Yes properly said it would be a nuclear excursion rather than an explosion.
Another theory is that the C + H2O -> CO + H2 reaction alone could have explained the second explosion, with the hydrogen having a path outside that had been blasted open by steam in the first explosion. It isn't clear exactly how much of a chemical explosion it was.
Whatever it was that made half the reactor core blow through the ceiling, the big problem was the filthy reactor guts being outside in the open and on fire after having been used for some time to generate nuclear power for the Soviets. The actual energy of the reactor explosion itself isn't the right way to compare this incident to Hiroshima, Nagasaki etc.
Chernobyl was pretty nasty; it released several hundred times as much radioactivity into the air as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions did. The reactor filled up with steam and went into a runaway power generation loop, which first caused a steam explosion, then a more powerful nuclear explosion.
The nuclear explosion itself wasn't very impressive. It had as much power as about 10 tons of TNT, which was several orders of magnitude lower than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. No one outside the USSR even knew about it until that incoming shift of Swedish nuclear plant workers kept setting off the radiation alarms.
But one thing to remember with nuclear explosions is that the explosion itself isn't everything. Since their instruments were all fucked up, they thought the reactor wasn't related to the loud explosions they were hearing. Meanwhile since their reactor core had partially blasted its way through the cheap-assed bitumen roof that the Soviets used as a reactor containment vessel, and since the graphite moderator was on fire, it lit the roof up in a bunch of places. In general graphite fires are quite rare, but bitumen is the least desirable material to have underneath smoldering red-hot radioactive graphite in the open air. The fires emitted foul black clouds of fission products across the countryside. Most of the fission products had actually been generated much prior, not during the brief explosion itself. The reactor had presumably consumed more fuel at that point than could ever be carried by a single bomber.
Hi, I'm Tim James. Some people are talking about going to Mars, a dark-colored planet. If I'm governor, we're going to Venus. This is Alabama. We build cities on white planets here. If you want to live there, learn it.
Venus has just the kind of environment Alabaman Republicans want. Maybe it's just the businessman in me, but we'll save money on heating. It just makes sense to me.... does it to you?
Oh and obviously the human population will have to be decimated, even if you do actually give those things up. Forget about birth control, which only has effect after 60 years or-so, assuming you can enforce it globally (assuming, to be blunt, that every nation on earth is prepared to kill "unapproved" babies), which is "too late". So who do we kill ?
Geez... let's kill people because we can forget about encouraging contraception.
Mind you, we'll need to lose somewhere between 60% and 90% of all humans alive. Who do we start with ? To keep in the theme of this thread, perhaps the Jews ?
So in "keeping the theme of the thread", let's introduce this novel idea of selecting individuals for destruction specifically based on their ethnicity. Your worrying about "enforcing it globally" for "every nation on earth" with regard to "unapproved babies" was a strong hint this was coming.
Of course atheists, christians, muslims, hindus and buddhists, even slashdotters won't be far behind.
Uh huh. Then they came for the slashdotters, and I posted nothing because I wasn't a slashdotter, then they came for me.
This 60% merely makes "living renewably" an attainable goal, btw, it does not, at all, guarantee we actually do accomplish it.
Nothing is guaranteed when only partial solutions are available. That doesn't mean sitting on your ass.
I used to have a boss- every time I saw him, the thought went through my head, "you must have been washing your hair while this guy was reading papers." His hair was never combed straight and he wiped everyone's ass across the floor in every scientific staff meeting.
Pu-238 occurs as an unavoidable contaminant in breeder reactors. However, what would seem the most obvious technique to get it, enriching it straight out of the main Pu-239 product isotopically, U-235/U-238 style, is always going to be extremely difficult- what with the ridiculous centrifuges and mass spectrometry that prevent everyone with an axe to grind from becoming a nuclear power.
Luckily another contaminant, U-236, is also formed when the small amount of contaminant U-235 present in the initial yellowcake acquires a neutron in the breeder reactor to become U-236 with a ten million year half life (before it spontaneously fissions after humans are extinct). If it captures a second stray neutron in there before that happens eons from now, then it beta decays to Np-237 with a half life of one week, but that means we get extra electron to grab onto! A [suicidal] high school chemistry class could then isolate this neptunium from the plutonium, easily within a few days (to reach the deadline).
After you have so easily isolated the pure neptunium (and buried the dead chemists), you just shine more neutrons on it, and voila, you get alpha emitter Pu-238 with a half life of 90 years. (Before it decays to "stable" U-234 which has its own half life of 27000 years making it someone else's problem.) Cram a thermoelectric generator full of Pu-238 and hold it at arms length from your electronic toys, and you've got a nice battery that lasts for decades for trips outside the solar system.
For a neutron source, spontaneous fission will usually suffice, certainly for civilian or nuclear reactors. But when timing is absolutely critical, a more reliable neutron source can be made from an emitter of fast alpha particles (Pu-238, Ra-226, Po-210, whatever) irradiating beryllium-9. The alpha particle has an inelastic collision with the beryllium which produces a carbon-12 nucleus and a fast neutron- or a thermal neutron if it keeps bouncing off carbon and beryllium nuclei. Fast neutrons pack more energy if they hit and can overcome kinetic barriers to fuse with nuclei, but slow ones spend more time poking around nuclei and may even tunnel through barriers. Whether you want fast or slow depends on how you have arranged the fuel, the moderator, and any neutron absorbent or reflective materials in your device.
Well of course. They make much better contact with the surface of the road than round wheels do because the coefficient of static friction for square wheels is so incredibly superior to that of round wheels.
Nevertheless, the winner in this department has to be the triangular wheel.
Windows Viagra, I mean Windows 8, is just around the corner...
WINDOW REFLECTION: So! Heading toward work?
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: Uh, yeah! [nods head a little incredulously, as if his reflection really has nerve taunting him]
WINDOW REFLECTION: You going to ask them this time?
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: About what?
WINDOW REFLECTION: Our dysfunctional operating system!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: Ssssh, no! I don't want to talk about it!
WINDOW REFLECTION: Look, you're not alone. Millions of Windows users have complained to their bosses!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: [skeptically] I don't know.
WINDOW REFLECTION: We can do this!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: [pauses... then nods and smiles] OK.
Boss dramatization... followed by developer giving reflection a high-five.
Talking to your boss about Windows may be the last thing you want to do. But it's definitely a conversation worth having. Zillions of people have had their Windows talk. When you're ready for yours, you'll find helpful tips for complaining to your boss about Windows, on the Internet. Ask your doctor if you're healthy enough for Linux. Do not use Linux if you don't know what you're doing as kernel panics may result from an unsafe kernel recompilation. Side effects may include headache, patching, purchasing expensive Macs, and spending hours into the night talking to geeks on abnormal web sites. To avoid long term bricking, seek immediate help on the Internet for a reboot that lasts longer than four hours. Stop using Linux and buy a sleek silver MacBook right away if you experience a sudden decrease or loss of sex appeal. Talk to your boss today and ask if Linux is right for you!
[New Linux developer looks at reflection, smiling and nodding asynchronously]
Outside of school, do you really think someone will pick up on the math and other concepts necessary to, for just one example, calculate the Big-O of a part of their program?
OK, for passengers it makes more sense- so a better example of a trigger offense might be something like creating a public disturbance, with no car involved.
Basically, you are saying that the Arizona law is unconstitutional because Arizona law enforcement officers are bigots.
Although it's not PC in the U.S. anymore to say anything that sounds bad about soldiers or cops, that doesn't automatically mean they're all supermen. Some are going to be better at this than others.
The law is unconstitutional because it applies an ill-defined standard for "explicit reason". It's too vague, too broad, and relies too much on a law enforcement officer's discretion. They don't like having to apply discretion; they want explicit instructions like "check everyone's credentials automatically". When they're forced to apply discretion they often get in trouble. And like I said, even if they have the purest of pure intentions, who really wants to waste time bugging white people about their citizenship credentials? I probably wouldn't either if I were a cop. It would be really naive to assume that white and non-white citizens are equally likely to be harassed for citizenship credentials under this law- even by Hispanic police.
Actually I didn't word that last part right. A malicious intent to undermine constitutional protections here isn't required. It's more a question of whether or not a law is constitutional if its passage reflects indifference to unavoidable but predictable side-effects that undermine them, even if the letter of the law and the intent behind the spirit of the law are on their face constitutional. That's a more precise way of putting it.
Meaning, no matter what our racial impulses are, there's nothing wrong necessarily with a bill designed specifically to target illegal aliens. That's an acceptable intent (no matter how important you think it is and why). But if we all know that this is unavoidably going to affect different races of people differently, undermining constitutional protections, is it enough to argue that isn't what the law is designed or intended to do?
Slashdot Mirror
How about a turd floating around in your swimming pool? I think that might actually beat the glacier in overall excitement.
There must be coolers of Bud Light just waiting in the center of the ice! Let's get up there before it melts! The ice I mean.
Oh, I get it, masturbatory.
Yes properly said it would be a nuclear excursion rather than an explosion.
Another theory is that the C + H2O -> CO + H2 reaction alone could have explained the second explosion, with the hydrogen having a path outside that had been blasted open by steam in the first explosion. It isn't clear exactly how much of a chemical explosion it was.
Whatever it was that made half the reactor core blow through the ceiling, the big problem was the filthy reactor guts being outside in the open and on fire after having been used for some time to generate nuclear power for the Soviets. The actual energy of the reactor explosion itself isn't the right way to compare this incident to Hiroshima, Nagasaki etc.
Chernobyl was pretty nasty; it released several hundred times as much radioactivity into the air as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions did. The reactor filled up with steam and went into a runaway power generation loop, which first caused a steam explosion, then a more powerful nuclear explosion.
The nuclear explosion itself wasn't very impressive. It had as much power as about 10 tons of TNT, which was several orders of magnitude lower than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. No one outside the USSR even knew about it until that incoming shift of Swedish nuclear plant workers kept setting off the radiation alarms.
But one thing to remember with nuclear explosions is that the explosion itself isn't everything. Since their instruments were all fucked up, they thought the reactor wasn't related to the loud explosions they were hearing. Meanwhile since their reactor core had partially blasted its way through the cheap-assed bitumen roof that the Soviets used as a reactor containment vessel, and since the graphite moderator was on fire, it lit the roof up in a bunch of places. In general graphite fires are quite rare, but bitumen is the least desirable material to have underneath smoldering red-hot radioactive graphite in the open air. The fires emitted foul black clouds of fission products across the countryside. Most of the fission products had actually been generated much prior, not during the brief explosion itself. The reactor had presumably consumed more fuel at that point than could ever be carried by a single bomber.
The ability to run on multiple VMs doesn't prevent vendor-specific coding. Now that would be impressive.
It'd be nice if there was an "Ask Slashdot" on this. Ah well. One can only dream...
That reminds me... hey Slashdot, what should I do with my old Dreamcast?
You misspelled "nationalized".
Wouldn't it be cheaper just to pay the Chinese to blow space junk out of the sky with their new missiles?
IE it was a missile interception test.
I think it goes without saying it must have failed to intercept any missiles, especially IE 6.
I expect my 4-year old to come up with better arguments. Don't you ?
No- I don't have a 4-year old.
Hi, I'm Tim James.
Some people are talking about going to Mars, a dark-colored planet. If I'm governor, we're going to Venus. This is Alabama. We build cities on white planets here. If you want to live there, learn it.
Venus has just the kind of environment Alabaman Republicans want. Maybe it's just the businessman in me, but we'll save money on heating. It just makes sense to me.... does it to you?
It's hot enough to cook your Thanksgiving turkey in an hour, although you should leave the oven door closed after turning off the heat.
Oh and obviously the human population will have to be decimated, even if you do actually give those things up. Forget about birth control, which only has effect after 60 years or-so, assuming you can enforce it globally (assuming, to be blunt, that every nation on earth is prepared to kill "unapproved" babies), which is "too late". So who do we kill ?
Geez... let's kill people because we can forget about encouraging contraception.
Mind you, we'll need to lose somewhere between 60% and 90% of all humans alive. Who do we start with ? To keep in the theme of this thread, perhaps the Jews ?
So in "keeping the theme of the thread", let's introduce this novel idea of selecting individuals for destruction specifically based on their ethnicity. Your worrying about "enforcing it globally" for "every nation on earth" with regard to "unapproved babies" was a strong hint this was coming.
Of course atheists, christians, muslims, hindus and buddhists, even slashdotters won't be far behind.
Uh huh. Then they came for the slashdotters, and I posted nothing because I wasn't a slashdotter, then they came for me.
This 60% merely makes "living renewably" an attainable goal, btw, it does not, at all, guarantee we actually do accomplish it.
Nothing is guaranteed when only partial solutions are available. That doesn't mean sitting on your ass.
- Little mustaches on Hitler, Obama, and Lenin over the word "Socialist" for those who appear to be white
I used to have a boss- every time I saw him, the thought went through my head, "you must have been washing your hair while this guy was reading papers." His hair was never combed straight and he wiped everyone's ass across the floor in every scientific staff meeting.
Pu-238 occurs as an unavoidable contaminant in breeder reactors. However, what would seem the most obvious technique to get it, enriching it straight out of the main Pu-239 product isotopically, U-235/U-238 style, is always going to be extremely difficult- what with the ridiculous centrifuges and mass spectrometry that prevent everyone with an axe to grind from becoming a nuclear power.
Luckily another contaminant, U-236, is also formed when the small amount of contaminant U-235 present in the initial yellowcake acquires a neutron in the breeder reactor to become U-236 with a ten million year half life (before it spontaneously fissions after humans are extinct). If it captures a second stray neutron in there before that happens eons from now, then it beta decays to Np-237 with a half life of one week, but that means we get extra electron to grab onto! A [suicidal] high school chemistry class could then isolate this neptunium from the plutonium, easily within a few days (to reach the deadline).
After you have so easily isolated the pure neptunium (and buried the dead chemists), you just shine more neutrons on it, and voila, you get alpha emitter Pu-238 with a half life of 90 years. (Before it decays to "stable" U-234 which has its own half life of 27000 years making it someone else's problem.) Cram a thermoelectric generator full of Pu-238 and hold it at arms length from your electronic toys, and you've got a nice battery that lasts for decades for trips outside the solar system.
For a neutron source, spontaneous fission will usually suffice, certainly for civilian or nuclear reactors. But when timing is absolutely critical, a more reliable neutron source can be made from an emitter of fast alpha particles (Pu-238, Ra-226, Po-210, whatever) irradiating beryllium-9. The alpha particle has an inelastic collision with the beryllium which produces a carbon-12 nucleus and a fast neutron- or a thermal neutron if it keeps bouncing off carbon and beryllium nuclei. Fast neutrons pack more energy if they hit and can overcome kinetic barriers to fuse with nuclei, but slow ones spend more time poking around nuclei and may even tunnel through barriers. Whether you want fast or slow depends on how you have arranged the fuel, the moderator, and any neutron absorbent or reflective materials in your device.
Well of course. They make much better contact with the surface of the road than round wheels do because the coefficient of static friction for square wheels is so incredibly superior to that of round wheels.
Nevertheless, the winner in this department has to be the triangular wheel.
Really, square pixels are an invention?
Come on, we all know you're sore from square wheels failing in the marketplace.
Jeebus needed a single-pixel transparent GIF to do the walking on water miracle.
Windows Viagra, I mean Windows 8, is just around the corner...
WINDOW REFLECTION: So! Heading toward work?
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: Uh, yeah! [nods head a little incredulously, as if his reflection really has nerve taunting him]
WINDOW REFLECTION: You going to ask them this time?
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: About what?
WINDOW REFLECTION: Our dysfunctional operating system!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: Ssssh, no! I don't want to talk about it!
WINDOW REFLECTION: Look, you're not alone. Millions of Windows users have complained to their bosses!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: [skeptically] I don't know.
WINDOW REFLECTION: We can do this!
WINDOWS DEVELOPER: [pauses... then nods and smiles] OK.
Boss dramatization... followed by developer giving reflection a high-five.
Talking to your boss about Windows may be the last thing you want to do. But it's definitely a conversation worth having. Zillions of people have had their Windows talk. When you're ready for yours, you'll find helpful tips for complaining to your boss about Windows, on the Internet. Ask your doctor if you're healthy enough for Linux. Do not use Linux if you don't know what you're doing as kernel panics may result from an unsafe kernel recompilation. Side effects may include headache, patching, purchasing expensive Macs, and spending hours into the night talking to geeks on abnormal web sites. To avoid long term bricking, seek immediate help on the Internet for a reboot that lasts longer than four hours. Stop using Linux and buy a sleek silver MacBook right away if you experience a sudden decrease or loss of sex appeal. Talk to your boss today and ask if Linux is right for you!
[New Linux developer looks at reflection, smiling and nodding asynchronously]
The Generics in .NET put Java's to shame.
That's not hard though; the generics in Java could have been nice if they hadn't been bolted on posthumously.
Outside of school, do you really think someone will pick up on the math and other concepts necessary to, for just one example, calculate the Big-O of a part of their program?
Sure, why not? I found it to be O(1).
Basically, you are saying that the Arizona law is unconstitutional because Arizona law enforcement officers are bigots.
Although it's not PC in the U.S. anymore to say anything that sounds bad about soldiers or cops, that doesn't automatically mean they're all supermen. Some are going to be better at this than others.
The law is unconstitutional because it applies an ill-defined standard for "explicit reason". It's too vague, too broad, and relies too much on a law enforcement officer's discretion. They don't like having to apply discretion; they want explicit instructions like "check everyone's credentials automatically". When they're forced to apply discretion they often get in trouble. And like I said, even if they have the purest of pure intentions, who really wants to waste time bugging white people about their citizenship credentials? I probably wouldn't either if I were a cop. It would be really naive to assume that white and non-white citizens are equally likely to be harassed for citizenship credentials under this law- even by Hispanic police.
Actually I didn't word that last part right. A malicious intent to undermine constitutional protections here isn't required. It's more a question of whether or not a law is constitutional if its passage reflects indifference to unavoidable but predictable side-effects that undermine them, even if the letter of the law and the intent behind the spirit of the law are on their face constitutional. That's a more precise way of putting it.
Meaning, no matter what our racial impulses are, there's nothing wrong necessarily with a bill designed specifically to target illegal aliens. That's an acceptable intent (no matter how important you think it is and why). But if we all know that this is unavoidably going to affect different races of people differently, undermining constitutional protections, is it enough to argue that isn't what the law is designed or intended to do?