Also, plutonium is only an alpha emmiter. This form of radiation canot penetrate a sheet of paper or your dead epidermis. So a chunk of plutonium sitting right next to you would have no effect at all. It is only dangerous if you inhale it, or, to a lesser extent, ingest it.
Here is an excellent Lawrence Livermore Nat'l Lab paper on plutonium toxicity. Pay special attention to the section on plutonium in drinking water. It shows how plutonium would simply settle out of the water, producing almost no health risk, even in large quantities.
The Romans had always used lead pipes. Yet they conquered a good part of the world, build huge monuments, and wrote many great works of literature such as the Aenied. I doubt lead poisoning really had much to do with it. The greeks used lead pipes too, BTW.
Here is an Lawrence Livermore report on plutonium toxicity. Plutonium oxide actually is not that toxic when ingested. It passes out of your system fairly harmlessly in small quantities. In larger quantities (~5 grams) it still probably won't kill you, but only increase the risk of cancer somewhat. Plutonium is only really deadly if inhaled.
I thought the Roman empire fell because of their odd habit of preserving food with lead...silly me.
Or barbarian invasions!;-) They had no chance to survive. Around the 300-400's all these barbarian tribes just descended on Rome. They just were too outnumbered, plus the barbarians had tactic that were in some ways superior to the Romans. Such as their heavy use of calvary and light leather armor, which allowed quicker movement than the Roman legions.
A more accurate translation from Hebrew is "Thou shalt not murder." Remember that it was translated from Hebrew to Greek to Latin and finally to English. On a side note, the Red Sea the Moses parted is not the Red Sea. The Hebrew Torah said the "Reed Sea," probably one of the many saline lakes in the Sinai area.
Consider that this storage facility has to store materials with half-lives of 20,000 years or more and is supposedly designed for the task.
Radioactive materials with such long half-lives aren't very radioactive. Nuclear waste drops to the radioactivity levels of uranium ore in 500 years!!! Uranium ore has so little radioactivity that they make fiestaware plates out of it.
According to the EPA, an aquifer runs approximately 1000ft under the storage area at Yucca (which is 1000ft below the surface). That sounds like alot of room, but consider that many home water wells run over 500ft deep.
What do home wells have to do with it?? 1000 feet is quite a bit of space. Anyway, explain to me how solid metal leaks out of a thick metal container, and leaches through sealed concrete, and the 1000 feet of solid rock to get into the water supply.
Putting such a facility in a place where an earthquake could trigger a radiation leak that could poison an entire regions water 20 years or 2,000 years from now is irresponsible and must be stopped.
Every place on the planet has earthquakes! The yucca moutain quakes are very weak. Just look at the facts. An earlier poster put up a seismic map of the Yucca mountain area. Anyway, how is a 2.0 earthquake going to break thick concrete, and the somehow puncture steel casks?
A single mid-sized moving van took out the federal building in Oklahoma. I think something similar could be done to take out a transport truck.
Put your thinking cap on. The bombing hit a huge (relatively) flimsy building from close up. It still did not cause the building to completely collapse. Explain to me then how it would do anything to a small (absorbs less impact force) thick steel cask? The cask would be intact! You don't think they have tested it in explosions before? They have.
Funny thing is, there's still gonna be a lot of the stuff all over the place in unsecure facilities. The stuff has to cool for 5 years before they can transport it. Then when they transport it, you have the potential for terrorists to have an easy way to detonate a dirty bomb. They just need to get a car full of explosives close enough to a transport truck and it's all over.
Your facts are all wrong. It does not have to cool down. It would take a shitload of explosives to rupture the tanks. The transport trucks are guarded and they can withstand explosions, ultra-high speed crashes with locomotives, etc. And now, they often glassify the waste. So if somthing does happen, you just easily clean up the glassy waste, leaving nothing on the ground contaminated.
May I remind you that nuclear waste is routinely trucked around the country. It has been for years. Is it only dangerous when being transported to Yucca Mountain or somthing?
Um. No. These figures are coming from the American Wind Energy Assoc. They are skewed. I usualy hear in the neighborhood of 3 cents KWH for new meldown proof pebble-bed reactors and about 4-6 cents for other reactors. I usualy hear wind power being around 6-9 cents a KWH. (still fairly cheap, mind you)
Wind energy is a clean, cheap power source, but it is too unreliable to provide more than a few percent of our total power needs. I'm sorry I don't have any good links.
Weightlifting tends to put the most muscle on per time spent (as opposed to say running.)
Weight lifting is mostly upper body work, with the exceptions of a few lifts such as squats. Upper body work is great. But running is not to be overlooked either. It builds huge quads and calves. (I get much more leg results from running than I do from lifting) Your leg muscles are by far the largest in yor body, much larger than bi's, tri's, or pecs. So running can increase your muscle mass quite a bit, raising your metabolism, burning shitloads of calories in addition to those being burned by running itself.
I believe a complete physical fitness plan should include cardio workouts such as running along with weight training, preferably on alternating days.
I'm a cross country runner in high school. I am now training for the fall x/c season. 2 months ago, I had 15% body fat, well within the normal range, but I wanted to drop some.
So, in late May I started to cut out all junk foods, pop especially. Quitting drinking pop is very important. Pop is just a ton of empty calories that gets converted to fat. So anyway, I quit pop, and now I don't even like it anymore. Pop just seems gross and over-sweet to me now. Also, I began a fitness program. I run 1/2 hour to 1 hour a night, stretching before and afterwards, and doing an ab routine and push-ups.
I have gone down to 6% bodyfat (This is VERY low, but not unhealthy for runners). I used to be 135, but now I am 130 with much more muscle. I can also run a mile in 5:10 now.
One note about running: It is hard to sum up the willpower to run at first. However, once you get to be more in shape, it can be great fun, due to the "runner's high".
To someone who wants to lose weight, don't go on a diet. Just change your lifestyle a bit. When you go to the grocery store, buy apples and nectarines to satisfy your sweet tooth. Drink orange juice instead of pop. You don't have to revert to a vegan diet or anything. Just eat a balanced diet, but try to cut down on the doritos and pepsi. Exercise a little. Do something fun to exercise. Maybe ride your bike or play raquetball or something. When you get more fit, maybe try your luck at running.
Transuranic waste is highly radioactive, however, and you're sure to suffer from it.
However, a chunk of plutonium sitting ten feet away from you wouldn't do much, assuming you are only exposed to it for a relatively short amount of time.
Would you rather sleep in a room with say a bucket of transuranic waste or with the equivalent mass of coal particles? Hmm?
Transuranic waste, please. The coal dust is very carcinogenic and I would be inhaling it into my lungs. It could cause lung cancer , emphysema, or black lung disease. While the radiation from the waste would not be too bad, and it certainly wouldn't get into my lungs.
It's not like you die from being around plutonium. I wouldn't want to have a chunk of plutonium on my person all the time. But just casual exposure to radioactive materials will only increase cancer risk a very small amount. The big danger is when you are around fissioning materials.
A planet Venus' size can retain that kind of atmosphere with no problem. There have been several probes on venus that have confirmed the dense atmosphere. (The first soviet venus probe was crushed by the extreme pressures on descent)
Besides, thick cloud layers tend to reflect away incoming energy, creating a natural balance to a greenhouse effect. At the rate it's going, you would expect the dumb thing to regulate itself back to something a bit more normal in a matter of a few millenia, wouldn't you?
Keep in mind that they are sulfuric acid clouds. More of a dark brown than white. They don't reflect nearly as much as water clouds.
Actually, none of his more far out inventions were really practical. The laser thing still loses a ton of power over a relatively short distance. The only aplication I could see would be a really kick ass shock rifle. (In addition to being able to electrocute anyone for over 2 miles, a high voltage tesla rifle would make a green glow.)
why else would California depend so much on Washington state and others for their power,
God. I'm from Yakima, WA. We got royally screwed over by those idiotic californian bureaucrats. Here in WA we have always had clean, cheap power from all the hydroelectric dams along the Columbia and Snake. They also provide us with our water to irrigate our rich but dry farmland. Anyway, our power was so cheap that we had power-hungry aluminum plants up the ying-yang. Which provided tens of thousands of jobs in Eastern Washington.
Then we were forced to sell power to the Californians to bail them out of their own stupidity. This raised prices and caused most of the aluminum plants to close. There is a small town of about 2,000 a ways south of where I live. Goldendale. It used to have a huge ALCOA plant by John Day Dam there that provided about a thousand jobs. Then the electric rates rose and it shut down, putting all of it's workers out of a job. Now the majority of goldendale's population is on some kind of welfare.
I read Tesla's work, and while much of it was brilliant, I don't buy into the hype and conspiracy theories that these inventions were somehow "lost". They proved economically or practically infeasible, or were replaced by more effective inventions.
Another wireless power transmission method that he tested was to send high-voltage power along the UV-ionized air in the paths of two large searchlights. It worked. Now it can be done much more easily with small nitrogen UV lasers. There is one company testing a stun gun using this technology. It works for up to two miles. I imagine this would not be that inneficient if you were aiming the electric beams toward some power lines just a little ways away.
That or you could just put an electric line between the two tracks!:-P
When tuned properly, a diesel engine is just as clean as gasoline. Plus diesel is more efficient, so you get more power per gallon. (Diesel powered small cars get much better mileage than their gas counterparts)
Is your need for air conditioning SO great that you have to have 48 diesel engines running YEAR ROUND and polluting the earth to ONLY produce 2.1 megawatts each?
It will only produce as much pollution as a few semi trucks put together.
I can't believe these Europeans. You know if it wasn't for us you would be under the rule of the Thrird Reich!? Without the massive support from the U.S. (we churned out more planes, tanks, etc than all other allieds and axis combined) you would have been crushed by Hitler.
You don't have low mileage cars because you care about the evironment. You do because your socialist governments tax gas to $4.00.
Slashdot Mirror
proton bomb....
No, you would want a neutron bomb.
Also, plutonium is only an alpha emmiter. This form of radiation canot penetrate a sheet of paper or your dead epidermis. So a chunk of plutonium sitting right next to you would have no effect at all. It is only dangerous if you inhale it, or, to a lesser extent, ingest it.
Here is an excellent Lawrence Livermore Nat'l Lab paper on plutonium toxicity. Pay special attention to the section on plutonium in drinking water. It shows how plutonium would simply settle out of the water, producing almost no health risk, even in large quantities.
The Romans had always used lead pipes. Yet they conquered a good part of the world, build huge monuments, and wrote many great works of literature such as the Aenied. I doubt lead poisoning really had much to do with it. The greeks used lead pipes too, BTW.
Ur user #6757!? Holy shit!
Here is an Lawrence Livermore report on plutonium toxicity. Plutonium oxide actually is not that toxic when ingested. It passes out of your system fairly harmlessly in small quantities. In larger quantities (~5 grams) it still probably won't kill you, but only increase the risk of cancer somewhat. Plutonium is only really deadly if inhaled.
If he is so smart, why does he say "nukular" instead of "nuclear"?
Yeah. It's pronounced "nuc-u-ler."
I thought the Roman empire fell because of their odd habit of preserving food with lead...silly me.
;-) They had no chance to survive. Around the 300-400's all these barbarian tribes just descended on Rome. They just were too outnumbered, plus the barbarians had tactic that were in some ways superior to the Romans. Such as their heavy use of calvary and light leather armor, which allowed quicker movement than the Roman legions.
Or barbarian invasions!
I'm pretty sure it's "Thou shalt not kill."
A more accurate translation from Hebrew is "Thou shalt not murder." Remember that it was translated from Hebrew to Greek to Latin and finally to English. On a side note, the Red Sea the Moses parted is not the Red Sea. The Hebrew Torah said the "Reed Sea," probably one of the many saline lakes in the Sinai area.
You forgot "boy imagines boss having girl and coffee." mmmm, okay, yeah, slurp.
Yeah. Could you moxe a little over to the right? Grreat.
Consider that this storage facility has to store materials with half-lives of 20,000 years or more and is supposedly designed for the task.
Radioactive materials with such long half-lives aren't very radioactive. Nuclear waste drops to the radioactivity levels of uranium ore in 500 years!!! Uranium ore has so little radioactivity that they make fiestaware plates out of it.
According to the EPA, an aquifer runs approximately 1000ft under the storage area at Yucca (which is 1000ft below the surface). That sounds like alot of room, but consider that many home water wells run over 500ft deep.
What do home wells have to do with it?? 1000 feet is quite a bit of space. Anyway, explain to me how solid metal leaks out of a thick metal container, and leaches through sealed concrete, and the 1000 feet of solid rock to get into the water supply.
Putting such a facility in a place where an earthquake could trigger a radiation leak that could poison an entire regions water 20 years or 2,000 years from now is irresponsible and must be stopped.
Every place on the planet has earthquakes! The yucca moutain quakes are very weak. Just look at the facts. An earlier poster put up a seismic map of the Yucca mountain area. Anyway, how is a 2.0 earthquake going to break thick concrete, and the somehow puncture steel casks?
Here is a good site.
Side note: How come your HTML tags look like this [i]? You use carrots for HTML tags.
A single mid-sized moving van took out the federal building in Oklahoma. I think something similar could be done to take out a transport truck.
Put your thinking cap on. The bombing hit a huge (relatively) flimsy building from close up. It still did not cause the building to completely collapse. Explain to me then how it would do anything to a small (absorbs less impact force) thick steel cask? The cask would be intact! You don't think they have tested it in explosions before? They have.
Funny thing is, there's still gonna be a lot of the stuff all over the place in unsecure facilities. The stuff has to cool for 5 years before they can transport it. Then when they transport it, you have the potential for terrorists to have an easy way to detonate a dirty bomb. They just need to get a car full of explosives close enough to a transport truck and it's all over.
Your facts are all wrong. It does not have to cool down. It would take a shitload of explosives to rupture the tanks. The transport trucks are guarded and they can withstand explosions, ultra-high speed crashes with locomotives, etc. And now, they often glassify the waste. So if somthing does happen, you just easily clean up the glassy waste, leaving nothing on the ground contaminated.
May I remind you that nuclear waste is routinely trucked around the country. It has been for years. Is it only dangerous when being transported to Yucca Mountain or somthing?
wind : 4 to6 cents
nuclear : 11,1 to 14,5 cents
Um. No. These figures are coming from the American Wind Energy Assoc. They are skewed. I usualy hear in the neighborhood of 3 cents KWH for new meldown proof pebble-bed reactors and about 4-6 cents for other reactors. I usualy hear wind power being around 6-9 cents a KWH. (still fairly cheap, mind you)
Wind energy is a clean, cheap power source, but it is too unreliable to provide more than a few percent of our total power needs. I'm sorry I don't have any good links.
I've got the advangtage as a teen. But anyone under the age of forty still should be about as fit as a teenager.
Weightlifting tends to put the most muscle on per time spent (as opposed to say running.)
Weight lifting is mostly upper body work, with the exceptions of a few lifts such as squats. Upper body work is great. But running is not to be overlooked either. It builds huge quads and calves. (I get much more leg results from running than I do from lifting) Your leg muscles are by far the largest in yor body, much larger than bi's, tri's, or pecs. So running can increase your muscle mass quite a bit, raising your metabolism, burning shitloads of calories in addition to those being burned by running itself.
I believe a complete physical fitness plan should include cardio workouts such as running along with weight training, preferably on alternating days.
Here's what I do:
I'm a cross country runner in high school. I am now training for the fall x/c season. 2 months ago, I had 15% body fat, well within the normal range, but I wanted to drop some.
So, in late May I started to cut out all junk foods, pop especially. Quitting drinking pop is very important. Pop is just a ton of empty calories that gets converted to fat. So anyway, I quit pop, and now I don't even like it anymore. Pop just seems gross and over-sweet to me now. Also, I began a fitness program. I run 1/2 hour to 1 hour a night, stretching before and afterwards, and doing an ab routine and push-ups.
I have gone down to 6% bodyfat (This is VERY low, but not unhealthy for runners). I used to be 135, but now I am 130 with much more muscle. I can also run a mile in 5:10 now.
One note about running: It is hard to sum up the willpower to run at first. However, once you get to be more in shape, it can be great fun, due to the "runner's high".
To someone who wants to lose weight, don't go on a diet. Just change your lifestyle a bit. When you go to the grocery store, buy apples and nectarines to satisfy your sweet tooth. Drink orange juice instead of pop. You don't have to revert to a vegan diet or anything. Just eat a balanced diet, but try to cut down on the doritos and pepsi. Exercise a little. Do something fun to exercise. Maybe ride your bike or play raquetball or something. When you get more fit, maybe try your luck at running.
Being healthy can be fun
Transuranic waste is highly radioactive, however, and you're sure to suffer from it.
However, a chunk of plutonium sitting ten feet away from you wouldn't do much, assuming you are only exposed to it for a relatively short amount of time.
Would you rather sleep in a room with say a bucket of transuranic waste or with the equivalent mass of coal particles? Hmm?
Transuranic waste, please. The coal dust is very carcinogenic and I would be inhaling it into my lungs. It could cause lung cancer , emphysema, or black lung disease. While the radiation from the waste would not be too bad, and it certainly wouldn't get into my lungs.
It's not like you die from being around plutonium. I wouldn't want to have a chunk of plutonium on my person all the time. But just casual exposure to radioactive materials will only increase cancer risk a very small amount. The big danger is when you are around fissioning materials.
A planet Venus' size can retain that kind of atmosphere with no problem. There have been several probes on venus that have confirmed the dense atmosphere. (The first soviet venus probe was crushed by the extreme pressures on descent)
Besides, thick cloud layers tend to reflect away incoming energy, creating a natural balance to a greenhouse effect. At the rate it's going, you would expect the dumb thing to regulate itself back to something a bit more normal in a matter of a few millenia, wouldn't you?
Keep in mind that they are sulfuric acid clouds. More of a dark brown than white. They don't reflect nearly as much as water clouds.
Allright, you're off the hook! ;-) Just next time buy a Nissan Sentra. (I got one. 40 mpg. very nice)
Maybe I misjudged
Actually, none of his more far out inventions were really practical. The laser thing still loses a ton of power over a relatively short distance. The only aplication I could see would be a really kick ass shock rifle. (In addition to being able to electrocute anyone for over 2 miles, a high voltage tesla rifle would make a green glow.)
why else would California depend so much on Washington state and others for their power,
God. I'm from Yakima, WA. We got royally screwed over by those idiotic californian bureaucrats. Here in WA we have always had clean, cheap power from all the hydroelectric dams along the Columbia and Snake. They also provide us with our water to irrigate our rich but dry farmland. Anyway, our power was so cheap that we had power-hungry aluminum plants up the ying-yang. Which provided tens of thousands of jobs in Eastern Washington.
Then we were forced to sell power to the Californians to bail them out of their own stupidity. This raised prices and caused most of the aluminum plants to close. There is a small town of about 2,000 a ways south of where I live. Goldendale. It used to have a huge ALCOA plant by John Day Dam there that provided about a thousand jobs. Then the electric rates rose and it shut down, putting all of it's workers out of a job. Now the majority of goldendale's population is on some kind of welfare.
I read Tesla's work, and while much of it was brilliant, I don't buy into the hype and conspiracy theories that these inventions were somehow "lost". They proved economically or practically infeasible, or were replaced by more effective inventions.
Another wireless power transmission method that he tested was to send high-voltage power along the UV-ionized air in the paths of two large searchlights. It worked. Now it can be done much more easily with small nitrogen UV lasers. There is one company testing a stun gun using this technology. It works for up to two miles. I imagine this would not be that inneficient if you were aiming the electric beams toward some power lines just a little ways away.
That or you could just put an electric line between the two tracks!
They are extremly inefficient, and burn DIESEL!
When tuned properly, a diesel engine is just as clean as gasoline. Plus diesel is more efficient, so you get more power per gallon. (Diesel powered small cars get much better mileage than their gas counterparts)
Is your need for air conditioning SO great that you have to have 48 diesel engines running YEAR ROUND and polluting the earth to ONLY produce 2.1 megawatts each?
It will only produce as much pollution as a few semi trucks put together.
I can't believe these Europeans. You know if it wasn't for us you would be under the rule of the Thrird Reich!? Without the massive support from the U.S. (we churned out more planes, tanks, etc than all other allieds and axis combined) you would have been crushed by Hitler.
You don't have low mileage cars because you care about the evironment. You do because your socialist governments tax gas to $4.00.
My brother had a metro and he commuted 30 miles a day going 65 MPH on freeways. Never had a problem.