The change in view of Crichton took place long before he talked to anyone on capital hill. The articles and comment started even before his book was out in anything other than preview copy. Frankly, it was rather a clever way to get more exposure than the book was probably worth.
I'm more amused by how quickly any of the political extremes can turn on someone if they say something they don't like. And, how often it ends up giving much more exposure to it than would have happened otherwise.
As to my own view. Global warming is happening. A significant part of it is likely due to human inputs.
We might well differ over what all should be done about that, but, what the hey, variety is the spice of live.
Regardless of the quality of science in his writings, the interesting thing for me was the turnaround in perception of him. For years, I thought a number of his stories and the films made of them were quite good, but the science was iffy at best. Even so, he seemed to be well thought of as putting forward "cautionary tales" highlighting the hubris of science, scientists and capitalists who myopically care for nothing but their own ends (the owner in the book version of Jurassic Park for example).
Now that he's written a novel that's critical of a different group, what we hear is quite different. We now have entire websites dedicated to telling us how he's been a science distorting hack all along.
Amazing the change in perspective. Guess it pays to think about who you criticize before you do it.
What you're talking about is sodium ferrocyanide. It's what is called on the label of the table salt that contains it as an additive, "yellow prussiate of soda" to avoid freaking people out with the word cyanide.
It's used widely in food to prevent caking of powdered substances. It will not easily dissociate when mixed with all but quite strong and or hot acids, though it can degrade under high heat (like in a potters kiln). Given that food ingredients are often acidic (vinegar) and processed at elevated temperatures (salt in a several hundred degree fry pan), you quickly come to the idea that it's not that big of a risk, at least in fairly small quantities. You have to work fairly hard to get it to be even a small one. Much harder than you would to make a common household item like gasoline a risk (No fire needed. Just spill it over broad parts of you and not wash it off. Ouch. Or, leave a pan of it to evaporate in a small enclosed space where you are and breath the fumes.). Even chemically ignorant people are able to live with gasoline because we use it daily and mostly know the precautions we need to use.
I think you just gave a good example of what some of the people here are talking about. You're a highly trained chemist and yet, you get the amount of risk posed by the chemical wrong simply based on the name including cyanide. That's exactly the problem that DSBSCI was mentioning above. The risk is different than what you perceived it to be.
Is this a nullification of what you were saying? Of course not. Should all things be freely available just for asking (sarin, for example)? Of course not. There's merit in managing the risks. But, let's correctly understand what that level of risk is before we make the regulations.
I'm taking an EMT class at the moment and the most important items are maintaining an open airway, getting out a blockage if they're choking and avoiding aspiration of vomit and such. In artificial respiration, it can be hard not to have the stomach inflate with excess air. And that's largely due to the pipes for food and air being shared. The tongue has a bad design that it can fall back in an unconscious patient and block the airway as well. Those are common and fast killers.
One of the mantras of emergency care is, "No airway. No patient."
My impression of at least part of the antinuclear movement was that this and centralization in general was the larger reason for their opposition. The waste and safety issue was just a convenient way to sell a more general decentralization philosophy.
For example, when asked what he would feel about a truly cheap clean source of energy, Amory Lovins (a respected figure in the antinuclear movement) said that it would be a disaster.
Why? Because concentrated centralized sources of power give humanity the ability to wreak more havoc on nature. He felt that small diffuse sources of power would limit mankind's ability to damage the environment.
Now, that's a viewpoint that can reasonably be argued for. I disagree with it rather strongly. *shrug* People disagree about lots of things.
What I found disengenuous was using the waste issue and the safety issue, which are both greatly exagerated, as a stalking horse to sell a wider philosophy which the audience was largely unaware of.
Some religious groups use similar tactics of using one issue to sell a broader agenda. An example would be using the gay marriage issue in order to get candidates into office that would then push for a broad repeal of separation of church and state.
Because much like the Bush administration's restrictions on stem cell research is based on political reasons rather than engineering or science, the Carter administration's position was also based more on politics than science or engineering.
There were groups that wanted it stopped due to opposition to nuclear power in general. There were also groups that wanted it stopped because they thought it was a proliferation risk. The civilian nuclear power industry didn't fight so strongly for it as it was looking to be expensive and it appeared to be easier just to deal with the waste problem later. i.e Kick the can down the road.
I remember when the decision was made. I disagreed then as well. Unfortunately, the political conditions were such that it went ahead. I think it was quite a bad idea.
The claim of shutting reprocessing down for proliferation reasons was questionable.
Yes, being able to do the chemical separation is one part of making plutonium for bomb fuel. However, it's relatively difficult to get useable bomb fuel plutonium from reactor fuel that's been in a normal type power reactor. It has too much of Pu 240 and other higher weight isotopes of Pu. (What you want is relatively pure Pu 239.)
Bomb fuel is made in a reactor specifically engineered to produce less of the higher weight isotopes of plutonium. Normal power reactors produce too much Pu 240.
That makes the engineering for building a bomb out of it much tougher, since the core has to be crushed more quickly (due to large amount of spontaneous neutrons from Pu 240). The material is also much more dimensionally unstable. Pu is a weird metal in many ways and with the higher decay rate (and higher heat production) of the Pu 240, it changes phases and shape. Some of the dimensions of bomb cores are fairly tight tolerance.
The British apparently had a program to make a plutonium bomb from Pu with a high level of heavier isotopes, but gave it up.
This is why the US offered to build light water reactors for North Korea. It wasn't a major proliferation risk. The US reneged on it, but that's another sad tail of international relations.
So, just having reprocessing plants is a bit less of a direct problem for proliferation than is often alleged, since the product of them (unless it came from a special reactor) isn't easy to use as bomb fuel.
It's not that big a worry as far as nongovernment entities. It would be tough for even an advanced terrorist group to make use of the usual output material from a reprocessing plant.
The indirect problem is that if a country has reprocessing plants already, it's harder to monitor that they aren't secretly setting up one of their reactors to make bomb fuel.
So, that's the longwinded explanation of why I agree with the earlier poster that the Carter administration's decision was shortsighted.
Just like I feel that the Clinton administration's decision to shut down research on the IFR was also a shortsighted payback to a political constituency. (The IFR was an advanced reactor that would have produced far less waste, and much shorter lived waste.)
Yeah, I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt and make it only a little more than 5 orders of magnitude he was off rather than a full 6.
The cynical part of me expects to hear the 10,000 million figure quoted and requoted as fact in part of the blogosphere. Mistakes like that tend to take on a life of their own.
From your article: "So one NarusInsight machine can look at 10,000 million DSL lines at once in great detail."
That would indeed be an impressive machine, but:
I think you're off by a factor of 250,000 or so in that (and direct division is an overly simple way to look at it as most pipes aren't constantly full). You might want to add an update to the article or you're gonna get picked to death by the hoards of math minded slashdot geeks. (Like me.)
And, it makes you have to think. It's so much easier to work in binary.
And, if you're really clever, you can score points with your social group by restating what they already believe in some humorous or new way.
Or, you can come up with some faux insight that seems to show that your in group were the smart and good ones, and that the evil Group Y people were really the stupid bad ones all along.
Black and white are exciting and give your heart a work out by raising your blood pressure over even the smallest trifle that can be entertainingly misconstrued.
Jumping to conclusions, straining at gnats, and swallowing camels seem to be the main athletic sports of the political side of the internet.
It depends on the intent. And courts are always dealing with the question of 'intent'.
If he did it, intending to cover up evidence of his violating a noncompete clause, yes, I could see it being a possible crime.
This isn't that much different than if he shredded paper files that detailed what he had been doing. If he did it to cover something up, it could be criminal.
See the famous 18 minute gap during the Nixon administration for example.
They started off to build 7 robots and have them work collaboratively. They actually built only one.
So, instead of just saying that, they highlight results that say they've shown several things to be possible (that really didn't seem likely to be impossible in the first place, as they are already done with existing micromanipulation systems. Cellular injection is pretty common stuff.), by doing similar things with a robot orders of magnitude larger than the ones they are aiming for.
Then, they announce a follow on project where they really, no, really this time, are going to build swarms of collaborative microbots.
And though cow dung may be considered a waste product with fairly low value in the fuel and fertilizer rich industrialized west, it's a valuable item in a lot of other places.
Not only is it used as fertilizer, but it's also used as a fuel in a lot of places.
So, the villages now have another economic question. Do they give up a fertilizer and heating fuel for this? Does it raise the cost of what was a cheap fuel and fertilizer?
So, it's not quite so neutral as it might seem on first glance. It's a very neat idea and it probably works out, but the economics may be more complicated than this indicates.
It minimizes what's viewed as one of the more effective arguments against nuclear power, the volume of waste generated, and it's long lifetime.
For that reason, it's very unpopular with people who are a priori against nuclear power.
I'm also not fully convinced by the proliferation claims that people made. Plutonium for bombs is normally made in a reactor set up so that it produces far less of the heavier isotopes of plutonium which are problematic for making a bomb (greater spontaneous fission, they make the material dimensionally unstable, etc.).
That's why we offered to build light water reactors for N. Korea (and then reneged, but that's another issue). Normal power production reactors aren't so good for making bomb fuel.
So, what determines the feasibility of making a plutonium bomb is more the reactor type, than a civilian reprocessing program. Especially one like pyroprocessing that doesn't do a full seperation of the various actinides but leaves them mixed.
The point wasn't that no one saw it live. A fair number did. The point was that far fewer people saw it live than say they did. Indeed some did see it live. For example, the sergeant in charge of me at Ft. Hood saw it live as he was tuned into CNN on the base cable system. I didn't. I saw the replay later on. A lot more people "remember" that they saw it live than really did. That's all Oberg was saying.
Had the o-ring leak been on the far side, not cut into the main fuel tank, would the orbiter have still spontainously disintegrated at 73 seconds into the flight?
Non Sequitur. There would have been no accident if that was the case.
Oberg's right that the tank blowing didn't destroy the orbiter. At that high of a mach, if a vehicle gets sideways to the airstream, it gets ripped apart. Ask ShockWave if you don't believe me.
The combustion wave from hydrogen LOX isn't as brissant as you're thinking. If it was, why didn't it put so much of a bending moment into the SRBs to break them in two? They aren't nearly so strong for sideways forces pushing in, or inducing a bend.
Oberg can be kind of a pill, but it doesn't change that he's a fairly good technical space analyst. He, Charlie Vick, and others sure did a better job figuring out what was going on in the Russian space program than Marcia Smith and the bunch ot the Library of Congress, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when is 2/3 of what's on slashdot new or ingenious?
Anyone who knows enough about physics to make that joke can't be all bad.
At least give me credit for having a memory.
The change in view of Crichton took place long before he talked to anyone on capital hill. The articles and comment started even before his book was out in anything other than preview copy. Frankly, it was rather a clever way to get more exposure than the book was probably worth.
I'm more amused by how quickly any of the political extremes can turn on someone if they say something they don't like. And, how often it ends up giving much more exposure to it than would have happened otherwise.
As to my own view. Global warming is happening. A significant part of it is likely due to human inputs.
We might well differ over what all should be done about that, but, what the hey, variety is the spice of live.
It's truly amazing. Zonk's on duty, and everybody's bitching about something other than him!
Regardless of the quality of science in his writings, the interesting thing for me was the turnaround in perception of him. For years, I thought a number of his stories and the films made of them were quite good, but the science was iffy at best. Even so, he seemed to be well thought of as putting forward "cautionary tales" highlighting the hubris of science, scientists and capitalists who myopically care for nothing but their own ends (the owner in the book version of Jurassic Park for example).
Now that he's written a novel that's critical of a different group, what we hear is quite different. We now have entire websites dedicated to telling us how he's been a science distorting hack all along.
Amazing the change in perspective. Guess it pays to think about who you criticize before you do it.
What you're talking about is sodium ferrocyanide. It's what is called on the label of the table salt that contains it as an additive, "yellow prussiate of soda" to avoid freaking people out with the word cyanide.
It's used widely in food to prevent caking of powdered substances. It will not easily dissociate when mixed with all but quite strong and or hot acids, though it can degrade under high heat (like in a potters kiln). Given that food ingredients are often acidic (vinegar) and processed at elevated temperatures (salt in a several hundred degree fry pan), you quickly come to the idea that it's not that big of a risk, at least in fairly small quantities. You have to work fairly hard to get it to be even a small one. Much harder than you would to make a common household item like gasoline a risk (No fire needed. Just spill it over broad parts of you and not wash it off. Ouch. Or, leave a pan of it to evaporate in a small enclosed space where you are and breath the fumes.). Even chemically ignorant people are able to live with gasoline because we use it daily and mostly know the precautions we need to use.
I think you just gave a good example of what some of the people here are talking about. You're a highly trained chemist and yet, you get the amount of risk posed by the chemical wrong simply based on the name including cyanide. That's exactly the problem that DSBSCI was mentioning above. The risk is different than what you perceived it to be.
Is this a nullification of what you were saying? Of course not. Should all things be freely available just for asking (sarin, for example)? Of course not. There's merit in managing the risks. But, let's correctly understand what that level of risk is before we make the regulations.
Congratulations Taco, you now join Hemos as just another old fart.
:)
Of course, you're still both just rotten kids to all of us 40 somethings!
It's Zonk on duty. What did you expect?
Indeed. That's the first thing I thought of.
I'm taking an EMT class at the moment and the most important items are maintaining an open airway, getting out a blockage if they're choking and avoiding aspiration of vomit and such. In artificial respiration, it can be hard not to have the stomach inflate with excess air. And that's largely due to the pipes for food and air being shared. The tongue has a bad design that it can fall back in an unconscious patient and block the airway as well. Those are common and fast killers.
One of the mantras of emergency care is, "No airway. No patient."
nuclear power means wealth concentration
My impression of at least part of the antinuclear movement was that this and centralization in general was the larger reason for their opposition. The waste and safety issue was just a convenient way to sell a more general decentralization philosophy.
For example, when asked what he would feel about a truly cheap clean source of energy, Amory Lovins (a respected figure in the antinuclear movement) said that it would be a disaster.
Why? Because concentrated centralized sources of power give humanity the ability to wreak more havoc on nature. He felt that small diffuse sources of power would limit mankind's ability to damage the environment.
Now, that's a viewpoint that can reasonably be argued for. I disagree with it rather strongly. *shrug* People disagree about lots of things.
What I found disengenuous was using the waste issue and the safety issue, which are both greatly exagerated, as a stalking horse to sell a wider philosophy which the audience was largely unaware of.
Some religious groups use similar tactics of using one issue to sell a broader agenda. An example would be using the gay marriage issue in order to get candidates into office that would then push for a broad repeal of separation of church and state.
Because much like the Bush administration's restrictions on stem cell research is based on political reasons rather than engineering or science, the Carter administration's position was also based more on politics than science or engineering.
There were groups that wanted it stopped due to opposition to nuclear power in general. There were also groups that wanted it stopped because they thought it was a proliferation risk. The civilian nuclear power industry didn't fight so strongly for it as it was looking to be expensive and it appeared to be easier just to deal with the waste problem later. i.e Kick the can down the road.
I remember when the decision was made. I disagreed then as well. Unfortunately, the political conditions were such that it went ahead. I think it was quite a bad idea.
The claim of shutting reprocessing down for proliferation reasons was questionable.
Yes, being able to do the chemical separation is one part of making plutonium for bomb fuel. However, it's relatively difficult to get useable bomb fuel plutonium from reactor fuel that's been in a normal type power reactor. It has too much of Pu 240 and other higher weight isotopes of Pu. (What you want is relatively pure Pu 239.)
Bomb fuel is made in a reactor specifically engineered to produce less of the higher weight isotopes of plutonium. Normal power reactors produce too much Pu 240.
That makes the engineering for building a bomb out of it much tougher, since the core has to be crushed more quickly (due to large amount of spontaneous neutrons from Pu 240). The material is also much more dimensionally unstable. Pu is a weird metal in many ways and with the higher decay rate (and higher heat production) of the Pu 240, it changes phases and shape. Some of the dimensions of bomb cores are fairly tight tolerance.
The British apparently had a program to make a plutonium bomb from Pu with a high level of heavier isotopes, but gave it up.
This is why the US offered to build light water reactors for North Korea. It wasn't a major proliferation risk. The US reneged on it, but that's another sad tail of international relations.
So, just having reprocessing plants is a bit less of a direct problem for proliferation than is often alleged, since the product of them (unless it came from a special reactor) isn't easy to use as bomb fuel.
It's not that big a worry as far as nongovernment entities. It would be tough for even an advanced terrorist group to make use of the usual output material from a reprocessing plant.
The indirect problem is that if a country has reprocessing plants already, it's harder to monitor that they aren't secretly setting up one of their reactors to make bomb fuel.
So, that's the longwinded explanation of why I agree with the earlier poster that the Carter administration's decision was shortsighted.
Just like I feel that the Clinton administration's decision to shut down research on the IFR was also a shortsighted payback to a political constituency. (The IFR was an advanced reactor that would have produced far less waste, and much shorter lived waste.)
Yeah, I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt and make it only a little more than 5 orders of magnitude he was off rather than a full 6.
The cynical part of me expects to hear the 10,000 million figure quoted and requoted as fact in part of the blogosphere. Mistakes like that tend to take on a life of their own.
From your article: "So one NarusInsight machine can look at 10,000 million DSL lines at once in great detail."
That would indeed be an impressive machine, but:
I think you're off by a factor of 250,000 or so in that (and direct division is an overly simple way to look at it as most pipes aren't constantly full). You might want to add an update to the article or you're gonna get picked to death by the hoards of math minded slashdot geeks. (Like me.)
We've got a childhood obesity epidemic. Make the little blighters fetch their own beer. That way they'll get some exercise.
While they're at it, have em fetch me one too!
Talk about, like, being so out of pinkish clue. :P :P :P
Do you also, like, make Bob Cratchit work on Christmas?
And you probly hate ponies too! What a total loser.
Oh this is like SO cool! Does this mean we can sit around writing My Little Pony fanfics all day?
Please, oh please, oh please?
Because grey is boring.
And, it makes you have to think. It's so much easier to work in binary.
And, if you're really clever, you can score points with your social group by restating what they already believe in some humorous or new way.
Or, you can come up with some faux insight that seems to show that your in group were the smart and good ones, and that the evil Group Y people were really the stupid bad ones all along.
Black and white are exciting and give your heart a work out by raising your blood pressure over even the smallest trifle that can be entertainingly misconstrued.
Jumping to conclusions, straining at gnats, and swallowing camels seem to be the main athletic sports of the political side of the internet.
It depends on the intent. And courts are always dealing with the question of 'intent'.
If he did it, intending to cover up evidence of his violating a noncompete clause, yes, I could see it being a possible crime.
This isn't that much different than if he shredded paper files that detailed what he had been doing. If he did it to cover something up, it could be criminal.
See the famous 18 minute gap during the Nixon administration for example.
How come people take things like the "Sustainable Development Commission" seriously?
Because the journalist who wrote this up agreed with the conclusion, therefore it must be important?
They started off to build 7 robots and have them work collaboratively. They actually built only one.
So, instead of just saying that, they highlight results that say they've shown several things to be possible (that really didn't seem likely to be impossible in the first place, as they are already done with existing micromanipulation systems. Cellular injection is pretty common stuff.), by doing similar things with a robot orders of magnitude larger than the ones they are aiming for.
Then, they announce a follow on project where they really, no, really this time, are going to build swarms of collaborative microbots.
You just have to keep funding us.
My question is the amount of fuel that it needs.
Boiling water takes a lot of energy.
And though cow dung may be considered a waste product with fairly low value in the fuel and fertilizer rich industrialized west, it's a valuable item in a lot of other places.
Not only is it used as fertilizer, but it's also used as a fuel in a lot of places.
So, the villages now have another economic question. Do they give up a fertilizer and heating fuel for this? Does it raise the cost of what was a cheap fuel and fertilizer?
So, it's not quite so neutral as it might seem on first glance. It's a very neat idea and it probably works out, but the economics may be more complicated than this indicates.
But, but, but... Like, it so HAS to be true! I mean, like, 20 people on my Livejournal friends list linked to it just today.
Skepticism is only modded up on Slashdot if it agrees with the prevailing Slashdot firmly held supposition.
It minimizes what's viewed as one of the more effective arguments against nuclear power, the volume of waste generated, and it's long lifetime.
For that reason, it's very unpopular with people who are a priori against nuclear power.
I'm also not fully convinced by the proliferation claims that people made. Plutonium for bombs is normally made in a reactor set up so that it produces far less of the heavier isotopes of plutonium which are problematic for making a bomb (greater spontaneous fission, they make the material dimensionally unstable, etc.).
That's why we offered to build light water reactors for N. Korea (and then reneged, but that's another issue). Normal power production reactors aren't so good for making bomb fuel.
So, what determines the feasibility of making a plutonium bomb is more the reactor type, than a civilian reprocessing program. Especially one like pyroprocessing that doesn't do a full seperation of the various actinides but leaves them mixed.
Howdy Harik.
The point wasn't that no one saw it live. A fair number did. The point was that far fewer people saw it live than say they did. Indeed some did see it live. For example, the sergeant in charge of me at Ft. Hood saw it live as he was tuned into CNN on the base cable system. I didn't. I saw the replay later on. A lot more people "remember" that they saw it live than really did. That's all Oberg was saying.
Had the o-ring leak been on the far side, not cut into the main fuel tank, would the orbiter have still spontainously disintegrated at 73 seconds into the flight?
Non Sequitur. There would have been no accident if that was the case.
Oberg's right that the tank blowing didn't destroy the orbiter. At that high of a mach, if a vehicle gets sideways to the airstream, it gets ripped apart. Ask ShockWave if you don't believe me.
The combustion wave from hydrogen LOX isn't as brissant as you're thinking. If it was, why didn't it put so much of a bending moment into the SRBs to break them in two? They aren't nearly so strong for sideways forces pushing in, or inducing a bend.
Oberg can be kind of a pill, but it doesn't change that he's a fairly good technical space analyst. He, Charlie Vick, and others sure did a better job figuring out what was going on in the Russian space program than Marcia Smith and the bunch ot the Library of Congress, for example.