A small amount of naturally occurring microbes would eventually metabolize the oil to a large extent, but it would take longer and significant damage could be done to the species in the area in the meantime. Therefore, for oil spills to not be a big deal, we should add the natural microbes to areas where they are not naturally found.
There may be other reasons to suggest that oil spills are not a big deal, and I may agree with some of them, but this argument is not enough to prove it.