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."

Comments

Re:Evolution in progress...

[Travoltus]

Evolution is the result of nature inflicting random mutations in the gene pool.

Re:They'll be able to deal with it....

[drinkypoo]

We should realy be moving away from fossil fuels anyway, so we shouldn't care if there exists gasoline in 50 years. Places where you need fossil fuels or similar, you can use a diesel and use one of the many alternative diesel fuels available, soon to be available, or eventually to be available.

Someone once told me that a small two stroke is 6,000 times less clean than a car, hour for hour. So assuming that is correct (with no emissions controls and deliberate burning of oil for lubrication, not to mention that they're almost never in tune, I can believe that number) you'd have to eliminate 6,000 car-hours for each blower-hour. Frankly I think it would be a good idea to eliminate all non-oil-injected two stroke engines, period - the best way to do this of course is to outlaw their sale.

You're right that our societies are based around cars. Any city with streets wide enough for cars has become a place to commute to or from. Any city without streets wide enough for cars has either been revised to add them or become a tourist attraction. This is stupid and backwards, we should be trying to live in cities and work in them too. People should work where they live. I have no good solution to this problem. Gentrification occurs through market forces and without invasive law is a reality of capitalistic societies which contain real estate of varying desirability. Since the USA is deeply into capitalism and contains every type of terrain that there is (In fact, aside from Tundra, California contains every type of terrain that there is) naturally it will end up with a population which is extremely unevenly distributed across the land mass.

I'm not worried about running out of fossil fuels. I'm worried about running out of petroleum plastics. There are alternatives but currently they remain very expensive in spite of continually increaing demand. Nonetheless we can make synthetic lubricants, so it is possible that we could take existing vehicles (it's not worth it to do this but bear with me) and convert them to use no fossil fuel related parts. Over time seals would be replaced with silicone, polyurethane or teflon (depending on environment), lubricants would be replaced with synthetics, the fuel could be replaced with whatever you wanted, even hydrogen can be burned efficiently in existing engines if you increase compression sufficiently. But plastic is cheaper than the alternatives, and easier to mold, it's better known, it's more readily available, and it's more easily recyclable, not that we typically do that. So that would be really unfortunate. The only people who would have a long term problem with us not using fossil fuels any more are the oil companies. People who couldn't afford to convert their vehicles to an alternative fuel would be highly motivated to use alternative transportation, which would open up the possibility for a lot of mass transit.