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Program To Detect Smuggled Nuclear Bombs Stalls
Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that a program to detect plutonium or uranium in shipping containers has stalled because the United States has run out of helium 3, a crucial raw material needed to build the 1,300 to 1,400 machines to be deployed in ports around the world to thwart terrorists who might try to deliver a nuclear bomb to a big city by stashing it in one of the millions of containers that enter the United States every year. Helium 3 is an unusual form of the element that is formed when tritium, an ingredient of hydrogen bombs, decays — but the government mostly stopped making tritium in 1989 after accumulating a substantial stockpile of Helium 3 as a byproduct of maintaining nuclear weapons. 'I have not heard any explanation of why this was not entirely foreseeable,' says Representative Brad Miller, chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the problem. Helium 3 is not hazardous or even chemically reactive, and it is not the only material that can be used for neutron detection. The Homeland Security Department has older equipment that can look for radioactivity, but it does not differentiate well between bomb fuel and innocuous materials that naturally emit radiation like cat litter, ceramic tiles and bananas — and sounds false alarms more often. In a letter to President Obama, Miller called the shortage 'a national crisis' and said the price had jumped to $2,000 a liter from $100 in the last few years. With continuing concern that Al Qaida or other terrorists will try to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States, Congress has mandated that, by 2012, all containers bound for the US be inspected overseas."
The moon is covered in helium 3. There, we have to have a manned lunar colony in order to be safe from terrorists!
This is my sig.
hyperinflation ensues
Now this is The roxerz!
Sure, this was foreseeable. But at the time nobody needed large quantities of this sort of radiation-detection gear, and nobody foresaw circumstances where we'd suddenly develop a huge demand for it. So when production was stopped, nobody saw the consequences as being any major problem.
Helium 3 is also used in cryogenic coolers that reach temperatures below 0.4K. These are used for cooling radiotelescope bolometers and other exotic scientific instruments. I remember pricing it a few years ago for a bolometer we had that lost its He3, and being astounded at the price. Sounds like it was a bargain back then.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
"With continuing concern that Al Qaida or other terrorists will try to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States..." Who, exactly, has continuing concern about terrorist nuclear bombs smuggled through US ports?
Having these detectors would be about 1000X more effective at protecting the USA from attack compared to the GWBush/NeoCon approach. Instead the idiots decided to waste $$$TRILLIONS in the Middle East searching for non-existant WMDs... hoping the current administration is better in the long term.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html
Congress has mandated that, by 2012, all containers bound for the US be inspected overseas.
It's a good thing that it is impossible to place a container on a non-commercial vessel. It is also good that it is impossible to NOT ship a weapon in a large cargo container.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
"Congress has mandated that, by 2012, all containers bound for the US be inspected overseas."
Eh, what'll it matter. It'll only be in effect for a few months.
This just means the terrorists will simply drive it over the border. It's not hard to smuggle stuff into the US without going through an inspection point. Just look how well 100% inspection is working for curbing the drug traffic. They hide it in coffee beans in shipping containers. Anyone reasonably crafty will just hid the radioactive materials in a lead lined container.
I typed two posts prior to this one, and backspaced over both of them. The first was the thought that the machines were already there and this publicity was a rouse to try to catch trafficers. Then I realized I was just feeding the conspiricy side of my brain. I then typed up a joke about how I wasn't going to fall for their ploy to seize my precious nuclear product. I then decided better of that given I didn't relish the thought of MiB showing up at my front door based on some lame FBI web crawler hit. So yea, here I am. How's it going guys?
I'm guessing there's also a shortage of Tritium which decays into Helium-3 with a half-life of 12 years. If you have enough Tritium around and wait long enough, you'll have fresh Helium-3. You can make more Tritium by exposing Lithium-6 to a high neutron flux like that found in nuclear reactors. The neutron splits the Li6 as LI6 + n => T + He4. Russia might have quite a bit of it laying around owing to the size of their nuclear arsenal that we could buy.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Run 3He through a polarizer and feed it to someone in an MR scanner, and it lights up the airspace inside the lungs like a Christmas tree. Makes it dead easy to see ventilation defects (emphysema, etc.) and functional issues that are very difficult to spot with any other imaging technique. But Homeland Security Theater has jacked the price so high that even by medical-procedure standards it's prohibitively expensive.
We've spent lots of hours designing and building a reclamation system so that we can collect the stuff, one MOUSE lungful at a time, and pump it into cylinders which we'll ship back to the supplier for purification. Yes, the amount a MOUSE breathes in a study is expensive enough to justify reclamation.
We're also working on xenon imaging, which does some things almost as well as 3He, and some things better. It's still hideously expensive, but at least you can get it from the atmosphere, instead of painstakingly milking it from aging thermonukes.
Helium-3 is also used for detecting neutrons in Neutron scattering experiments. Neutron scattering is used in lots of materials research, and for many purposes it's the only feasible technique. The strain on Helium-3 reserves is already felt when building new detectors or an old one needs the occasional refill.
I have programs that stall all the time. Just run it under a debugger and you'll see why almost immediately.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
How do you get 0.4 Kevins? Is this some sort of midget? It's dangerously close to 0 Kevins.
My home town nearly went to zero Kevins back in 1978.
It was a particularly cold winter, and we were already down to 3 Kevins (due to their low popularity at the time).
Kevin Thomas had flown out to be with his son's family for a wedding and got stuck in Boston for a whole week due to the weather. 2 Kevins left.
Kevin Lemmer was rushed to the hospital during my shift. I still remember the call from the EMTs as the ambulance was rushing toward us. "It's Lemmer. He's in bad shape. Drove right into the fucking ditch." We called the time of death at 6:15 PM.
At 6:16, all eyes turned to room 2217. Kevin Spencer was 82 and on his death bed with leukemia. His family being Catholic, he had already been given his last rights. If he couldn't hold out until Kevin Thomas returned, we would be at zero Kevins. Sure, we had 4 perfectly healthy Calvins, but they're just not the same.
It was 7:15 when Carla Brooks and her husband James burst through the main entrance. "She's not due for 2 weeks!", James exclaimed. As the staff bustled around getting the Brookses settled, they exchanged darting glances with each other. This was their first child, and they wanted to keep the baby's sex a secret. Of course, in a small town, secrets don't get kept. Nearly all of the hospital staff new that the child about to rip open Mrs. Brooks was indeed a boy.
The delivery was routine, and Kevin Brooks was born healthy, if a tad underweight, at 10:52 PM. Kevin Spencer was pronounced dead at 10:54.
It was, as they say, a close one. Kevin Thomas arrived two days later, the weather having finally cleared up. To this day, we still rib him about it.
Cedar Falls is currently at 5 Kevins.
There's seriously a program aimed at developing and deploying a fleet of nuclear bomb detectors at every port in the United States?
What kind of ridiculous bullshit is this? Did someone at the DHS watch a few episodes of 24 to come up with this? It's movie-plot anti-terrorism at its absolute worst: imaging ridiculously specific scenarios and spending enormous amounts of money to guard against them.
As if a terrorist organization resourceful enough to obtain a *nuclear fucking weapon* would somehow have difficulty bringing it into the country. This is a nation into which several metric tonnes of cocaine and thousands of illegal immigrants are successfully smuggled every year, and someone imagines that they'll be able to erect a perfect wall to keep a few kilograms of metal out of the country?
What congressman's nephew is being paid to make these detectors?
You call twelve months plus twelve days of a year "just a few months"?
You call 11 months, 20 days, and a few hours "twelve months plus twelve days"?
It seems we know how to do just about anything these days, but lack the ability to actually get it done
What a coincidence that the cousin of the DoHS's director owns a chemical manufacturing plant that can produce helium 3...
Ken Welch is dancing a jig in reverse.
Is there anything going on in the U.S. today that is NOT a "national crisis"? We need a break.
No one petitioned a military judge to order his arrest.
It's illegal to speak out against things?
Get your own free personal location tracker
International Committee on Future Accelerators Beam Dynamics section newsletter abstract under the URL.
While the emphasis in the six articles is on transmutation of nuclear waste and accelerator driven nuclear power plants, the same accelerators can generate neutrons to breed tritium from lithium. The fusion demonstration ITER will have blanket with lithium to demonstrate breeding since its fuel is a deuterium-tritium mixture.
It would be lovely for the US accelerator community if the US DHS forked over $1.5B for a system to breed tritium and, in its spare time, transmute long lived waste isotopes so used fuel rods would decay to radiation levels below that of natural uranium ore within one thousand instead of one hundred thousand years.
http://www-bd.fnal.gov/icfabd/Newsletter49.pdf
The theme is "Accelerator Driven Sub-Critical Assemblies (ADS) and its challenge to accelerators." This is a topic that could have a deep impact on the future of our society. As we all know, developing clean energy and protecting the environment are two top priorities in countries around the world. ADS is an accelerator-based technology that may provide a viable solution to these major problems. Jiuqing collected 6 excellent articles in the theme section. They give a comprehensive review of this important accelerator field, including valuable lessons learned from the past.
mod parent up, i burned my points and my karma for the day!
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
large mass of plastic and scintillating material is all that's needed, someone is just making excuses
RTFA. It states that He-3 is being supplied comercially by the US and Russia. Total available ~20,000 liters/year. With DHS, annual requirement is 65,000 liters/year. I've seen another article, which I didn't bother to search for, which suggested the Russian's had cut back on selling the stuff until the price went up still more.
A byproduct of CANDU reactors is Helium-3.
I'm not the first to note this, evidently.
Apparently it is, if you're in the military and the "things" you are speaking out against are the United States and/or its armed forces. Uniform Code of Military Justice, article 134: "GENERAL ARTICLE: Though not specifically mentioned in this chapter, all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces, all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces, and crimes and offenses not capital, of which persons subject to this chapter may be guilty, shall be taken cognizance of by a general, special , or summary court-martial, according to the nature and degree of the offense, and shall be punished at the discretion of that court."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_article_(military_law)
Admittedly that's the final "catch all" article intended to close the loopholes above. Still, by the letter of the law...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I probably stalled because it is near impossible to tell the difference between a smuggled nuclear bomb and a TSA approved nuclear bomb in check luggage.
I'm sure there's plenty on sale in Jita.
Just get the bloody shipping regs to recognize that a wee bit of BF3 in a radiation detector is not a major hazmat issue. BF3 tubes tended to be the norm for neutron detectors until a change in the HAZMAT regs a few years ago... The regs just need to be amended to include an excepted quantity rule for BF3 in a rad detector. Problem solved.
Since we're talking about mouse lungfuls, either a Bulgarian airbag or Bulgarian funbag would give an answer with fewer leading zeroes.
shh don't spoil his ignorace by letting him whine. we don't want people to believe they actually have freedom afterall.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
please please mod this noble sir up
I just finished working on this project a year ago. I worked as a sub-contractor for Thermo-Fisher Scientific, one of the prime contractors, to DNDO, DHS, and CBP. It was an interesting project. My team was responsible for developing the command and control software for these systems. Had a lot of ups and downs. The technology works fairly well. We did A LOT of testing of the system in both laboratory and field conditions in order to validate the software. Got to travel to great and wonderous places like Nevada Test Site, Southampton, UK, and Antwerp, Belgium. Who'd a thought something like this would put a monkey in the works?
Funny anecdote: When we installed the system in Southampton, UK, the British and Eurpoean Union representatives were most interest in if it could detect "Cigarettes"? Man, they wanna make sure they collect that tax on your smokes!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
The article mentions a cost per container of as much as $12.00. Who pays this cost? Is it the shippers? Will it lead to higher prices on imported goods. The program is bound to be in effect for a long time to come and these are important questions.
I have nothing more to add.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Regarding nuclear fusion. It is often said that Hydrogen fusion will produce Helium 4 which will then emit a neutron to become Helium 3 - some argument about the Helium 4 having too much energy to remain that way. To digress a bit - this was used as evidence against cold fusion (the neutrons should have killed them). So I looked it up and Helium 4 is far more abundant than 3 both on earth and apparently on the moon. As you can see by the abundance of kids balloons, we are not out of Helium 4 which is in much wider use. So can someone explain to me where all the Helium 4 comes from that was supposed to emit neutrons and turn into Helium 3???
Thanks,
'I have not heard any explanation of why this was not entirely foreseeable,' says Representative Brad Miller, chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the problem.
To some extent it wasn't foreseeable - this program is part of the fallout of 9/11. OTOH, we've had this program coming down the pike for years.
In reality, the DoE has been asking for funding to expand tritium production (for a wide variety of uses) since the mid 90's (correctly foreseeing that there would be a shortage of a material with a limited life span) and Congress has routinely refused the funding.
You don't need to land the bomb to cause lots of damage. Anyone resourceful enough to get hold of a nuclear bomb will probably know about the detection system and the best risk avoidance is to detonate it before unloading. You could detonate it below the waterline (in the ship) or above ground (hoisted off deck by the port crane) to be as destructive as possible. No detection possible unless you scan cargo 20km offshore.
WASHINGTON - Yet another national crisis shakes the American people as the White House announced that America is in dire need of a break from all those national crisises. "It's really getting to me," a visibly aggravated Barack Obama told the press, "first we have yet another terrorist warning, then we're out of nuclear weapons to build nuclear weapon detectors and just this morning I had three more peak oil predictions on my desk." Obama then curled up into a fetal position, rocking back and forth, mumbling to himself: "No more crisises, please, make it stop!"
"If we look at the numbers, it's really clear that we're currently at a record crisis high," told us crisis expert Albert E. Backenhauer in an interview. "We've got the onslaught of national crisises an economic depression brings with it in addition to the ongoing wars on drugs, terrorism and consumers. If this keeps up and, say, the Super Bowl gets canceled because of persisting bad weather, this country might go tits up." He then looked at our reporter like a cow looks at an oncoming train and added: "Oh shit, now they're recursive!" before proceeing to jump out of his window.
The internet has yet to take a stance on this delicate issue, although seasoned YouTube pundit dirtysanchezlol offered a silver lining of hope by reassuring us that "everythings normal youre still all gay fags".
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
ROFLMAO, come on mods, he cant be serious.
No one is THAT stupid surely.
Then again whenever someone writes Barrack "Hussein" Obama you just never know if they are real paranoid right wing nutjobs, or just satirising them.
Words cannot describe how much I enjoy their terrified thrashing around now a decent intelligent black man is President. Fun times.
dog are controlled by the cops...
they are partial...
tools with black box logging are not..
As a low-temperature physicist, I've been following this issue for some time now, as have many others in my field. At a conference this summer there was a panel discussion on the problem, and how seriously it is affecting not just the low-temp physics community, but many others, as well. A few years ago we could buy He-3 for a few hundred dollars per gaseous liter; it is now pretty much impossible to get your hands on any new He-3, and the prices quoted are in the many thousands of dollars per liter (for when it does eventually become available). As another poster above pointed out, it's used in dilution refrigerators to achieve sub-Kelvin temperatures, necessary for many scientific experiments, as well as some other specialized applications. As others have also pointed out, it's used for MRI; and obviously it's used for neutron detection. There are myriad applications for He-3, and only some of them can be achieved with lesser efficiency with other materials. Part of the reason prices were so low until very recently is that the government had tens of thousands of liters stockpiled, collected over time from tritium decay. A decision was made to start releasing the stockpile, and so global production was bolstered by this stockpiled material, which, while substantial, pales in comparison to the amounts required by DHS. The stockpile has been steadily shrinking for a number of years, and even if we were to access it and use it, that would be a very brief respite to the shortage. He-3 production has been decreasing as we disarm, and it's mind-boggling to think that nobody in the government saw this coming. They're basically the only ones producing He-3, so you'd think they'd be able to do the simple math and see that the amount they'd need to implement their plan would be leaps and bounds beyond what even the US and Russia combined could supply. On a slightly more technical note, this is also very bad news for the low-temperature community. As mentioned before, dilution fridges need He-3 to function, but they also generally need to be immersed in a bath of liquid He-4. With the global He-4 shortage that has also recently been in the news, most new dilution fridges are now what is called cryogen-free, not requiring the bath of 4K He-4 to stay cold, and thus not requiring hundreds of dollars of helium to be cycled through the system daily. However, the cryogen-free fridges happen to require a significantly larger quantity of He-3 to get cold. So not only are we forced to move away from more traditional helium-cooled cryostats, we're also currently unable to fill any of the new type of fridge, at least until the hold on He-3 is lifted, and then probably at significantly increased prices. In the most recent issue of Science there was an article about this, and there's a quote from of one of the dilution fridge manufacturers that if things don't change for the better, they will be out of business in a year. All thanks to the monumental short-sightedness of DHS.
Why don't they just buy tritium from Canada, we have lots at the Tritium Removal Facility at Darlington.
The reason Helium 3 is not being produced from Tritium is that storage and generation of tritium has been made politically impossible after a few accidents involving releases near the public. Oddly this doesn't seem to be mentioned on the wikipedia page. But google finds some of the coverage like this from LBL.
Then again whenever someone writes "Barrack Hussein Obama" you just never know ...
That's why I took all those headlines on 2008-11-05 with a grain of salt.
One:
We're not out of He3, not even close, and you can buy a He3 detector if you can afford it. I just did, and I'm neither a government guy, or in some eyes, a legit scientist (my degree is elsewhere). But I do nuclear fusion (D-D) research here on my own time and money (programming made me well off) and needed some good detectors for my work, called up LND, and no problem - they are expensive to be sure, but not unavailable, not hardly, they really wanted a sale. And more He3 can be made, just like the stuff we had was "made", primarily. You can thank a recent administration for releasing zillions of tons of our strategic reserve of He (some of which was recoverable He3) because they didn't want to pay the rent on the salt domes it was stuffed under. Thanks George. Was it somehow affecting your profit kickbacks from wanna be oil wells in the same area of Texas?
But more is coming out of just about every gas or oil well all the time -- you just have to decide it's worth saving (and pay the money to separate it from all the other junk, but it's an easier separation than for heavier elements). A He3 detector doesn't need all that much. A really good one might be a 1" diameter tube a couple feet long stuffed with 10 atmospheres worth, but it takes quite a lot less than that to make a decent detector. That one, I bought, it cost about 2.5k$. They go down in price and sensitivity to about $700 (it's kind of a limited competition market, they get $700 for sneezing in your general direction and $100 for a line cord) and up to the sky for really large ones, which are really just a lot of little ones stuffed into the same moderator.
Two:
No you can't just use more other kinds of detectors to get the same sensitivity. There are only so many neutrons coming out of the source, and the other types have far lower quantum efficiency re detection, but once you're got a moderator, the ones that don't "hit" a detector are more or less lost, no second chance, maybe, certainly no third.
The B10 class detectors (B10 lined tubes or BF3 gas geigers) are only sensitive to slow neutrons, just like He3, but far less quantum efficient (and He3 ain't that great). You can't just stuff them all over the place and not have a moderator to up sensitivity beyond a point.
And -- they also see gamma rays etc, and produce one heck of a background count on things like cosmic rays and kitty litter (which does not give off neutrons, very few things do in fact).
To discriminate against the increased background count of the Boron types, you need to count longer -- much longer.
(See statistics 101, it's kind of depressing when the counts are about the same as background --)
There are other neutron detectors, scintillator plastics that are large area and can see recoil protons from collisions with fast neutrons, and an interesting design called a Hornyak detector, some of which I've made myself. Not in the same class, and see "background". I doubt we want to push screened things into underground mines to kill off the cosmic background.
Which isn't even the only one, there's still that kitty litter. That's what they make gamma ray spectrometers for, by the way, and we're not close to running out of the stuff to make them out of, any of the several technologies that can be used, depending on the resolution you need. And, oh, gammas are what mostly come out of weapons fuel, along with alphas that are easy to shield against, a piece of paper stops them. And oh yes, daughter products -- radon and so on that are more or less impossible to stop leaking out. The sad thing is, a nuke just doesn't make that much noise about itself until bang time.
Would you like to wait essentially forever if each screen took an hour, and there were 10,000 things an hour needing it?
At every port of entry? It adds up fast.
Not that this is really needed for the DHS job, they just like to have the nicest and best of everything *your* money can buy them, to cover their butts. Now that
maybe the koreans can help?
It's the time for us to build the Jupitoris fleet -- Mohammad Ikhsan
inspected overseas
Date of scan - 24 Nov 2009
Results of scan - No radioactivity detected
Operator - Osama
impossible to NOT ship a weapon in a large cargo container.
Definitely. I'd be more worried by the ones that arrive under their own power :)
Sorry if I'm dense (!) but if you just wrap your nuclear bomb in a lot of lead, doesn't that make it pretty much invisible to any detector?
Well, not directly He3 I guess, but we did talk about a helium shortage coming... http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/14/0219246
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Competitive technologies are available. Here's a commercial small, low-cost neutron monitor. That uses zinc sulfide with boron. Boron detectors seem to be gaining on helium-3 detectors. What seems to have happened is that Homeland Security locked onto a specific detector technology and supplier, and now the supplier has problems. This is a bureaucracy problem, not a technology problem.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, a small factory made glow-in-the-dark clock and watch faces across the street from the bakery and kitchens for my school district. They used a paint which released tritium as it dried, and their fume hoods vented out the roof (why not? plenty of air circulation!) and the prevailing breezes carried a nice dose of alpha particles across the street on most days to settle out on the food that we were served. When somebody somewhere was tipped off that this arrangement may not have been completely kosher, some local muckrakers and a couple of curious scientists showed up with a Geiger counter. One dish in particular, sunshine cake, was damn hot and legend has it that the name alludes to its brightness....I blame all my societal maladjustment on this lapse in food safety.
Kids, don't trust the food just because the lady with the hairnet says it's OK. Get it checked out by one of the guys in the hazmat suits.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
ROFLMAO, come on mods, he cant be serious.
I wasn't. Unlike you guys, we right wingers are capable of self deprecation.
Words cannot describe how much I enjoy their terrified thrashing around now a decent intelligent black man is President. Fun times
Well, at least we know that all of this so-called social justice crap really is the euphemism for hating white people that we suspected it to be. Having heard "finally its our time" and all this other crap from so-called minorities, we can say with great confidence now that 90% of liberal identity politics is just racism. I mean, if, as Jesse Jackson says that it would be stupid for a black guy to vote against the health care bill, then, why should a white guy vote for it?
This is my sig.
Because it's good for whites as well? Or is this some kind of battle between blacks and whites where the whites must come out far ahead?
Cheney will be cowering in his Bunker
That is all
Canada has had heavy water reactors for years. Unlike American light water nuclear reactors (which have enriched fuel and a light moderator), Canada has less-enriched fuel, but uses heavy water as a moderator. Once spent fuel rods are removed from the reactor core, they are assembled into bundles and stored in pools of water. Most of the radioactivity is gone, but what little remains makes the water slightly radioactive, and as a by-product of that, a certain amount of tritium is produced. You want it baby? We got it. Take all you want, all sales final. Remember the half life of this stuff is 12 years, so 50 metric tons of this stuff will still have 0.48 kg radioactive in 200 years. (50 metric tons is 50000 kg, and 50000 * .5 ^ (200/12) = 0.48).
The NYT article says that the current demand for H3 is 65,000 liters per year. WTF!!!
I can't believe that so much H3 is needed for new screening machines. It must be true that the machines are leaking the H3 or contaminating it and thus needing to replenish it all the time.
If it were private industry rather than Homeland Security that wanted the screening function, the regulators would force them to refine the design until they need only one liter or less per machine, and then to protect the asset so that it never leaks or gets contaminated. One liter per ten years per screening machine sounds like a more reasonable quota.
I attribute this crisis to the inability of government to regulate itself.
By the way, I live on my sailboat and cruise internationally. I know that hundreds of thousands of recreational boats enter the USA every year. Every one of them is capable of carrying one or more nuclear warheads. Are these boats screened? No. In many cases they just call a 800 number to report their entry.
With China having their RMB tied to the dollar, the difference between the euro, Canadia/Austalian dollar, Yen, Peso vs. the RMB will become so great, that western nations will finally say enough is enough and take action.
Well, at least we know that all of this so-called social justice crap really is the euphemism for hating white people that we suspected it to be.
You know, when someone hates a class of people, let's say Catholics (the boy-rape really makes them a convenient target) they don't hate every member of the class. At the same time, Catholics will take ownership of people ("they are good catholics, there are 42532362632 of us") until they become too inconvenient, and then they decry their actions. Perhaps we the light-colored people of the world should take up our lead pipes and smite down the racist whites so that the rest of us can move on down the road. No? Then I guess we'll just have to accept that many persons of color will despise us all, since we all look the same.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I mean, we have no Helium 3 left, lets tell everybody so they know that they can import nukes without being found out. I would have thought it best to keep this sort of thing COMPLETELY under wraps, what the enemy don't know doesn't hurt.
If it were hypoxia, you'd get the same effect from helium. You don't.
If it were hypoxia, that would imply that we aren't co-administering oxygen. We are.
It's an anesthetic, albeit a mysterious one, and like other anesthetics, it exerts its effect even without hypoxia.
"Heavier" has nothing to do with it, unless you're filling a room with xenon from the bottom. Most places don't have the budget for that. It apparently costs around $30/liter -- better than 3He's $2000/liter, but still pricey.
"... the 'price had jumped to $2,000 a liter from $100 in the last few years.
Profit! Further evidence that the free market works: the sound of one Invisible Hand clapping.
-kgj
Maybe we should just buy some from Iran...
...I have a fluorine-based metabolism, you insensitive clod!
This. Exactly this.
Whoever modded this +1 Funny instead of +1 Insightful must have misclicked. The capabilities of the gen IV plants are absolutely unreal; in addition to their staggeringly more effective power generation, they have safety features built into their design that make them the generators of choice. They would also provide us the ability to deliver ultra-high-temperatures for next-generation materials work, produce hydrogen for fuel cells, and desalinate water. That's basically all of our problems solved except carbon scrubbing from the atmosphere.
++
I was replying to the post below yours.
Watch otu though your racism is showing, despite your attempts to hide it.
No? Then I guess we'll just have to accept that many persons of color will despise us all, since we all look the same.
As I said, that would be what they call racism.
This is my sig.
I came to expect the Native Americans at the casino where I used to work to treat me a certain way, and except for the small group that I interacted with regularly which was about my age and gets my sense of humor, I was seldom disappointed, so to speak.
I don't think I've ever met a racial group that wasn't racist. If my family associates itself with any race in particular it's Mexican... don't get ANY of us started on Mexicans, though. (If you just drove up the 101 from the San Diego area, trying to go at a good clip all the while, you'd be pissed at them too.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"