No, because those millions of small pieces release the same amount of energy into the Earth system, just now into the atmosphere now rather than the planet surface. Rather than ejecting material, earthquakes, tsunamis, you flash fry the hemisphere.
Or to put it another way (to more accurately reflect the energies involved), would you rather be hit in the arm by a 30mm round (taking your arm off), or hit by several dozen 9mm rounds.
The problem isn't the impact, its all the kinetic energy needs to go somewhere. Either into the Earth which vaporizes rock and spreads it around, or in the atmosphere that flash cooks the hemisphere
It's all about statistics and comparative assessment of risk.
It comes down to how likely is an individual person to be killed or injured in a motor vehicle accident vs. being killed or injured by "highly toxic radio nucleotides which last tens of thousands of years" released during a launch failure?
The answer is, or course, that you are orders of magnitude more likely to be harmed in a car accident (or slipping in the shower) than you would by an RTG launch. Surrounding it with hyperbolic descriptors such as "toxic" or "highly harmful" doesn't make any difference to the statistics, nor the fact that each of us make the choice to participate in far more risky endeavors on a daily basis. Adding the word "nuclear" to something that has a 0.0000001% of killing you, means it still has a 0.0000001% of killing you.
Besides Pu-238 (used in RTGs) has a half life of 87 years. So it most definitely wont be hanging around for "tens of thousands of years"
Then god forbid you drive to work today. It's just not worth it to risk a car accident, after all just because you've had a perfect "not dying in a car crash" record so far, it meaningless. Or are you one of those people that hear the word "Nuclear" and flee in abject terror. You must be shocked, absolutely shocked that you probably have nuclear material in your home (smoke detector) or that thousands of lives a day are saved using nuclear medicine (my mother was one). But hey Fukushima.
RTGs are designed to handle worst case launch accident or re-entry scenarios. Even if they did somehow breach and release some of their Pu-238, the odds of if harming someone are so insignificant, that if it worries you, I cant imagine how you manage to go outside while dealing with the constant fear of being, shot, run over and struck by lightning. Never mind that full blown nuclear reactors carrying far greater quantities of highly radioactive material have burned up in the atmosphere several times, with zero, absolutely zero harm to anyone.
Read my response to the other poster. Kosmos 954 carried a BES-5 nuclear reactor on board, NOT a RTG. These are very very different technologies. If someone just sees the word "Nuclear" and starts running for the hills, then it's pretty clear they aren't even willing to learn.
RTGs have a perfect safety record, including cases there the rocket exploded, the RTG fished out of the ocean and used on a subsequent. We're talking about a few kg of PU-239 in an armored casing.
Besides you, who specifically doubts that SpaceX or Boeing (the other commercial crew contractor) will be unable to fly crew by 2017? Crew Dragon is supposed to fly (unmanned)in 2016. Boeing early 2017.
DC-X was a prototype to validate certain technologies and approaches that could potentially be used to build an actual SSTO (which would have been DC-Y)
Amazon doesn't survive due to selling "zero emissions" credits that it gets from the Californian government to other manufacturers. I'd like to see Tesla make a profit without all the cronyism and end user tax credits.
Tesla doesn't make a profit because it reinvests everything into R&D and the capital equipment it needs to scale. It would be a bad sign if they did make a profit, as it would mean that they don't have any ideas on where to spend money on growth.
LD50 (ingested) Plutonium metal is ~320 mg/kg based on animal studies, LD50 (ingested) caffeine is 127 mg/Kg. Thus caffeine is more toxic than Plutonium
You do realize that a the vast majority of shareholders and bondholders are not the 1%. They are the pension funds and 401K plans. You're talking about wiping out a good chunk of middle classes retirement savingsl
Most of the Moon's craters formed during the Late Heavy Bombardment period (3.8-4.0 billion years ago). The Earth was likely similarly impacted during this time, however on the Earth, geologic processes have erased almost all evidence of these. Oceanic crust is recycled every 200 odd million years, and there wasn't much continental crust during that period. Any crust that remains has been weathered, eroded, uplifted, folded, compressed, a dozen times. The Moon being geologically dead, and lacking any weather, retains these scars
It's not the size of NASA's budget, (Bolden keeps saying they have all the money they need for SLS), it's the unholy mess of earmarks that ties NASA's hands at just about every step. These days NASA can't take a shit without some congressional earmark telling them what brand of toilet paper to use.
NASA is no longer about space, it's about launching money into key congressional districts
What if the similar "big thwack" that created the moon on Earth, had done something similar on Venus as opposed to killing its rotation. Current theories suggest that the Moon's influence was important in establishing plate tectonics on Earth which did a lot to fix all our early CO2. Venus without a large moon, never developed plate tectonics and kept it's CO2 in the atmosphere leading to its runaway greenhouse effect.
So I take it you're against retiring the internal combustion engine. If the plan is to substantially reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, then expect a dramatic increase in the amount of electric consumed as we electrify the transportation sector.
In weapons yes, however all military reactors use highly enriched uranium (sub reactors even use super-grade uranium which has higher U-235 concentration than what is typically used in weapons)
> current price to last several hundred years
At the currently tiny fraction of worldwide production. If you are arguing for some sort of fission economy, then there's not nearly enough of the stuff.
If there is a fission economy than new sources will be found and developed. Then there are breeder reactors, thorium, sea water extraction, and ultimately the rest of the solar system. People always seem to compare what Solar will be in 10 years to what nuclear was 30 years ago. Or can we abandon Solar because if we go "full solar" we'll run out of Indium or Lithium
> and it'd take so long to build that it'd never be economical.
It doesn't make a difference, the non-nuclear side is already too expensive to build:
Oh, no... someone wrote a blog. His argument assumes that the ITER approach is the only one that will work and that costs will never come down, he also assumes that if Fusion were perfected and became widespread we somehow couldn't build additional fission reactors, or build specialized fusion reactors to produce tritium (I guess we've lost the ability to build CANDU reactors), Darlington itself has been approved to build 2-4 new reactors if required. Plus we don't know if Pollywell fusion will pan out, or if Lockheed Martin will somehow live up to their claims. However it's perfectly fine for Solar advocates to assume that breakthroughs in battery technology will solve all of its issues
Slashdot Mirror
No, because those millions of small pieces release the same amount of energy into the Earth system, just now into the atmosphere now rather than the planet surface. Rather than ejecting material, earthquakes, tsunamis, you flash fry the hemisphere.
Or to put it another way (to more accurately reflect the energies involved), would you rather be hit in the arm by a 30mm round (taking your arm off), or hit by several dozen 9mm rounds. The problem isn't the impact, its all the kinetic energy needs to go somewhere. Either into the Earth which vaporizes rock and spreads it around, or in the atmosphere that flash cooks the hemisphere
It's all about statistics and comparative assessment of risk. It comes down to how likely is an individual person to be killed or injured in a motor vehicle accident vs. being killed or injured by "highly toxic radio nucleotides which last tens of thousands of years" released during a launch failure? The answer is, or course, that you are orders of magnitude more likely to be harmed in a car accident (or slipping in the shower) than you would by an RTG launch. Surrounding it with hyperbolic descriptors such as "toxic" or "highly harmful" doesn't make any difference to the statistics, nor the fact that each of us make the choice to participate in far more risky endeavors on a daily basis. Adding the word "nuclear" to something that has a 0.0000001% of killing you, means it still has a 0.0000001% of killing you. Besides Pu-238 (used in RTGs) has a half life of 87 years. So it most definitely wont be hanging around for "tens of thousands of years"
As I indicated in my original post. RTGs are designed to survive (and have successfully survived) both launch accidents and re-entry's
Then god forbid you drive to work today. It's just not worth it to risk a car accident, after all just because you've had a perfect "not dying in a car crash" record so far, it meaningless. Or are you one of those people that hear the word "Nuclear" and flee in abject terror. You must be shocked, absolutely shocked that you probably have nuclear material in your home (smoke detector) or that thousands of lives a day are saved using nuclear medicine (my mother was one). But hey Fukushima. RTGs are designed to handle worst case launch accident or re-entry scenarios. Even if they did somehow breach and release some of their Pu-238, the odds of if harming someone are so insignificant, that if it worries you, I cant imagine how you manage to go outside while dealing with the constant fear of being, shot, run over and struck by lightning. Never mind that full blown nuclear reactors carrying far greater quantities of highly radioactive material have burned up in the atmosphere several times, with zero, absolutely zero harm to anyone.
Ooops, yes, mixed up my isotopes.
Read my response to the other poster. Kosmos 954 carried a BES-5 nuclear reactor on board, NOT a RTG. These are very very different technologies. If someone just sees the word "Nuclear" and starts running for the hills, then it's pretty clear they aren't even willing to learn.
Kosmos 954 carried a BES-5 nuclear reactor not a RTG, these are very very different technologies. Besides I remember how we all died in 1977
RTG's ARE containers designed to survive catastrophic launch failures. We're not talking about nuclear reactors here
RTGs have a perfect safety record, including cases there the rocket exploded, the RTG fished out of the ocean and used on a subsequent. We're talking about a few kg of PU-239 in an armored casing.
Besides you, who specifically doubts that SpaceX or Boeing (the other commercial crew contractor) will be unable to fly crew by 2017? Crew Dragon is supposed to fly (unmanned)in 2016. Boeing early 2017.
SpaceX also just filed with the FCC to launch two prototype satellites for its future constellation
DC-X was a prototype to validate certain technologies and approaches that could potentially be used to build an actual SSTO (which would have been DC-Y)
Nothing new, and one wonders what the "telecoms" are doing with the metadata.
"Telcoms" use this metadata for a little thing called billing
Amazon doesn't survive due to selling "zero emissions" credits that it gets from the Californian government to other manufacturers. I'd like to see Tesla make a profit without all the cronyism and end user tax credits.
Tesla doesn't make a profit because it reinvests everything into R&D and the capital equipment it needs to scale. It would be a bad sign if they did make a profit, as it would mean that they don't have any ideas on where to spend money on growth.
LD50 (ingested) Plutonium metal is ~320 mg/kg based on animal studies, LD50 (ingested) caffeine is 127 mg/Kg. Thus caffeine is more toxic than Plutonium
I will also point out that Caffeine is far more toxic than Plutonium
I'd be interested in hearing why you think that.
You start eating pure caffeine and I'll start eating pure plutonium and we'll see who dies first
I will also point out that Caffeine is far more toxic than Plutonium
You do realize that a the vast majority of shareholders and bondholders are not the 1%. They are the pension funds and 401K plans. You're talking about wiping out a good chunk of middle classes retirement savingsl
You're not including all the people who have died as a result of air pollution cause by the burning of coal
Most of the Moon's craters formed during the Late Heavy Bombardment period (3.8-4.0 billion years ago). The Earth was likely similarly impacted during this time, however on the Earth, geologic processes have erased almost all evidence of these. Oceanic crust is recycled every 200 odd million years, and there wasn't much continental crust during that period. Any crust that remains has been weathered, eroded, uplifted, folded, compressed, a dozen times. The Moon being geologically dead, and lacking any weather, retains these scars
It's not the size of NASA's budget, (Bolden keeps saying they have all the money they need for SLS), it's the unholy mess of earmarks that ties NASA's hands at just about every step. These days NASA can't take a shit without some congressional earmark telling them what brand of toilet paper to use. NASA is no longer about space, it's about launching money into key congressional districts
What if the similar "big thwack" that created the moon on Earth, had done something similar on Venus as opposed to killing its rotation. Current theories suggest that the Moon's influence was important in establishing plate tectonics on Earth which did a lot to fix all our early CO2. Venus without a large moon, never developed plate tectonics and kept it's CO2 in the atmosphere leading to its runaway greenhouse effect.
So I take it you're against retiring the internal combustion engine. If the plan is to substantially reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, then expect a dramatic increase in the amount of electric consumed as we electrify the transportation sector.
> The military hardly uses plutonium
Wut? That's practically all they use.
In weapons yes, however all military reactors use highly enriched uranium (sub reactors even use super-grade uranium which has higher U-235 concentration than what is typically used in weapons)
> current price to last several hundred years
At the currently tiny fraction of worldwide production. If you are arguing for some sort of fission economy, then there's not nearly enough of the stuff.
If there is a fission economy than new sources will be found and developed. Then there are breeder reactors, thorium, sea water extraction, and ultimately the rest of the solar system. People always seem to compare what Solar will be in 10 years to what nuclear was 30 years ago. Or can we abandon Solar because if we go "full solar" we'll run out of Indium or Lithium
> and it'd take so long to build that it'd never be economical.
It doesn't make a difference, the non-nuclear side is already too expensive to build:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/fusion-aint-gonna-happen
Oh, no... someone wrote a blog. His argument assumes that the ITER approach is the only one that will work and that costs will never come down, he also assumes that if Fusion were perfected and became widespread we somehow couldn't build additional fission reactors, or build specialized fusion reactors to produce tritium (I guess we've lost the ability to build CANDU reactors), Darlington itself has been approved to build 2-4 new reactors if required. Plus we don't know if Pollywell fusion will pan out, or if Lockheed Martin will somehow live up to their claims. However it's perfectly fine for Solar advocates to assume that breakthroughs in battery technology will solve all of its issues