Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear 'Asteroids' Due In A Few Hundred Years
easyCoder writes "In this space.com article, it mentions a RORSAT satellite that has been leaking radioactive coolant, leaving little droplets of it in orbit around our planet. However, further down, it also mentions this, quoted here for maximum impact: 'After a RORSATs tour-of-duty was over, the reactor's fuel core was shot high above Earth into a "disposal orbit." Once at that altitude the power supply unit would take several hundred years before it reentered the Earth's atmosphere.' Wow. So ... our great-grandchildren can expect a lovely day, partly cloudy with the occasional nuclear reactor plummeting down from outer space."
Grand children? I'm celibate by popular demand you insensitive clod!
What happened to 2012?
By then Skynet will be in control, let it be the "Machines" problem.
Look out! Nulcear Sputnik!
Everyone under there desks!
...wildly positive articles that Linux is just about to break big and take over the desktop from Microsoft. ;)
....in a couple of hundred years, I'd be most depressed if they can't deal with a small nuclear reactor falling back to earth.
I mean we're meant to be progressing in our knowledge and abilities, no?
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
The Soviets have lost one or two before that have burned up, and no I'm not just talking RTG's. And since I only have 3 heads, not 5 and none of them is green, I'm not particularly worried.
Professor: About... 300 years.
Kid: ...so we have a little time.
This sig no verb.
By then, Nuclear war will have happened, and humans will be back to the stone age, or at least some quasi-magick age like in Thundarr The Barbarian. When this thing lands, an evil wizard will use its powers to "make lightning" come out of a stick or something.
That will be cool.
davejenkins.com |
Not that it matters much what an asteroid is made of when it's landing on you.
I would hope in a few hundred years we have the technical expertise to do an "orbital cleanup" job and get rid of all the crap floatind around the Earth.
Maybe zap them with laser beams!
Execute? [Y/N] _
Boy, I'm sure glad I gave up that career in space flight and instead opted for becoming a laid-off IT guy. And my guidance counselor said I couldn't make a good decision...
Mom says my
In a couple hundred years, they'll be able to clean it up before it causes problems. If not, then humanity probably isn't progressing much, and it won't be that great of a loss.
Asteroids != meteors. This is about them entering the Earth's atmosphere eventually, right? So, shouldn't we be expecting nuclear 'meteors'?
Am I the only one thinking about the Futurama "A big piece of garbage" episode? The best way to solve this would be to shoot up another reactor to deflect the falling one...
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
Well we've invested in the laser technology haven't we? And those things were designed to cook nuclear missiles...
How much material are we talking? Will this be a major event to the earth, or will the upper atmosphere just shrug and eat it up?
It's a pretty freaking big planet. If we're talking about 5kg of fissionables, that seems pretty small to me compared to the daily dosage the planet gets from the sun - although I do understand there's one hell of a difference between solar radiation and vaporous uranium - the latter's toxic as well as radioactive, iirc.
The guy who decided this was a great idea was smart. By the time it comes down, he won't be around to take blame for his smart plan, and most likely his immediate children wont be either. It's Someone Else's Problem(tm)! Thinking further into the future would require too many brain cells and/or would demand convincing stupid beancounters that they should spend crapload of money to actually *fix* the issue instead of pushing it to future generations.
A view that is so common in our society today. It's *so* much fun to find yourself in crappy situations during your workday all the time, caused by the same mentality - "Out of sight, out of mind" and "Whew, got rid of the problem for now. Next time it's someone else's problem". Yeah, you can try spending time finding out who's to blame, but usually the idiot has covered his tracks well enough so that it's not worth the effort - easier just to permanently handle the situation (or, like lots of people enjoy to do - push it back so it becomes YET AGAIN someone else's problem)
A little radiation won't kill anyone. Sheesh. The amount of radiation released by the NaK coolant drops (especially after being vaporized on hitting the atmosphere) will be negligible.
Once again, the media makes a big deal out of a little thing.
(Note that this doesn't excuse the Soviets' lack of foresight on the reactor. Then again, they did manage Chernobyl...)
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
... but these things always seemed funny because nobody was stupid enough to actually do them.
I do not plan to be working for RORSAT a few hundred years from now, so my great-great-great successor to my job as CEO can deal with it. The only thing I am concerned about is the health of my stock portfolio, which thanks to recent NASDAQ surges, is looking VERY healthy indeed.
Keep your fingers on the next RORSAT launch, scheduled for next month. It should pad my stock earnings another few million dollars.
Since 3/4 of the surface is watter, it has a high chance of hitting the watter. Maybe by that time we have a satalite fall out fall down forcast appended to the wether forcast: "Don't go walking on the beatch near post 23.4, between 16:40 and 16:42."
-- (:> jms cs.vu.nl (_) --"---
If pieces of this stuff lands in my greatx5 grand daughter's yard and it gives my greatx6 grandkid leukemia, who are they gonna sue? The Soviet Union's been Chapter 11 liquidated for over a decade by now.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I don't know why, or how... but it must be Microsoft's fault.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
we would have blown ourselves to bits with our nukes anyway.
So who cares about a nuclear reactor floating out there somewhere in earth orbit?
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Somewhere in this article is the potential for a "Soviet Russia" line that's actually funny, and yet no one's posted it.
Mom says my
Have you met some grand kids.... they are little bastards. I say let 'em play catch the bright red ball.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Evolution is the result of nature inflicting random mutations in the gene pool.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The article isn't worried about the radiation from the drops of coolent, they are worried that, as the collent falls back to earth, it could impact other sats causing a cascade that would destroy a large chunk of the sats currently around earth. And in the process render space a much more dangerous place due to the extra space junk that would be released.
A meteor is the flash of light that a interstellar object causes etering out atmosphere,the stuff going through the atmosphere is called meteoroid if it vapourizes before hitting the ground, or if it lands its called be a meteorite.
By then, the hann section will have taken care of it.
that seems pretty small to me compared to the daily dosage the planet gets from the sun - although I do understand there's one hell of a difference between solar radiation and vaporous uranium - the latter's toxic as well as radioactive, iirc.
However.. the earths magnetic field, stratosphere and all of that other junk up there in the sky protects us from most of the most harmful damage of the sun, whereas 5KG of fissionables wouldnt be Dilluted by the earth's atmosphere!
By doing what he did he secured that we as a race will have the capabilities to catch this sucker and render it harmless when it arrives.
Good forward thinking ;-)
Help fight continental drift.
This class of satellite -- no longer launched -- carried a nuclear reactor to power a large radar dish that enabled day/night snooping of Earth's oceans.
Yes, I'm sure that the Soviets were using this for day/night observation of Earth's oceans. Or possibly day/night observation of the missile silos in the US. But it's a tough call.
And just as junk emails cause a threat to network connectivity, space junk can potentially damage future space missions. NASA constantly keeps its eye on the movements of these bits of space trash.
space.com has a comprehensive list of space junk items, and who put them there.
Moderate this comment
Negative: Offtopic Flamebait Troll Redundant
Positive: Insightful Interesting Informative Funny
Nothing to see here
said Chicken Little. Were it not for your
twentieth century garbage-making skills, we'd all be
buried under twentieth century garbage.
All our plans for regular space travel, not to mention all kinds of other space uses, will be in jeopardy. Paint chips, bolts, pieces of wire, etc. We need some really smart people thinking about a solution to this.
Alaska Village invited to test cheap, clean nuclear power
ok, that's it... i'm not having kids!
"The concentration was so high that, whatever the source, it represented the most significant impact hazard for spacecraft operating at those altitudes... and still does today," Kessler said.
So man kind is once again it's own worst enemy?? Wow the chances of that are like the chances of Infinium losing there SCO(was going to put PieceOfShit, but in my vernacular SCO means the same thing now) of a lawsuit.
Yea, because the only thing that comes out of the current Solid Rockets we use is rainbows and perfume...
from the happy-birthday-to-you-happy-birthday-to-you dept.
I'm not sure what to think of this. The article has nothing to do with birthdays. However, it is, in fact, my birthday today (March 30th). As I see no other reason why timothy might have chosen that department, I can only assume that he's celebrating my birthday. I don't know whether to be flattered or disturbed by this.
by the time its anywhere near to earth, we're going to have so much debris up there that this will probably hit the stuff and cancel itself out.
i live on an alternate planet
The above blatantly stolen from Einstein
"Once at that altitude the power supply unit would take several hundred years before it reentered the Earth's atmosphere.' Wow. So ... our great-grandchildren can expect a lovely day, partly cloudy with the occasional nuclear reactor plummeting down from outer space.
Well here's a clue for the terminally short-sighted: Do you think maybe- just maybe -we'll have a better way to deal with it in several hundred years??? I mean for cryin' out loud, the damn things safe in parking orbit. It's not going anywhere for the next few centuries! Could the submitter be anymore of an alarmist if he tried? Heads up, Chicken Little, the sky is falling!
Sigh.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
.. from our children, and their children, and their children's children.. And this little legacy is just to teach them not to put their parents in crappy nursing homes in future.
Isn't it the point of this design, that the radionucleides will have decayed by that time, so their burning up in the atmosphere will be harmless? Not all radioactive materials have millions of years of half-life (and radioactivity from those would be less intense, I'd guess...)
The radioation given off by this thing is probably peanuts compared to the radiation the earth has had from nuclear tests, leaks etc, not to mention natrual radiation.
I think it is more prudent to ask what steps and controls have/are being taken to ensure that this problem gets eliminated rather than escalates.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
I agree, I'm normally a technology first environment later but lets clean up chernobyl. Then we can consider if we are responsible enough to dick around with radiation in space. Frankly so far, i'm not impressed.
I dont know that exact satelite, but most of those "reactors" are in fact thermoelectic, powered by decay death.
Those things use isotopes with a half life in a low 2 digit year range, because they NEED a HIGH decay rate to create heat. So in a few hundered years there wont be too much left to make our great - great children 3 eyed...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
"leaving little droplets of it in orbit around our planent."
Is a planent something from LOTR ? :P
Would you like hashbrowns with that?
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Really? I heard it was the final nail in the coffin of David Duchovny's acting career.
There is also a difference between having the suns radiation hit your skin and breathing radioactive material that bond to the calcium in your bones delivering a 24/7 does of radiation to a single spot.
You can stand on a floor of strontium 90 every day and not really be affected (well, I think there are parts of your skin thin enough that the radiation will cause problems), breath a few particles of it and some Bad Things will happen.
I think the stuff talked about here make strontium 90 look good. Some of that stuff takes VERY little though yellow and magenta chains grant immunity to radiation (Ok, inside joke, govt labs use yellow and magenta plastic chains to rope off radioactive areas with no other explaination leaving you wondering what the actual contamination is from. Nothing like a 2 foot square hole in the hall in front of your office with one of those chains around the very edge of the hole).
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Hmmm. If you have something in space that feels nasty to keep around there, has an engine with limited spare energy, and is controllable, why not send it towards the great bright waste disposal unit in the centre of our system? _ /Bjorn.
"We just collided with a satelite. We're venting oxygen. We have 2 minutes of air left."
"Oh no, it was a nuclear satelite! What about the radiation? Now we have 1 minute, 55 seconds of air left. I knew nuclear power was a bad idea."
If it comes down in 1 clump. If it burns up in the atmosphere then you won't even notice it when it get dispursed amoungst the tons of natural radioactive dust particles that bombard our planet constantly. Sheessh
I'll be 6 ft under when that day comes, why do I care??
It's amazing how short sighted we've become as a species. So long as it doesn't happen in our lifetimes, who cares? Most species will die defending their children. We leave them to deal with our messes. They mention one small satelite. What about the space station? One day it won't be cost effective to maintain and it will come down. Of course it'll be dumped in the ocean where we dump the rest of our trash. Mercury levels in fish are already becoming dangerous. That's just one heavy metal. A problem that I've never heard mentioned is what do we do with all the skyscrapers? September 11th should have made it painfully clear implosion isn't an attractive solution. It'll be a few hundred years before most are ready to come down. What then? Like nuclear waste hopefully the next generation will figure out an answer. What do we care we'll all be dead. It'd be interesting to see what happened to attitudes if a means was devised to prolong life to 300 to 500 years. Suddenly all this crap becomes our problem again. If there's one thing more important than how to do a thing it's how to undo it.
Even if all of the Soviet reactors reentered the atmosphere tomorrow, it would be insignificant compared to the many tons of radioactive material that was released into the atmosphere by above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Please think
:/
yes there is a lot of junk up in orbit but it really doesn't effect us launching to much.
The actual odds of us hitting anything up there is remote....do the math. Take the
(average size satilite * number of satilites) / Area of the orbit shells
Then tell me its a worry given that we probably know all the locations of man made satelites on top of that.
Pushing it up to a higher orbit for now is fine. I bet within 100 years they'll be running boosters to throw these types of objects out of orbit to crash into the sun.
I can see the people complaining now "You can't throw that into the sun! You'll make the sun radioactive!"
Offtopic, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY MATE :)
"Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING."
That's because I WAS yelling.
I mean, he's probably somewhere in the US and I'm here in the Netherlands, so he can't really hear me if I whisper. Damn lameass filter
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Even if humanity lauched every fucking ounce of nuclear material we have into orbit it would have next to no effect on the rad environment.
The sun pumps more radition into space in one second than we could in 100 years...
As long as we are not talking about things like Plutonium 238, I think we are still safe.
These droplets will quickly burn as soon as they enter in the atmosphere since Na and K are highly reactive. Both the sodium and potassium will absorb CO2/H20 becoming small crystals of inoffensive carbonates. The most dangerous compound coming from this Na/K coolant might be Argon-39 (released from the radioactive Sodium-24).
Now, Argon-39 has a beta-decay mode, with around 300 years half-life. First, beta-decay is one of the least dangerous types of decay. For example, tritium is much more dangerous than Argon-39 since it has a half-life of only 10 years. But tritium is used everywhere today, in exit signs for example, or other "glow in the dark" toys. You can order this stuff on the Internet today...
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
Perhaps we should create a series of lanes, or standard satellite orbiting trajectories. All satellites going around the earth (in a non geo-synchronous orbit) do so in a west-to-east fashion, for example, to reduce the difference in speed between orbiting vehicles and debris.
There are a lot of parallels between orbital space now and the roadway system before signs were erected.
The ______ Agenda
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
The fuel was U-235. Half-life 704 million years, resulting in a chain of 10 other radioactive elements (excluding branches) before stopping at stable Pb-207. And that's just the original fuel, not fission by-products. A veritable nuclear cocktail.
IT wil lall burn up in the atmosphere, and have no impact on earth, the reactor is small, the droplets are small. IT wasn't even that funny of a post :/.
In no way will I excuse the extreme sloppiness of the Russians in all things nuclear, but the radiation hazard from these things has been greatly exaggerated to sell newspapers, books and TV spots. Several of these orbiting Soviet reactors failed to go into their disposal orbits and have already fallen back to earth -- and we're still here. Yes, you could say we were lucky that they fell in relatively remote areas. But most of the earth's surface is still sparsely populated (such as the 70% that's covered by water).
Another thing to remember about spent reactor fuel is that its radioactivity falls rapidly with time. While a reactor operates, a significant fraction of the generated power comes from the decay of short-lived fission products. This radioactive decay heat continues even after the chain reaction has been shut down; that's why emergency core cooling is so important in terrestrial reactors. Depending on the reactor design and the fuel, a few hundred years may be enough for its radioactivity to decay to that of the uranium ore from which it was originally made. This point is often lost in the shrill criticism of permanent high-level waste disposal sites.
I do have one question about the physical properties of the NaK coolant: what is its vapor pressure? This particular alloy was chosen partly because it's a liquid at or just above room temperature, so it must have some vapor pressure that would cause it to slowly sublime in the vacuum of space. That sublimation would occur much more quickly for small droplets than large. Anybody have numbers?
Many people may not know, but post-cold war Russia has been dumping nuclear waste into the Sea of Japan. They have also been known to dock into small African ports, and "leave" their cargo (nuclear waste) behind.
The linked article notes that "16 of a total of 31 RORSAT nuclear reactors orbited lost coolant following core ejection into disposal orbits."
The biggest short term problem seems to be the loss of NaK coolant, with the number of these drops "estimated to be 110,000 to over 115,000." Wih the possibility for more of them to leak if other space junk punctures the radiators of the satellites. In the most immediate future these droplets are mostly just navigation hazards, but the amount of radiation that might remain in them is unknown, and it's not known if they're further contaminated. I'm guessing the radioactive argon in the droplets, of which there is a presently unknown quantity, is a relatively small hazard...but please correct me if this suspicion is wrong.
I'm not sure how radioactive the reactors themselves might be; the article didn't give much information on this side of the problem. If anyone is familiar with Soviet spaceborne reactor design, please speak up! My strong suspicion is, however, that even in the likelihood they are thermoelectric reactors with short-lived isotopes, there would still be enough residual radiation to make them unpleasant devices to have land on you patio. And since there are so many of them, it seems a little too optimistic that they'll all land in the ocean.
Finally, I found it interesting that the article notes "we are on the threshold, if we have not already exceeded it, of reaching a critical density' of objects in low Earth orbit, where collisional fragmentation will cause the debris environment to slowly grow even if all other sources are eliminated." How will we respond if low Earth orbit becomes too dangerous for reliable operation of satellites or manned spaceflight? How dangerous is it right now, or does anyone know how many satellites are believed to have been lost due to space collisions?
ACME ORBITAL SALVAGE Recovered space artefacts for sale! -from vintage to conteporary! Satellites, Astronauts lost articles, assorted booster fragments. AUCTION SPECIALS THIS WEEK; COMSAT 1!! historic vintage bird! Lost glove from Gemini IV! 100's of bargains!
I think you mean nucular war
I don't know if it's been discussed on Slashdot, but I think it was about a year ago when the issue was in the headlines. The voice I remember from the fray was a moderate one. He did the math, and determined that the amount and spread of radiation that would return to Earth would actually be a fraction of that which occurs naturally.
Sorry I don't remember the source or context better...
To a politician, one email equals one voter.
a RORSAT satellite that has been leaking radioactive coolant, leaving little droplets of it in orbit around our planent.
It's not an accident, it's our interplanetary nuclear defense system.
yet another example of a kind leftist government caring about the people and our planets future!
ooh time for some more Juche lesson from the great leader...
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
When our ancestors realize how much we've fucked up their planet, they will use their superior technology to travel back in time and kill us.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Operating a radar took a lot of power, more than you could get from solar panels or an RTG.
just duck and cover!
- what works against nuclear explosions will for sure protect me from a few radioactive dropplets.
Because the children he's talking about will indeed be the 14 yearolds who inherit NORAD after the corn turns them all into psychotic killers, again.
it's "jealous" not "jelous". are you jealous of other peoples' spelling abilities?
31 kg of 90% U235.
n t/rorsat.htm
Reference: http://www.fas.org/spp/guide/russia/military/sigi
There have been dozens of nuclear powered satellites launched by both USSR and USA. When the satellite reaches its end of life, the core is ejected into a higher orbit. The result of all this is there are several tonnes of nuclear waste and a few hunderd pounds of enriched uranium orbiting the Earth. You can read more about it here Nuclear Powered Space Missions
The nuclear core will have been completely dissolved by the ever present acid rain before it could ever get near the ground.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
From the article they are estimating the total mass of leaked (presumed radioactive) NaK coolant from various RORSATS as over 360 pounds (165 kilograms). The mass of the reactors is obviously going to be more.
How much material are we talking?
According to "Der rote Orbit" by Harro Zimmer, a book on the Soviet space program based on data released in the 1990s: There is about 940 kg of highly enriched uranium and more than 15 tons of radioactive material. The sattelites will stay about 600 years in orbit before coming down. Argon-39, mentioned in the article, will still be around then.
One exception is Kosmos 1900. On this RORSAT mission the core ejection was done later than usual due to a technical problem. Since the orbit was already very low then, the core was shot to an altitude of about 750 km, where it will only last about 100 years.
Will this be a major event to the earth, or will the upper atmosphere just shrug and eat it up?
This is unclear. There were two incidents in the RORSAT history where the reactor core re-entered Earth's atmosphere. Kosmos 1402 did not leave a radioactive trace while the infamous Kosmos 954 spacecraft certainly did.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_accid ents
These types of 'accidents' happen all of the time.
However, argon is a noble gas that does not combine chemically with anything, so long-term exposure from absorption into the human body is not exactly a big issue. It also forms a small but detectable proportion (about 1%) of the Earth's atmosphere, so it will be diluted by a factor of billions or trillions to one.
Sodium of course is highly reactive. I assume that it's the K (potassium?) that decays into the sodium as Na = sodium already... nuclear science is not my strong suit unfortunately. Upon hitting the high atmosphere, sodium will combine rapidly, probably with hydrogen (NaH) or Oxygen (NaO2/Na2O/Na2O2) none of which are used by the human body... may be a problem if it recombines, but again we're talking minute quantities relatively speaking.
The coolant is all in the form of liquid droplets which will be showering down over the earth over a period of hundreds of years. To be honest I can't see what the big deal is here. Yes, there's radiation showering down, but these are *droplets*, they're not going to smack you in the eye - they will break up probably before they hit the stratosphere, let alone the troposphere.
The net effect will be an increase in background radiation levels too small to measure.
The original article focuses on the hazards of the droplets as space junk... which to me seems sensible. As an earthbound radiation source these don't figure. As space junk they present not only a collision hazard but a radioactive one.
So near.. ..and yey so00oo far!!
Just in case you couldnt be bothered to track the flaw in this guy's argument, let me make it easy for you. His claim is that there will be a massive "die-off" when we run out of oil, and compares it to biological systems that face resource restriction. The flaw is that oil is not our only source of energy! Coal and natural gas can easily make up the energy differences and will last us quite some time still, so we arent going to go into energy starvation. Certainly there will be a change in the economy, as alternate fuels [note not energy sources] start to compete economically with gas as prices rise. So while the future is not all sweetness and light, its also not certain doom.
> It's a pretty freaking big planet.
It's so huge that it takes a satellite over an hour to orbit it. You could have breakfast in that time.
I stole this
OK slashdoters... I challenge you to somehow link this story to President Bush. Bonus points for making it his fault.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
"...most dangerous radioactive components will probably be gone by that time. So you'll have a bunch of somewhat harmless spent uranium..."
Bad guess. The half life of U-235 is 17 million years. The U-235 will hardly be "spent" in a few hundred (or a few thousand) (or for that matter, a few million) years.
"Well here's a clue for the terminally short-sighted: Do you think maybe- just maybe -we'll have a better way to deal with it in several hundred years???"
Well, MAYBE (as you put it). Tell you what. You rely on a mystical faith that MAYBE our descendants will develop this capability, while I'll prefer that we don't trust the future of the race to MAYBE.
We may be terminally short-sighted (I hardly think so), but you have terminal faith in "I can't tell you how right now, but things will turn out OK somehow, trust me."
It's right there ahead of 2011 and chasing 2013 hard.
***You learn something Every day. And then you die.***
"Some of that stuff takes VERY little though yellow and magenta chains grant immunity to radiation (Ok, inside joke, govt labs use yellow and magenta plastic chains to rope off radioactive areas with no other explaination leaving you wondering what the actual contamination is from. Nothing like a 2 foot square hole in the hall in front of your office with one of those chains around the very edge of the hole)."
Anyone know where I can get some of these. I've just had a great idea for a halloween costume
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Q.
Insert Signature Here
1. Crash it in the ocean. Sea water already has 0.0032 ppm of uranium in it: even if the whole damn thing dissolved, rather than just sinking into ocean bottom ooze to come back out of a volcano in half a billion years time, this might add another 1e-9 ppm to that grand total... (actually, if you just leave the satellite completely alone, this is the most likely scenario, anyway, given the land/water ratio of earth)
2. Crash it somewhere near Chernobyl. A few kilos of U-235 will be undetectable amongst the tons of much hotter stuff already lying around
3. Wait 50 years. Attach a small ion engine to it and crash it into the Sun.
4. Wait 40 years. Collect satellite and reuse the fuel
5.....
Bush was looking for weapons of mass destruction in the wrong place. Aparently there are flying over our heads waiting to rain down radiation on us. I wonder what other suprises are up there for us to find.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
This doesn't even count as news "for nerds". But it does demonstrate we think though. As Homer coined in the trash of the titans episode of the Simpsons "can't somebody else think of it", we'll just say someone else 'll fixit
Kinetic Energy = 1/2 * Mass * Velocity ^ 2
Double the velocity, and you get four times the impact energy.
From here - "In June, 1983, the windscreen of US shuttle Challenger had to be replaced after it was chipped by a fleck of paint, measuring 0.3mm, that impacted at 4 km per second." Note that this is considered a lower bound - up to 14 km/s is considered a "typical" impact speed.
The mass of the fleck has been estimated as 0.001 grams. So after conversion to SI units we have:
Kinetic Energy = 1/2 * 0.000001 * 4000 ^ 2 = 8 Joules
This about equivalent, in terms of impact energy, to a 1Kg object hitting the windscreen at 4m/sec (only with the impact focused into an area 0.09cm^of 2).
It is hardly surprising that it caused considerable damage. Perhaps the surprise should be that it did not penetrate the shuttle.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
I'm not sure a discarded satellite will come down anyway. If I remember correctly, satellites in an orbit outside geosynchronous tend to drift further out as they lose energy.
Future Martian colonists might want to get their tin-foil hats out, however.
this stuff is unbreakable, & wwworks on several (more than 3) dimensions.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... the stuff that that can hurt you has already landead?
I wish they said how many hundred years. While I am not familar with the RORSAT reactors, the waste from commericial nuclear reactors is as dangerous as the ore it came from in between 600 and 1200 years, depending on how you measure toxicity.
Bollocks beams aren't the solution to every problem.
All a laser beam could possibly to do would be to turn big lumps of radioactive debris into small lumps of radioactive debris. They'll still be radioactive, and still be in orbit.
Glow in the dark shooting stars!
Oh wait.
seriously. I hate your sig. and I'm sure I'm not the only one. it is not cool, clever, thought-provoking, cute, or funny. neither is it some postmodern statement or obsucre reference. and it isn't "ironic" if that's what you were going for.
it is nothing but stupid.
nothing personal against you; I'll bet you are a decent human being. you probably mean well.
but your sig pains my soul and I loathe it with all my being. well, most of my being, anyway. seriously, please get rid of it.
All we need to do is build a fleet ...
of nuclear powered vacuum cleaners,
launch them into low earth orbit,
and get to that big "Mr. Clean"
cleanup job
Oh, wait, isn't space a vacuum?
Okay, just forget the super-sized
"Dysons"
Doh!
This stuff is radioactive. Do we really want to deorbit radioactive debris?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"well, i'll probably be dead by the time the reactor lands. Maybe thats what the satellite controlling peeps though too. Seriously, what do you do with a nuke reactor in orbit without enough fuel to reach escape velocity?
at least they can't say we never got them anything
Don't be stupid. Several hundred years from now it will be like the street sweepers of today. Get a grip and drop the hissy fit.
A man from Lockheed, whose nuclear space program is located in King of Prussia, PA, just gave a talk on this at Penn State to the Nuclear Engineering students. To clarify what is actually up there, there is 1 US RTG core, and about 35 Russian RTG cores (that we know of). RTG is a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, they provide power for a very long time many times outlasting the life of the satellite. The reason we use these and not just solar panels has to do with harsh environments, and solar energy exponentially decays the further from the sun you get, once you get past Mars it is effectively zero. All the cores total about 1 Metric ton of highly enriched Uranium 235. The reason they are there is a simple one, when a malfunction happened on board a satellite the nuclear core was detached and shot off into a higher orbit. (on one occasion the satellite's guidance system was out and it actually sent the core crashing towards Earth. It landed somewhere in the jungle of South America, but the Soviets never found it, and refused our help.) So those cores are sitting up there in a high orbit and will come crashing down in about 600 years. As far as burning up in the atmosphere, well that was the methodology that NASA used to work with (now they are working with the idea that they should make the core indestructible and just retrieve it), however I am not sure and the man from Lockheed didn't give the impression it was. Personally I believe that's what we hope, but we just are not sure. Also, remember that we only have 1 core up there, the Soviets have 35 (at least) so who knows what to say about their cores.
What? A 2 feet square hole? Try Acme.
The flaw is that oil is not our only source of energy! Coal and natural gas can easily make up the energy differences and will last us quite some time still
Dieoff.org covers this in a lot of depth. The problem is that oil is a very, very high quality of energy that is easily transportable and extracted from the earth at a massive energy profit. The issue with coal is that large scale extraction may or may not be possible for an extended period without oil running the machines. Solar and other renewable resources just don't have the energy density or quality to even approach replacing oil. You'd need solar panels the size of earth orbiting the sun.
Largescale hydro and other projects can slow down the problem, but we really need something like fusion power to replace oil. It is a difficult problem that politicians do not want to address right now.
Perhaps a more -realistic- way of looking at it is that in the 1st world, we will not see the full impact of oil scarcity for a long time due to our advanced military capacity. There is no alternative to oil, and we will do what is required to guaranteed access in the short term.
If a cheap replacement for oil is not found (be it energy from the quantum vaccuum; fusion in a bottle; magic beans), we are in very dire straights. Enjoy the oil why it lasts. Before you jump on my post take the time to read some of the references on the Dieoff site - many of them are funded by the petrochemical industry and the US congress.
..don't panic
Ok, this Excel thingy must be good for SOMETHING, let's do the math on this huge leeakage problem: Assumptions: 100 liters spread out in a shell 30 miles thick, 200 miles up, each droplet one microliter: earth radius 4000 miles distance up 200 miles orbit distance 4200 area 221670590.4 sq miles thickness 30 volume 6650117712 cubic miles coolant amount 100 liters microliters 100000000 microliters microliters/cubic mile 0.015037328 microliters/cubic foot 1.02157E-13 -------------------- So there's less than a millionth of a tenth of a millionth of a microliter per cubic foot up there. Left for the reader: how many of these droplets will a satellite with say 10sq feet of cross section intersect per year? BTW if the coolant is a liquid, isnt it likely to evaporate into individual molecules (unless it's soemthing with super low vapor pressure, like mercury) ? Regards, Ancient_Hacker
Reuse? Recycle?
I keep telling my kids to remember where the landfills and waste dumps are, because *their* kids will want to mine them.
I actually haven't seen a decent rebutal for it yet, and I'm looking for one - mainly to calm my nerves.
I don't know if the following will be much of a rebuttal, but it might calm your nerves a bit.
To the key to understanding the article is this paragraph:
The human spirit is capable of some miraculous things. We need a miracle right now, so the human spirit had better get its' ass in gear, pronto.
The author is trying to shake us up into action. That doesn't mean that the science behind his polemic is necessarily incorrect, but it does mean that scientific correctness isn't his priority.
On the whole I do agree with much of what he says. Concept of Peak Oil is credible, that's how finite resources and geometrical growth work. The world economy is based on oil and oil shortage in inevitable.
What I don't agree is the decree to which we can cope with the depletion. The author calls alternative energy sources a hoax. According to him, for various reason, alternative energy sources aren't practical replacements for oil. I don't find his arguments convincing.
I won't suggests that there is a single solution, like going all-out nuclear, but I will suggest that there doesn't need to be a single solution. Rather there will a whole host of solutions, competing but at the same time complementary.
The author suggests that oil is necessary predicate for all the other energy sources. This is not true. Oil just is the cheapest energy source currently, so it is used in all manufacturing extensively. There is nothing to prevent us using, for example, electrical energy from a nuclear reactor to build solar panels or to operate a thermal depolymerization facility to "recycle" oil for the uses that oil is essential for.
The author does not factor in increased efficiency in, well, just about everything. We can do more with less and the evolution will not stop.
Also written off is voluntary conservation of energy by, for example, speeding limits that are build into cars.
I think the author underestimates our ability (as a species) to adept. I don't buy the part that oil depletion will devastate our economy and cripple our ability to implement renewables (that is build the infrastructure for harvesting and distributing the energy for alternative/renewable source). Have you ever considered how much dead weight there is in our economy? How much untapped economical potential there is even in the most advanced western societies? What is the portion of workforce that are involved in fields essential for survival (agriculture, energy supply, industry and manufacture (including distribution))? I'm not saying that our society will not change, but I'm confident that in a pinch we will be able to tighten our collective belts. A new Great Depression maybe, massive die-off very unlikely.
--Flam
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
We can get some idea what the re-entry will be like from history -- in January of 1978, a Soviet spy satellite with a nuclear reactor on board (not an RTG, an actively-cooled fission core) re-entered out of control and landed in the Canadian arctic. My recollection is that in this case, the reactor core failed to eject, and remained partially protected within the satellite, meaning that the core was still relatively compact when it hit the ground. In this respect, the event was unlike an atmospheric bomb test, and hopefully, also unlike the re-entry of a properly-ejected reactor core.
There were no direct casualties from the crash, but only a small fraction of the power supply was recovered. One website I found says the Canadian government billed the Soviets for $6 million (Canadian, 1978) dollars.
Google on Cosmos 954 for more.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
You may think this is a big deal, but just think about the Russian nuclear submarines that have been disposed in the oceans, during the last 30 years.
Sigged!
As Larry Niven said, "The dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Wow. So ... our great-grandchildren can expect a lovely day, partly cloudy with the occasional nuclear reactor plummeting down from outer space.
Frist Off. They arent Reactor. They are more like Batteries. And The only problem you might have from one falling to the Earth is Getting hit in your BIG FAT NOGGIN!!!!!
I dont post. I lurk.
I think that was the premise for a very bad scifi movie recently.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
And, you think that these... what do you call them... "facts"... have any influence on some of these people screaming bloody murder about anything with the word "nuc-u-lar" in it?
Ha! ha! You is so silly!
I wonder what would happen if some of these dolts found out what the sun really is? They'd probably be lobbying that we send the FDNY up there to put it out immediately.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
This is the refrain of anyone who doesn't have a rational argument but decries something based on pure emotionalism.
I say it's guff. The Earth has two sticky radiation belts and an atmosphere to heat things to 5000+ degrees before they get to land, where's the problem?
It appears the /.er that wrote the summary does not know very much about the atmosphere and the distribution of radioactive materials. The concentrated level of the radioactive materials from RORSAT satellite would be so small, it most likely would not even able to be measured. You receive more exposure to radiation from your toothpaste, dental X-rays, and Sun exposure than you would from fallout of the RORSAT satellite powerpack.
h tml.
/.ing. Mormonboy.
People are afraid of nuclear power and material but there is no reason to be. People quote Three-Mile Island incident as reason why we should not have nuclear power. We people of this freeloader society, you get more exposure every year from your dental X-rays than the people around Three-Mile received.
Some would say Chernobyl (Tschernobyl in Russian) was was a huge disaster. It was, but it failed because of the failure inherit to Communism and Socialism. Lack of capital principles to keep operations and maintenance in place. Failure on the government does not automatically mean failure in the technology.
If you want a good resource on the next generation of nuclear power go here:http://www.inel.gov/initiatives/generation.s
Keep
If you indeed assume that every person on earth gets the dose equivalent to a chest x-ray, I suppose there will be many, many cancer deaths from this!
This would not be harmless.
You fucking dumb ass. Even if it WASN'T radioactive to start with, by the time it crashes into the earth, hundreds of years hence, it WOULD be. Seeing as it is politly orbiting directly through the Van Allen belts a few times a day and getting smacked by high energy electrons. Amoungst other things. Hell, small drops of dense liquid would probably be an awesome He3 collection system.
Thr RISK, dickweed, is from being hit by a fucking drop of NaK at seven kilometers per second. Or more. As the ARTICLE iterated a number of times. But of course, you decide to focus on the nuclear aspect. Get a clue. Stop spreading FUD.
It's not like it's cleaner than coal in collection, energy production, or cleanup.
Take a Geiger Counter outside of a nuclear plant. Now take one outside of a coal plant. Hmmm... Much higher readings outside of the coal plant. What? Coal ore contains radioactive isotopes? Those isotopes don't burn up like the coal around them? Coal ash has concentrated radioactive material? The coal industry isn't as highly regulated as the nuclear industry?
Health problems? Do a google search for black lung disease. Hell, do some research on the total number of deaths from nuclear power generation and coal/natural gas since nuclear power was introduced. Nuclear engineers will normally receive more radiation from a single round of CAT scans than from their entire career at the nuclear plant.
Chernobyl? You mean the substandard plant where operators intentionally ignored warnings and pushed the envelope of safety much too far? The final death count was less than four hundred. Yes, the town of 75,000 had to be abandoned. This is an argument for not intentionally doing stupid things with your power plant.
The worst U.S. nuclear disaster? 3-Mile Island? Go back and check your history books. Look up the number of deaths. Zero. Look up the number of injured. None.
As it stands, U.S. nuclear power technology has fallen behind. Take a look at some of the French or, even better, German designs. I find it hard to believe that anything even approaches their level of safety or efficiency.
Terrorist attacks? Personally I'd be more worried about an exposed warehouse of natural gas where someone dropped a match. How about an oil refinery? Yeah, that'll be easy to clean up...
Nuclear waste? How about the euphemism (according to rabid environmental groups) "spent fuel"? Know why they call it a euphemism? Because all spent fuel in the U.S. is waste. Know why? Because in a bid to stop nuclear proliferation in the seventies, Jimmy Carter banned nuclear enrichment in power generation. No breeders for the U.S. Unfortunately for Carter, Europe gave him the finger and continued using nuclear -- including breeded reactors. Who listened? Japan. However Japan just sends its spent fuel to Europe for re-enrichment and buys it back for further processing.
What's the big deal. Let's take Diablo Canyon on the California coast. Only two turbines. 1/5 of the power production in the region. 20%!!! If anyone is curious, take a look at the number of >0.1MW powerplants in California. Diablo Canyon is on the coast about 2/3 of the way down from the top of the state. Look at all of those dams. Imagine all of the trucks, materials, and associated air/water pollution necessary for bringing the fuel to the plant.
Folks in California wouldn't even sell Diablo Canyon the water they needed even though the water/steam used to turn the turbines doesn't ever come into contact with the reactor; It isn't radioactive. So in addition to providing power, they had to set up a reverse osmosis water desalinization plant to get the water from the ocean. And it still gives 20% of the power for the region.
For all of the people whining about the number of birds killed by power poles and cell phone towers, I encourage you to take a look at the number of birds killed by power-generating windmills.
Solar? Anyone want to do the math on the number of panels necessary for even half of the national electricity usage? What about the power and materials required for their inital production?
Tidal? Will someone explain to me how land-locked regions would be able to take advantage of tidal power?
Fuel from soybeans? That would be a nice supplementary energy source. However, let's stop making food. Let's dedicate the nation's farmland to soybeans or other similar fuel generation crops. Reduce that number by the fuel necessary to s
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Swedish studies show there _is_ an optimal radiation exposure level for best health - and most folks get only about half of it. Therefore, bumping up from the typical 10-12 microroentgen background radiation would be useful from a public health standpoint, just like the increased rish of oral cancer from the use of flouridated water and toothpaste is more than outweighed by the greater decrease in bacteriologically-induced heart attack and other benefits of reducing oral bacterial load. Public health issues and the best solutions to them are sometimes counter-intuitive, until you actually run the numbers. Look up "radiation hormesis" to learn more.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
So we have a collection of RaDiOaCtIvE stuff at the far edge of low earth orbit - just think of the paranoia of the average person when they're informed of this
Could be this is the political camel's nose under the tent that will get $$$ flowing for anti orbital hazard clean up
'Three hundred years' and 'certain' is a lot better than 'maybe within the next sixty five million years' and 'highly unlikely to hit us' - the perception with slate wiper events is that they're just too rare for us to worry about them. An imminent, nuclear hazard might actually get politicians moving the right direction.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Sorry, but I have to say this, your "standing on" SR90 is just BS. Sr90 emits betas, not alphas, so the "harmless if not swallowed/inhaled" argument does not count. If standing on bricks of SR90, you'd get radiation sickness really soon. Google it yourself.
Does anyone else think a ton of money can be made by some company who can put a private ship in orbit with the only purpose being to collect space trash and clean up the orbits around the planet? Sign me up for that.
Then I post about a movie where
cryptically referenced, maybe, but -1, flamebait? What about the fact that this movie tries (among other things) to show people's reactions to such a danger?
Ah well, some moderator must have been turned down last night, and needed to vent some anger I guess...
>Nuclear Waste is a problem we cant deal with. The risk of nuclear plants is far too much to be justified. Therefore, I am anti-nuke.
And apparantly a moron to boot.
It has to be said, Timothy is illiterate.
Some twat modded the OP "offtopic". So I'l burn some more karma and repost it, even though several hours later the error has been corrected, it's still unforgiveable to make spelling mistakes when you're posting barely a dozen paragraphs a day.
Do you want to live next to a nuclear reactor -- ive got an offer, NO ONE HAS TO live next to a nuclear reactor if we get smart about our consumption -- and I mean quick. Western suburbanites need to wake the fuck up.
... Pro Reality.
If you want to build a nuclear power plant right next door to me, I'd be all for it. Not only would I rather have a nuclear plant right next door than have a coal plant 100 miles away, why should I be expected to lower my standard of living, and why should other people be denied the opportunity of achieving whatever standard of living we're capable of providing just because you're afraid of some technology that you think you understand but don't.
I want to be able to heat my house without burning oil, wood, or coal (it doesn't have to be a 3000 square foot house either. I live in 800 square feet right now). I want to drive to work without burining gasoline (and I don't have an SUV), or be able to take a train without it burning diesel (to generate electricity no less!). I want the population of the planet to have all the luxuries I have without having to cull about 4 billion people for it to be sustainable. The only technology we're currently capable of that can provide these things is nuclear. If we're going to maintain our current sociatal situation, or if we're going to regress, then what's the point?
Oh, then there's this:
This can best be summed up by my saying I am
Let me give you a healthy dose of reality. People don't like to change. Hell, people don't like other people to change. THere's tons of bullshit out there about preserving cultures to the point that we have cities full of old worthless buildings we can't knock down for historical reasons and people who try to revivie dead languages. People go to war over cultural differences, yet we even try to preserve the cultural differences that cause war. Changing the behavior of people enough to gain the "efficiency" and "responsiblilty" nescicary to stop burning carbon fuels *and* not have nuclear power is not just as close as you can get to impossible without going over, it's also far more dangerous to our society than the worst nuclear power accident we're capable of.
The headline, summary, and the posts to date seem to have all missed the point.
The real issue is the now solidified droplets of coolant which are a mixture of sodium and potassium metal. Unlike the reactors themselves which are few in number and fairly easy to track, there's more than 100,000 of those buckshot sized metal droplets out there, just waiting to collide with something. Since they're traveling faster than buckshot, they could present quite a problem.
Your chemistry is a bit off. Sodium does not form an acid (NaH), but rather sodium hydroxide (NaOH).Your reactions sound a bit like those of Nitrogen (N) rather than Sodium (Na).
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
For all of the people whining about the number of birds killed by power poles and cell phone towers, I encourage you to take a look at the number of birds killed by power-generating windmills.
Awesome! We get electricity and food!
Sun Bad!
Sun make skin turn read in Big Blue Room!!!
Sun BAD!!!!
ME miss OGG, have lots of opensouce CDs for OGG to smash! But no OGG
Animal cruely must continue for the following to work:
1. Club baby seal
2. ???
3. Oil!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Don't worry about it. My great-grandkids Boy Scout troop will clean that thing up during their annual "Cleaner Low Earth Orbits" drive. Just hop in the ol' GM SpaceBurban, blast up to orbit, toss it in the back with the handy Maneuvering Arm/Cupholder, and run it on up to the dump on the back side of the Moon. And the boys get to practice free fall maneuvering in their new suits! Woohoo!
DR. STRANGELOVE Well, that would not be necessary Mr. President. It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Of course it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. (Slams down left fist. Right arm rises in stiff Nazi salute.) Arrrrr! (restrains right arm with left) Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years. PRESIDENT MUFFLEY But look here doctor, wouldn't this nucleus of survivors be so grief stricken and anguished that they'd, well, envy the dead and not want to go on living? DR. STRANGELOVE No sir... (His right arm rolls his wheelchair backwards.) Excuse me.(He struggles with wayward right arm, ultimately subduing it with a beating from his left.) Also when... when they go down into the mine everyone would still be alive. There would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead! Ahhhh! (Right arm reflexes into Nazi salute. He pulls it back into his lap and beats it again. Gloved hand attempts to strangle him.) GENERAL TURGIDSON Doctor, you mentioned the ration of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned? DR. STRANGELOVE Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Sorry, but American space activity has been steadily devolving for the last few decades.
40 years ago, we sent men to the moon
30 years ago, we had what was meant to be a "permanent" human outpost in orbit
20 years ago we drew up proposals to send humans to Mars, and designed singe stage to orbit craft
2 years ago, we routinely put people into orbit
Today we sit on the ground, and say space exploration isn't worth the economic and human sacrifice.
We're not even going to try to do anything about those reactors until one of them lands in a major population center. By then, I'm not sure we will even remember what those falling chunks of radioactive metal are, much less how to move them out of earth orbit.
In any sufficiently sized (non-trivial) population a certain percentage of assholes exist.
-or-
Every person displays asshole behavior a certain percentage of time. In a sufficiently large group there will always be a number of people displaying asshole behavior.
It's a numbers game. Look at how many environmentalists there are. For that matter, look at how many slashdotters there are.
Before you post this kind of garbage, ask yourself the following question: how *much* nuclear material was in the satellite? A kg? Half a Kg?
So whatever isn't leaked into space will spread *how* much radioactive material over *how* *much* area? Will it even be enough to light a watch dial?
mark
There are many natural sources of radiation out there, let's get this in perspective, this ain't an orbiting chernobyl, it's a small mass of moderately radioactive debris that will decay over time.
All radioactive isotopes have a half life and their radioactivity halves over that period. So cool it, get the facts and stop getting hysterical every time someone mentions radioactivity. Every time you stand on the beach of near a granite mountain you're increasing your radioactive dosage more than this satellite ever will for your grandkids.
Meteoroid - still in space
Meteor - currently falling to earth and burning up
Meteorite - a rock on the ground
Soooo... you can't be hit by a Meteorite unless someone throws it at you and the only way to be hit by a meteoroid is if you're in space.
check out www.gaspricewatch.com which lists the best gasoline prices as reported by consumers local to a particular zip code. I am not affiliated with this site nor does the site favor anything but the best posted price.
Once the object gets out of the Earth's gravity well, it doesn't just automatically drop towards the sun, it instead assumes an Earth-like orbit. The energy used getting out of Earth's gravity well is smaller than the energy it would take to go down the sun's gravity well.
Not to mention that when the material was boosted up into high orbit, it was because it had decayed to the point that it no longer produced useful amounts of power - add a few centuries and you've got a block of barely-radioactive heavy metals wrapped in ceramic.
Yup. that could devastate entire cities? neighborhoods? Well, anyway, I wouldn't want it to hit me on the head when it came down.
Clear, Dark Skies
Claiming that an RTG released more P-238 than all previous nuclear explosions, when the manufacturing process for a nuclear bomb involves getting rid of as much P-238 as possible before it's ever exploded. (P-239 is fissible, P-238 is not and a lot of work goes into getting rid of it to produce a viable bomb.) The layman would read that as "the RTG released more plutonium than all previous nuclear explosions," which is probably the point - to mislead the reader into thinking the danger from an RTG is like the danger from a nuclear bomb.
Average annual radioactivity release from a 1000MWe nuclear reactor in the early 1990s: 4.8 person-rem/year
Average annual radioactivity release from a 1000MWe coal-fired plant in the early 1990s: 490 person-rem/year
Source
Yeah, I'd prefer the reactor myself on the basis of radioactivity, not to mention the lack of soot, or the various other things (cadmium, sulfur, NOx, etc) that come with the carbon.
Besides, now around some reactors, you get iodine tablets to help prevent uptake of radioactive elements into the thyroid in case of a major catastrophe. Cool to show your friends!
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Yes, U235 has a half life of 17 million years give or take. However, one Iron isotope have a half life of 3.1 x 10^22 years. That is considerably longer. I've never heard of someone becoming ill or perishing from the radioactive decay of Iron.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
We need enormous orbiting magnets to suck up all the random orbiting debris...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everyone its bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everyone can stand a hundred chest x-rays a year. They oughta have 'em too.
Frankly, I'm all for lobbing our trash as fast as possible in a direction perpendicular to the plane of our solar system and wishing the retreating garbage-barge the best. Nobody wants tons and tons of nuclear waste around -- even when it's no longer radioactive, it's still toxic. Some of our waste carries dangers we don't even know about. So ship that stuff as far away as possible. It's like the ultimate carpet to sweep things under -- cubic light years of empty space.
I really can't see any downsides. Even if a million years from now some alien lifeform shows up on our planet to complain that our radioactive trash crashed on their planet, we'll very easily be able to claim that we launched it a million years ago and couldn't possibly have predicted that it would hit any world at all, much less an inhabited one.
Um... unless they see this post. Better mod me down, just to be safe.
The enemies of Democracy are
Why can't these be launched towards the sun?
that within a finite space, we have infinite crude oil?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
less panacy rant, more education.
"A problem that I've never heard mentioned is what do we do with all the skyscrapers? September 11th should have made it painfully clear implosion isn't an attractive solution. "
Building are seldom imploded by flying a plane into them. and my seldom I mean never.
When the skyscrapers become unsafe, some large construction firm will win a bid to take one apart(how they chose to do it, I'll leave up to the experts). This will give jobs to lots of people. Bacasue when they go down, another will go up.
I'm not going to touch your radioactive waste and space station examples, because yout lack of education in these areanas.
Sheesh, dosn't anybody remember how to deal with these guys anymore?
The enemies of Democracy are
Think about it. The nuclear fuel rod was not magically produced in outer space, it was made by refining thousands of tons of material on Earth. Sending it into orbit reduces the amount of radioactive material on Earth. The fact that coolant might rain down and be even distributed over the Earth is nothing compared to what you get every time you are near a rock or in a basement.
Now, a core falling could be bad news, but I should hope that in the next few hundred years technology would advance enough to retrieve and dispose of such a thing.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
That was, without a doubt, the most hilarious thing I've heard all day. Thank you, thank you :)
That's cute, quoting the "National Center For Policy Analysis" to make a point about wind power. No partisan agenda there...
Still, the basic point of my post remains - 165kg is a drop in the bucket. Of course, the global environmental problems occurring recently have been due to the addition of an awful lot of drops. But IMO environmental concerns should focus on issues where there's a reasonable chance of taking effective action.
It is possible I am wrong as well. It has been a number of years since I took a chem course, and I rarely get to use those skills, working in IT. Actually, as I was driving home this evening, I started to wonder if I had spoken too hastily. NaH seemed wrong, especially as NaOH is such a common compound, but both had the right number of S shell electrons. Some of the O compounds seemed a little odd, but my boss kept wandering around my office, so I didn't have the time to look too closely. In short (if possible after such a lengthy digression) I apologize if I spoke too hastily.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
I say.... send it to the moon.
Indeed. But if the death rate is not statistically higher than those not exposed, the deaths specifically due to nuclear plant radiation is noise. However, if the death rate after 3-Mile Island went up past standard deviation, then it would be useful.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. The only question is if the timeline is ever considered too short.
Strictly speaking, I would expect someone who exercises regularly and was jogging within sight of 3-Mile Island to live longer than someone without a nuclear reactor nearby who sits on their fat ass all day. The same for smokers and for people who eat large amounts of red meat.
Is that sufficient clarification of my position?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
But I don't know of any sizeable amount of birds killed by nuclear.
Heh heh. Just kidding. My bird quote was mostly to get the "What about the animals?" knee-jerkers to stop and think a moment.
My main issue with wind power is the power output. Assuming you live in an area with copious amounts of wind, that wind velocity remains above a certain level almost all of the time, and the land isn't being used for anything else, wind power generation is great!
For the rest of us (>90%?), wind ain't gonna help a bit with our overall energy demands. If the wind ain't blowin', the power ain't flowin'. As long as the uranium gets shipped at least every few years, nuclear keeps the lights stay on (with output in the orders of magnitude over wind).
It's not partisanship. It's reality.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
We just need to find more creative ways to generate electricity.
Me too! It'd be like a giant scarecrow to scare off the dumbshits.
Let me guess: you think nuclear power is pollution free and environmentally responsible because there's no unsightly smokestack?
Sounds great--just dispose of the high-level waste next door to you too. You're safe, those drums won't start to leak for decades.
"Healthy dose" was a poor choice of words.
What's the half life on this kind of thing? Let's say it falls back into orbit 300 years from now. How radioactive will it still be?
Moderators, be gentle...
--- 11 meters/second, or 24 miles per hour - the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow. Really.
Let me guess: you think nuclear power is pollution free and environmentally responsible because there's no unsightly smokestack?
No, I understand the environmental impact of nuclear power compared to the alternatives. No, it's not polution free, but it's the cleanest option we are currently aware of that provides enough energy.
Also, the quantity of highly radioactive waste can be signifigantly reduced through reprocessing, but I guess you're against that too, huh?
"Healthy dose" was a poor choice of words.
"Healthy" was for you, not for me. Unless you like war and chaos. Bullets can be harmful to your health. There are reasons why there hasn't been a war in the continental US in your lifetime. Throwing away the ability to perpetuate those reasons can be more harmful to your health they you probably realize. Energy builds economies, and strong economies build military power. The types of people who don't care that they are exploiting their natural environment for resources are the same types of countries that use their military capability to expand. There are at least two notable governments with these charactaristics in existance right now. Your economy doesn't have to be in the tank for very long before your military crumbles and your nuclear deterrent starts to deteriorate. Look at Russia if you need an example of that. Mismanagement of energy policy can lead to a major shift of world power in your lifetime. Such a shift will not work out in your favor unless you enjoy repression. Luckily, our elected officials have access to intelligent analysis, and know not to compromise our energy production capabilities. Unfortunatly, as long as there's such a strong anti-nuke lobby that means we'll be building lots of gas and coal plants and energy costs will continue to rise unnessicarily.
Ok, so you're mistrustful of technology, and think we can't deal with nuclear waste. The unfortunate thing is, that the problems that are really in the way of proper, safe disposal are politcal, and not technological. They're also the same political problems that will guarantee that there will never be a signifigant number of wind farms in the US., and that cause us to continue to operate outdated and unsafe nuclear facilities beyond their rated life cycle instead of replacing them with newer, safer facilities.
Instead of being anti-nuke, why don't you do something productive and be pro-something. Pick a viable solution and advocate for it. The problem you'll find is that there are a limited number of viable solutions. The reduction of energy consumption certainly isn't one of them.
Didn't I see this on Futurama?
The solution is really quite simple, we launch another radioactive fuel core on a direct collision course with the first, knocking it off its trajectory giving us another couple hundred years.