Though it certainly takes a lot of fuel and oxidizer to get a rocket through the thick lower atmosphere up to say 90,000 feet, it still takes a tremendous amount of energy to get from 90,000 feet and 3000-4000 mph to escape velocity of 17,500 mph. And that last bit would have to use oxidizer brought with since the air is quite thin at the edge of space.
3) Given a speed of 4000 mph horizontally at 90K ft, mass ratio required to reach orbit would be around 4.5 (as high as 5.0 with relatively low Isp fuels, as low as 4.0 with high Isp fuels).
4) The second stage of the old Saturn V has a mass ratio of 13.25.
In other words, if you're starting at 4000 mph and above most of the atmosphere, getting to orbit is realtively trivial.
Also, it should be noted that the 13.25 mass ratio of the S-II stage of Saturn V pretty much puts paid to the argument that an SSTO is impossible, since that stage has a delta-V of 11000 m/s+ by itself. The trick isn't in building an SSTO, it's in making one practical - being able to carry a useful payload would be nice, for instance.
'm no supporter of Chinese methods, whether official or not, but it's not quite as extreme as it looks at first glance- only a maximum of 1.9% sex selection against girls, virtually all by abortion, not infanticide per se, yielding a 3.8% excess of boys. In fact most of the imbalance comes from not enforcing the one-child policy, allowing mothers of girls to try again for a son.
3.8% excess of boys. Trot forward 30 years or so, and we have a population with about 60 MILLION men with no prospects of reproduction. Trust me, that will have consequences, for their society and the world as a whole.
Most glaringly, either you did not know, or you neglected to point out, that population growth is China is as slow as ours is because it is *controlled* by the state; the "one child policy" that has been in effect there since 1979. Would be that the rest of the world followed their lead in this issue, we would not be gutting our precious natural resources so quickly.
Yep, knew that. Also know that people in China routinely flout that law, since it requires ~2.1 children per woman to break even on population. If China actually followed its policy strictly, their population would be plummeting.
If Europe were to follow China's law as well as China does, their population would increase FASTER than it does. Ditto the USA.
You will not convince me that population is the central problem (note that when I was a kid, they were predicting a population >10 billion by 2000) when population growth is declining toward unsustainable levels now.
If you want to reduce the number of people in the world, try increasing their standards of living to, say, middle-class American levels.
The Japanese situation has people like mdsolar doing the Chicken Little all over the web. In reality they should feel reassured because the worst has happened and it didn't mean the end of the world. Hell, it didn't even mean the end of one small set of islands. That's quite good news, isn't it?
You miss one important detail - people like this WANT the worst to happen. They're hoping every night when they go to bed that it'll happen before morning, and looking forward to it every day when they wake up.
Because, after all, the word "nuclear" is an incredibly scary WORD....
Or perhaps we should just address the root problem, which is too many people, for a planet this size, at our current efficiencies. If the effort that went into typical 'green' causes (anti-nuke, wind, anti-whaling, etc) were to be directed instead towards slowing down the human population explosion, maybe then we could hit equilibrium and sustainability.
Hmm, US population growth is almost entirely a result of immigration (illegal and otherwise). We have almost the lowest population density of any industrial civilization.
Europe has a negative population growth, excluding immigration. It has been under 0.17% (including immigration) for the last five or so years.
China has a population growth rate comparable to the US's, or a bit lower. No immigration to speak of, of course.
India's population growth rate is still healthy (slightly above 1.5%), but lower than it was as recently as 40 years ago.
So it doesn't really look all that much like population is the big issue here.
Big issue, such as it is, is that more of China's and India's population wants to enjoy the kind of living conditions we take pretty much for granted in the western nations - electricity, running water, sewage treatment, that sort of thing.
You forgot to mention the tax credits and subsidies that make that four year timetable possible.
Which means that as long as only a very few people install them, they're cheap. If EVERYONE installed them, well, the tax credits would basically reduce to "you pay for your neighbor's solar panels, and he'll pay for your solar panels"....
(not that someone who is educated enough to know about such options is likely to be someone who wants to close themselves off to other points of view).
I've not seen much evidence that people whao are "educated enough to know about such options" is any more likely to open themselves up to other points of view.
Mostly, the educated people want to see their point of view reinforced by other educated people, and the opposite point of view denigrated by other educated people.
Official estimates of deaths from Chernobyl are around a half million, but some fairly credible sources believe it is actually as high as a million or even more.
Define "official" in this context.
Doing a quick survey, I can't see anyone I'd call "official" estimating 500K+ deaths from Chernobyl.
Admittedly, Greenpeace came up with a very large number of "expected deaths". Not actual ones, mind you, but the number they expect to see someday.
Note, by the way, that even Greenpeace's estimate was almost an order of magnitude below your upper limit of "as high as a million or even more". "Expected deaths", in Greenpeace's case, of course, against your actual deaths....
Once we eliminated the stress/hardship of being away from the day to day means of making a living to attend the legislature, it became easier for our politicians to become disconnected from their constituents/the 'common man', and whore themselves[their influence] out to the deepest pockets.
Once the government got a big enough budget that bribing government officials to get a piece of it became immensely profitable, it became easier for out politicians to become disconnected from their constituents/the 'common man'...
As long as there are trillions on the table to be divied up, there will be people willing to spend hundreds of millions to get a piece of the action.
I think you misspelt "corrupt" twice. It's not the size of the governemnt that matters, its who controls it.
It's at least partly the size. When the government is big enough to spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually, then spending hundreds of millions on bribes to get some of those billions becomes a reasonably investment.
And you're not ever going to find enough people to run a government (or any other organization) who won't be tempted when a chunk of "hundreds of millions" gets waved under their noses.
Nor are you going to find a way to stop rent-seeking by corporations, other than be reducing the size of the pie they're all bribing their way to a piece of.
Perjury? Obstruction of justice? How did he do either? He got a blow-job, and some politicians found out about it, and then questioned him about it. What kind of normal person in power would actually admit to that?
Well the perjury part might come about because he lied under oath. Note the "under oath" part. It's important.
And Obstruction of Justice is one of those charges that frequently gets thrown at people who lie to the police and other government investigators. Martha Stewart went to prison for lying to the FBI, if you'll remember.
Note also that this was NOT in regards to Monica, but in regards to a Sexual Harassment charge made by whatsername from Arkansas.
Note further that the Supremes had rules shortly before that trial that "consent" didn't make it any less sexual harassment when your boss tells you he'd like to bang you.
Or don't you remember what the meaning if "is" is?
But how many deaths from Chernobyl? Some people claim it only caused 30-60 deaths, which sounds like the number of plant workers that died.
It specifies a deathrate per terawatt hour. 0.04 deaths per terawatt hour, in fact. Let's do a quick thought experiment.
worldwide nuclear power output is nominally about 375GW.
Assume all those plants are operating 8000 hours per year to allow for some downtime. And to make a round number.
Assume they've all been operating for 30 years. Some have been going longer, some not so long, but the heyday of nuclear plant building was in the 70's, so it's a good gueswstimate.
So, crunching those numbers gives us about 3600 deaths due to nuclear power worldwide, using the 0.04 deaths per TW-hr.
So, looks like they're including a lot more than 30-60 deaths from Chernobyl in that number.
Arguably, we can account for a much higher number of Chernobyl deaths, but we'd have to assume about 100,000 to get their estimate up to 1.0 deaths per TW-Hr.
Which is still almost two orders of magnitude lower than the coal estimate....
It makes a lot of sense to say "the emergency cooling system isn't able to function.. fix it before its needed"... instead of "FUCK! We cant cool this thing anymore... run.... run far the away"
Actually, from the description, it wasn't the emergency cooling system that wasn't able to function, it was the backup to the backup to the emergency cooling system.
Note that the system in question was last tested at installation in 2009. No, the plant hadn't been operating for the last 40 years with no emergency cooling system. Nor even with only ONE emergency cooling system.
Their bodies were found Wednesday and required work to remove radioactive materials from them, the utility said. The plant is continuing to release high-level radiation in Japan's worst ever nuclear crisis.
Your source doesn't say they died of contamination. What it says is that they died about an hour and a half after the quake. Which was about the time the tsunami hit, and well before the plant started releasing any contamination.
Note, for reference, that the diesels were still in operation up to about 20 minutes before this time.
Note further that it was another twelve hours before the fuel rods were exposed, which would have been about the first point that they could have been exposed to radioactive contamination (that's 12 hours after they were dead, if it's not obvious).
Good try, though. Two more deaths due to the tsunami, still holding at zero for the meltdown(s).
BTW some people already died in Fukushima by conamination.
Citation?
I'd have expected to see this in the news, since they'd be the first deaths as a result of a nuclear accident since Chernobyl, and haven't, so I'd like to know where you found that info.
Are you sure that chart is based on the right figures? Many nuclear fan boys often claim that there are less than 100 deaths world wide caused by nuclear, completely ignoring the 6000+ deaths caused by Chernobyl (not to mention people still alive with birth defects and cancer). And even then nuclear barely comes ahead of wind and solar.
Can't verify that the chart is correct, but it DOES specify that it includes the deaths from Chernobyl.
(in Moby Dick, despite having small arms on board, Ahab decides to outrun the pirates. Think for a while about why. But then Melville had actually crewed on a whaler.)
Hmm, Ahab has small arms, the pirates have cannons. Yah, I'd run if the choice were my rifle against your 12 pounder cannon too.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of things:
1) Escape velocity (more properly, escape speed) isn't 17,500 mph.
2) Escape velocity (more properly, escape speed) isn't relevant to reaching orbit.
3) Given a speed of 4000 mph horizontally at 90K ft, mass ratio required to reach orbit would be around 4.5 (as high as 5.0 with relatively low Isp fuels, as low as 4.0 with high Isp fuels).
4) The second stage of the old Saturn V has a mass ratio of 13.25.
In other words, if you're starting at 4000 mph and above most of the atmosphere, getting to orbit is realtively trivial.
Also, it should be noted that the 13.25 mass ratio of the S-II stage of Saturn V pretty much puts paid to the argument that an SSTO is impossible, since that stage has a delta-V of 11000 m/s+ by itself. The trick isn't in building an SSTO, it's in making one practical - being able to carry a useful payload would be nice, for instance.
3.8% excess of boys. Trot forward 30 years or so, and we have a population with about 60 MILLION men with no prospects of reproduction. Trust me, that will have consequences, for their society and the world as a whole.
Yep, knew that. Also know that people in China routinely flout that law, since it requires ~2.1 children per woman to break even on population. If China actually followed its policy strictly, their population would be plummeting.
If Europe were to follow China's law as well as China does, their population would increase FASTER than it does. Ditto the USA.
You will not convince me that population is the central problem (note that when I was a kid, they were predicting a population >10 billion by 2000) when population growth is declining toward unsustainable levels now.
If you want to reduce the number of people in the world, try increasing their standards of living to, say, middle-class American levels.
You miss one important detail - people like this WANT the worst to happen. They're hoping every night when they go to bed that it'll happen before morning, and looking forward to it every day when they wake up.
Because, after all, the word "nuclear" is an incredibly scary WORD....
Hmm, US population growth is almost entirely a result of immigration (illegal and otherwise). We have almost the lowest population density of any industrial civilization.
Europe has a negative population growth, excluding immigration. It has been under 0.17% (including immigration) for the last five or so years.
China has a population growth rate comparable to the US's, or a bit lower. No immigration to speak of, of course.
India's population growth rate is still healthy (slightly above 1.5%), but lower than it was as recently as 40 years ago.
So it doesn't really look all that much like population is the big issue here.
Big issue, such as it is, is that more of China's and India's population wants to enjoy the kind of living conditions we take pretty much for granted in the western nations - electricity, running water, sewage treatment, that sort of thing.
You forgot to mention the tax credits and subsidies that make that four year timetable possible.
Which means that as long as only a very few people install them, they're cheap. If EVERYONE installed them, well, the tax credits would basically reduce to "you pay for your neighbor's solar panels, and he'll pay for your solar panels"....
Solar sails work really well near a star.
But not so much when the nearest star is lightyears away.
I've not seen much evidence that people whao are "educated enough to know about such options" is any more likely to open themselves up to other points of view.
Mostly, the educated people want to see their point of view reinforced by other educated people, and the opposite point of view denigrated by other educated people.
No matter what their point of view is....
Define "official" in this context.
Doing a quick survey, I can't see anyone I'd call "official" estimating 500K+ deaths from Chernobyl.
Admittedly, Greenpeace came up with a very large number of "expected deaths". Not actual ones, mind you, but the number they expect to see someday.
Note, by the way, that even Greenpeace's estimate was almost an order of magnitude below your upper limit of "as high as a million or even more". "Expected deaths", in Greenpeace's case, of course, against your actual deaths....
Once the government got a big enough budget that bribing government officials to get a piece of it became immensely profitable, it became easier for out politicians to become disconnected from their constituents/the 'common man'...
As long as there are trillions on the table to be divied up, there will be people willing to spend hundreds of millions to get a piece of the action.
It's at least partly the size. When the government is big enough to spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually, then spending hundreds of millions on bribes to get some of those billions becomes a reasonably investment.
And you're not ever going to find enough people to run a government (or any other organization) who won't be tempted when a chunk of "hundreds of millions" gets waved under their noses.
Nor are you going to find a way to stop rent-seeking by corporations, other than be reducing the size of the pie they're all bribing their way to a piece of.
Well the perjury part might come about because he lied under oath. Note the "under oath" part. It's important.
And Obstruction of Justice is one of those charges that frequently gets thrown at people who lie to the police and other government investigators. Martha Stewart went to prison for lying to the FBI, if you'll remember.
Note also that this was NOT in regards to Monica, but in regards to a Sexual Harassment charge made by whatsername from Arkansas.
Note further that the Supremes had rules shortly before that trial that "consent" didn't make it any less sexual harassment when your boss tells you he'd like to bang you.
Or don't you remember what the meaning if "is" is?
Twenty percent of the USA power needs, not two. A similar level in Germany, I believe.
More than that in France, of course
It specifies a deathrate per terawatt hour. 0.04 deaths per terawatt hour, in fact. Let's do a quick thought experiment.
worldwide nuclear power output is nominally about 375GW.
Assume all those plants are operating 8000 hours per year to allow for some downtime. And to make a round number.
Assume they've all been operating for 30 years. Some have been going longer, some not so long, but the heyday of nuclear plant building was in the 70's, so it's a good gueswstimate.
So, crunching those numbers gives us about 3600 deaths due to nuclear power worldwide, using the 0.04 deaths per TW-hr.
So, looks like they're including a lot more than 30-60 deaths from Chernobyl in that number.
Arguably, we can account for a much higher number of Chernobyl deaths, but we'd have to assume about 100,000 to get their estimate up to 1.0 deaths per TW-Hr.
Which is still almost two orders of magnitude lower than the coal estimate....
Actually, from the description, it wasn't the emergency cooling system that wasn't able to function, it was the backup to the backup to the emergency cooling system.
Note that the system in question was last tested at installation in 2009. No, the plant hadn't been operating for the last 40 years with no emergency cooling system. Nor even with only ONE emergency cooling system.
When they get some credible sources, I'll start paying attention.
The only reference to five deaths among the nuclear plant workers I can find is five workers killed by the earthquake/tsunami.
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/04/82823.html/ [kyodonews.jp]
Your source doesn't say they died of contamination. What it says is that they died about an hour and a half after the quake. Which was about the time the tsunami hit, and well before the plant started releasing any contamination.
Note, for reference, that the diesels were still in operation up to about 20 minutes before this time.
Note further that it was another twelve hours before the fuel rods were exposed, which would have been about the first point that they could have been exposed to radioactive contamination (that's 12 hours after they were dead, if it's not obvious).
Good try, though. Two more deaths due to the tsunami, still holding at zero for the meltdown(s).
Just did a quick wiki of your list.
Looks like there are currently FOUR reactors online that are Generation III. All of the same type, all in Japan.
No, Generation IV online, or even under construction.
Note that even the four Gen III reactors online are using 20+ year old designs.
I'll bite. Where is there a 20 year old design in use?
I can't think of any less than 40 years old myself.
Citation?
I'd have expected to see this in the news, since they'd be the first deaths as a result of a nuclear accident since Chernobyl, and haven't, so I'd like to know where you found that info.
Can't verify that the chart is correct, but it DOES specify that it includes the deaths from Chernobyl.
Umm, no.
Natural Gas = CH4.
Hydrogen = H2
CH4 =/= H2.
Hmm, rough estimate says 10E-14 scale error will be detectable at >150 km/hour.
Hmm, Ahab has small arms, the pirates have cannons. Yah, I'd run if the choice were my rifle against your 12 pounder cannon too.
You heard correctly. But they have distillery tours anyway :)