Businesses don't bother with anything that doesn't have big, short term profit. They let the Guv'mint (sic) pay for it:(. Right now there's work being done on a Leukemia vaccine... in Europe. No company in the states would pay a dime for the research, because it'd be a one time vaccine that only benefits a few million people (many too poor to pay $$$ for medicine).
A quick google shows that work is ongoing on this new vaccine. I also see that it's not a vaccine in the sense that you get the vaccine to prevent the disease. This "vaccine" is just another chemo-therapy variant.
I also see that they're fairly early in the human-testing part of the vaccine. Which means that it'll be another 20 years before it becomes available to the general public.
Assuming of course that it actually works half as well as expected, and doesn't have side-effects worse than the disease it fixes.
Do you doubt that fires can spread radioactive contamination?
As far as England? Yes, I think I do.
Nobody said they felt tingling sensation when within a non-burning radioactive area, they said they felt it when fighting fires on contaminated ground.
Question is, did he feel it because he KNEW he was on contaminated ground? Or was he only told later that it was contaminated? And how contaminated was it, really? Don't know, do you? Did you ever consider the possibility that his quote was put in there to scare people, and not to inform people?
Look, just claiming, "Oh, that isn't a problem" is NOT going to get the public to trust nuclear power.
Frankly, NOTHING is going to get the public to trust nuclear power. Well, except that fraction of the public that lives near nuclear power plants. They generally have no problems that way. Of course, I expect that most of them don't even know they live near a nuclear reactor, since most of them have been taught that a nuclear reactor looks like a cooling tower.
A long time ago (~30 years), I remember an anti-nuke protest at the University I was going to at the time. The protesters spent a lot of time trying to convince the students they should fear nuclear power, right up to the point where one of their speakers asked "Well, how would you feel about living near a nuclear reactor?"
A couple of students raised their hands, and when recognized by the speaker, pointed to the nuclear reactor that could clearly be seen from where the protest was taking place.
This is the kind of hysteria we see on the nuclear debate - the opponents point out that nuclear power means the end of the world, the proponents start providing facts and figures, and are ignored.
And the media helps of course. You get more ads sold and pages viewed by terrifying your readers than you do by telling them "14000 people were killed by a tsunami, but so far the damaged reactor hasn't killed anyone"....
A gravitational slingshot from the moon could be used to offset some energy from the propulsion system, but is indirect. "Fuzzy orbits" operate on a similar principle, but are far more complex to compute and can take even less energy. Multiple passes of an elliptical orbit could take advantage of the Oberth effect, with multiple successive burns at the perigee of each pass. Overall, you end up using more energy than a direct Hohmann, but your engine is used more efficiently, producing more energy for less reaction mass. A long duration burn from an ion drive will consume far more energy, but will still take far longer than a Hohmann transfer.
All of this is true.
It should be noted that we could also go to Mars by way of a gravity slingshot around Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter as well.
Fortunately, we're not actually colossally stupid, so we're not going to send men to Mars in any spacecraft that takes longer than a Hohmann transfer.
For that matter, we're not all that likely to use an orbit as slow as a Hohmann. Seems to me that I read once that a six month transit to Mars requires only an extra km/s deltaV to achieve. Which would be pretty trivial with an orbital tankfarm to refuel from.
"Strontium-90, plutonium, and americium-241 are all extremely susceptible to upward atmospheric migration and dispersal via heat from fires. They create problems for firefighters and others who breathe them in. Radioactive smoke landing on crops ⦠even 150km or more from the fire can create such concentrations of radiation in food it will be harmful to eat. Our studies, together with Yale University, have shown it is imperative we take measures to control the radiation [in] Chernobyl's forests."
I'll bite, how is plutonium "extremely susceptible to upward atmospheric migration"? As opposed to, say, mercury?
Oh, and I really liked this part:
"I know when I am fighting a fire on radioactively contaminated ground â" you get the heat just like an ordinary fire, but you get a tingling sensation too, like pins jumping all over your body."
It should be noted that people work in that area for 15 days at a time.
While I doubt that Russia's opinions about how much exposure is "safe", I expect that if they're within a couple of orders of magnitude of US Navy rules, then I've had the dubious privilege of spending some time in an area with a higher radiation level (for a short time, mind you) without ever feeling any "tingling sensation"....
There's an exhibit in the window of the Wellcome Museum on Euston Rd. in London with pictures of some artist making actual cake from yellow cake and eating it. While you may not actually die from the amounts used, I still wouldn't intentionally EAT some. I guess it's no worse than living in a radon-rich area, but still...
Much less bad than living in a Radon-rich area.
Yellowcake isn't enriched, so it'll be better than 99% U-238 (half life in the billions of years) and less than 1% U-235 (half life in the hundreds of millions of years).
As far as I know, none of the compounds present are digestable, so it'll go through your digestive tract like, well, shit through a goose.
In two days tops it's on its way to the sewage treatment plant, and you don't have all that many alpha emissions from something with a 700+ million year half-life in two days....
I think Katrina; and the World Trade Center; and the Coal fires in Centralia, Pennsylvania (burning since '62); and the 1969 oil Spill in Santa Barbara; and the 89 Valdiez spill; and the Heyope tire fire (burned for 15 years;) and the Deepwater oil spill; the Bhopal disaster, etc. etc. etc. all disagree with your statement that nuclear desasters are the only energy/transportation disasters that have a long lasting impact.
It should, perhaps, be pointed out that there were several nuclear power plants within the area of effect of Katrina. Ever notice how seldom they're mentioned in the news?
Did any of the manned missions to the moon require refueling during flight?
Why would we need a refueling station for moon trips now?
To move larger payloads to the moon?
Saturn V was barely up to putting three men and a lander into a earth-moon orbit. If we want to lift something larger than that, we might want to use a dozen Saturn V (or equivalent vehicles) to boost 1000+ tons of fuel to earth orbit, then use one more to put a 200 or so ton spacecraft into Earth orbit, refuel, and off we go to the moon...
Also of note, People take a lot of resources to survive. So the trick with people is to move then quick so they use less resources. These could be put into orbit and take a decade or two to get into position. Have it sling shot around some planets and enough fuel (non-storage) to "Park It" in spot. For human travel taking a decade or two is way to long. We need fast and light ships to get us to say in mars in a year or two.
Umm, no.
the minimum energy hohmann transfer orbit to Mars takes 8 months and change. All the other orbits are faster.
Which means we don't need to worry about trips to Mars taking "a year or two", since they can't take more than eight months without us doing something colossally dumb.
Nor do we have to worry about trips to Mars taking a decade or two - the only way we could manage to take so long to get to Mars is if we drove there using the new Interplanetary Bypass....
I mean if you wanted to go to Mars, land and come back you wouldn't do it quite like a trip to the moon. Ideally you build the ship in space at a Lagrange point then shuttle the fuel, men and equipment up there. Then send a ship with a lander capable of breaking Mars orbit AND either a decent sized orbiter for the trip back or park another Lagrange point in relation to Mars before you even go, stop there and gas up and leave.
Easier to build it on the moon. And since there is water on the moon, easier to fuel it there.
Alternately, if you don't want to mess up the lunar water supply, you just make LOX on the moon from the rocks. Since LOX is ~5/6 of the mass of your fuel (using LH2/LOX), you only have to ship 1/6 of your fuel from Earthside to the moon.
Then, you launch from the moon into an orbit that uses the Earth as a slingshot to get a bit more oomph out of your reaction mass and off you go to Mars. Or wherever.
It wouldn't be necessary to "stop" even if you were to refuel mid-flight. The refueling vessel would be placed in opportune orbit--around the sun, around a planet, etc.. An inbound vehicle would simply intercept the refueling vessel's orbit, refuel, and continue on it's merry way.
It would be harder to put a refueling vessel in an "opportune orbit" than to get it to the destination.
And it would probably require more fuel to match orbits with the refueling vessel in an "opportune orbit" then return to your original orbit than it would be to just fly on past.
Note that LEO is "halfway to anywhere" in the only metric that really matters in space - deltaV required to get there. If you could get to LEO and then replace all the fuel spent getting there, you'd have enough to reach Solar Escape Speed. Plus a few km/s
In WWII, the US was building up a fuel store by fueling up B52s and flying them across the Himalayas. But, depending on weather conditions, sometimes they would need to take on fuel at the depot to make the return trip. The implication in what I've read about this is that they were spending the majority of the fuel on the trip, to deposit a little fuel at the destination, like driving across the state to deliver a couple of gallons of petrol.
First, we didn't have B52 bombers in WW2. You probably meant B29s.
Secondly, it's more like driving into the middle of a desert to deliver a couple gallons of petrol.
Which has been done repeatedly in history, when exploring new areas that didn't have gas stations. We even do it now in Antarctica.
It would annihilate (literally) the parts of you that it touches and in the process create enough gamma radiation to kill everything around you.
One atom of anti-helium? It would annihilate two protons and two neutrons, and produce enough gamma radiation to do essentially nothing at all - 10^-9 joules or so...
If they're guilty of nothing, as they are in many cases, then the correct thing to do is to say "You're free to go. If you want, we'll set up travel arrangements back to your home.
You DO realize that we haven't done that because too many people got excited about the possibility that the governments of their homes would torture/execute them, right?
If you'll remember, the Bush Administration (and later, the Obama Administration) spent quite a bit of time trying to find a place to release them.
Alas, people screamed to the high heavens when it was suggested that we take them back where we found them and let them go, since the local governments might kill/torture/otherwise-abuse them.
Then it was suggested that the people screaming might want them in THEIR countries. And they screamed even louder that they were NOT going to take any of these terrorists into their homes.
So then both admionistrations said, more or less, "fuck it! We'll keep them till we find somewhere that wants them", and so they continue to sit in Guantanamo.
Article II and Article VI would seem to contradict you.
And yes, it's at least theoretically possible to do the work from a country that hasn't signed the Treaty. Of course, it's arguable (and thus would be argued by someone) that citizens of a signatory nation would come under Article VI, even if operating out of a non-signatory nation.
Posting from Florida, most (all, I think) of the blackouts that I've experienced in my life (25 years) have been the result of a minor disaster tearing down a line. Usually this is in the "lightning hit a tree and it fell on a power line"-type of disaster, but includes the occasional tornado/hurricane. Keep in mind, we have significantly-above-average lightning strikes here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_lightning_strikes.png [wikipedia.org]
Agreed. I live in NOLA. I can't think of the last time we had a power outage that wasn't caused by a storm of one sort or another. And I'm a lot more than 25 years old.
I'm not advocating full command economy, I just want the government to intervene in areas that market forces have proven to be unreliable at best, and destructive at worst, in addressing. People aren't going to make the right decisions themselves, it requires some form of coercion or incentives.
Ultimately, once you give the government the power to intervene in areas that YOU consider essential, then you have given it power to intervene in EVERYTHING!
Or don't you think that someone else might manage to convince the government that HIS pet peeve is important enough to deserve a government mandate?
There are no detailed plans on the propulsion technology that would be used to get to mars
While NERVA or something better would be nice for going to Mars, it's not really required. LOX and LH2 (or even LOX and kerosene) is more than sufficient for the job. Just requires getting enough of it into orbit.
Depends on where you want to go. If you're trying to send a probe to Jupiter, you'll need a very big railgun to get the necessary speed.
Build a railgun that can push 20 tons to lunar escape speed (~2373 m/s).
Then use it to launch a rocket with 4km/s deltaV in an orbit that'll pass just above the atmosphere. Burn ~3.6km/s of your deltaV as you pass Earth close.
At that point, assuming you launched at the right time, you're outward bound for Jupiter and can expect to arrive there in about 33 months.
There are a lot of interesting things you can do with the Earth's gravity well if you start from the moon.
Slashdot Mirror
A quick google shows that work is ongoing on this new vaccine. I also see that it's not a vaccine in the sense that you get the vaccine to prevent the disease. This "vaccine" is just another chemo-therapy variant.
I also see that they're fairly early in the human-testing part of the vaccine. Which means that it'll be another 20 years before it becomes available to the general public.
Assuming of course that it actually works half as well as expected, and doesn't have side-effects worse than the disease it fixes.
As far as England? Yes, I think I do.
Question is, did he feel it because he KNEW he was on contaminated ground? Or was he only told later that it was contaminated? And how contaminated was it, really? Don't know, do you? Did you ever consider the possibility that his quote was put in there to scare people, and not to inform people?
Frankly, NOTHING is going to get the public to trust nuclear power. Well, except that fraction of the public that lives near nuclear power plants. They generally have no problems that way. Of course, I expect that most of them don't even know they live near a nuclear reactor, since most of them have been taught that a nuclear reactor looks like a cooling tower.
A long time ago (~30 years), I remember an anti-nuke protest at the University I was going to at the time. The protesters spent a lot of time trying to convince the students they should fear nuclear power, right up to the point where one of their speakers asked "Well, how would you feel about living near a nuclear reactor?"
A couple of students raised their hands, and when recognized by the speaker, pointed to the nuclear reactor that could clearly be seen from where the protest was taking place.
This is the kind of hysteria we see on the nuclear debate - the opponents point out that nuclear power means the end of the world, the proponents start providing facts and figures, and are ignored.
And the media helps of course. You get more ads sold and pages viewed by terrifying your readers than you do by telling them "14000 people were killed by a tsunami, but so far the damaged reactor hasn't killed anyone"....
All of this is true.
It should be noted that we could also go to Mars by way of a gravity slingshot around Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter as well.
Fortunately, we're not actually colossally stupid, so we're not going to send men to Mars in any spacecraft that takes longer than a Hohmann transfer.
For that matter, we're not all that likely to use an orbit as slow as a Hohmann. Seems to me that I read once that a six month transit to Mars requires only an extra km/s deltaV to achieve. Which would be pretty trivial with an orbital tankfarm to refuel from.
From your link:
"Strontium-90, plutonium, and americium-241 are all extremely susceptible to upward atmospheric migration and dispersal via heat from fires. They create problems for firefighters and others who breathe them in. Radioactive smoke landing on crops ⦠even 150km or more from the fire can create such concentrations of radiation in food it will be harmful to eat. Our studies, together with Yale University, have shown it is imperative we take measures to control the radiation [in] Chernobyl's forests."
I'll bite, how is plutonium "extremely susceptible to upward atmospheric migration"? As opposed to, say, mercury?
Oh, and I really liked this part:
"I know when I am fighting a fire on radioactively contaminated ground â" you get the heat just like an ordinary fire, but you get a tingling sensation too, like pins jumping all over your body."
It should be noted that people work in that area for 15 days at a time.
While I doubt that Russia's opinions about how much exposure is "safe", I expect that if they're within a couple of orders of magnitude of US Navy rules, then I've had the dubious privilege of spending some time in an area with a higher radiation level (for a short time, mind you) without ever feeling any "tingling sensation"....
Much less bad than living in a Radon-rich area.
Yellowcake isn't enriched, so it'll be better than 99% U-238 (half life in the billions of years) and less than 1% U-235 (half life in the hundreds of millions of years).
As far as I know, none of the compounds present are digestable, so it'll go through your digestive tract like, well, shit through a goose.
In two days tops it's on its way to the sewage treatment plant, and you don't have all that many alpha emissions from something with a 700+ million year half-life in two days....
It should, perhaps, be pointed out that there were several nuclear power plants within the area of effect of Katrina. Ever notice how seldom they're mentioned in the news?
To move larger payloads to the moon?
Saturn V was barely up to putting three men and a lander into a earth-moon orbit. If we want to lift something larger than that, we might want to use a dozen Saturn V (or equivalent vehicles) to boost 1000+ tons of fuel to earth orbit, then use one more to put a 200 or so ton spacecraft into Earth orbit, refuel, and off we go to the moon...
Umm, no.
the minimum energy hohmann transfer orbit to Mars takes 8 months and change. All the other orbits are faster.
Which means we don't need to worry about trips to Mars taking "a year or two", since they can't take more than eight months without us doing something colossally dumb.
Nor do we have to worry about trips to Mars taking a decade or two - the only way we could manage to take so long to get to Mars is if we drove there using the new Interplanetary Bypass....
Easier to build it on the moon. And since there is water on the moon, easier to fuel it there.
Alternately, if you don't want to mess up the lunar water supply, you just make LOX on the moon from the rocks. Since LOX is ~5/6 of the mass of your fuel (using LH2/LOX), you only have to ship 1/6 of your fuel from Earthside to the moon.
Then, you launch from the moon into an orbit that uses the Earth as a slingshot to get a bit more oomph out of your reaction mass and off you go to Mars. Or wherever.
It would be harder to put a refueling vessel in an "opportune orbit" than to get it to the destination.
And it would probably require more fuel to match orbits with the refueling vessel in an "opportune orbit" then return to your original orbit than it would be to just fly on past.
Note that LEO is "halfway to anywhere" in the only metric that really matters in space - deltaV required to get there. If you could get to LEO and then replace all the fuel spent getting there, you'd have enough to reach Solar Escape Speed. Plus a few km/s
First, we didn't have B52 bombers in WW2. You probably meant B29s.
Secondly, it's more like driving into the middle of a desert to deliver a couple gallons of petrol.
Which has been done repeatedly in history, when exploring new areas that didn't have gas stations. We even do it now in Antarctica.
One atom of anti-helium? It would annihilate two protons and two neutrons, and produce enough gamma radiation to do essentially nothing at all - 10^-9 joules or so...
Less than 200. Possibly less than 100. Unless by "from space" you mean "from Earth orbit".
You DO realize that we haven't done that because too many people got excited about the possibility that the governments of their homes would torture/execute them, right?
Alas, some people have this odd belief that intelligent, well-educated people should be able to read and write their own language properly.
If you'll remember, the Bush Administration (and later, the Obama Administration) spent quite a bit of time trying to find a place to release them.
Alas, people screamed to the high heavens when it was suggested that we take them back where we found them and let them go, since the local governments might kill/torture/otherwise-abuse them.
Then it was suggested that the people screaming might want them in THEIR countries. And they screamed even louder that they were NOT going to take any of these terrorists into their homes.
So then both admionistrations said, more or less, "fuck it! We'll keep them till we find somewhere that wants them", and so they continue to sit in Guantanamo.
And likely will forever....
Article II and Article VI would seem to contradict you.
And yes, it's at least theoretically possible to do the work from a country that hasn't signed the Treaty. Of course, it's arguable (and thus would be argued by someone) that citizens of a signatory nation would come under Article VI, even if operating out of a non-signatory nation.
Which would probably be why the US Army paid a license fee to the Mausers so that they could use a couple of Mauser patents on their service rifle.
And several to the French so they could use a couple of French artillery designs....
Umm, no. If you bother to check, you'll find, on the Treasury's website, a listing of the national debt from year to year.
The last time the national debt actually decreased was in 1956.
Agreed. I live in NOLA. I can't think of the last time we had a power outage that wasn't caused by a storm of one sort or another. And I'm a lot more than 25 years old.
Well, as I recall, most of the people defending Obama now were, in fact, blaming Bush back then.
Ultimately, once you give the government the power to intervene in areas that YOU consider essential, then you have given it power to intervene in EVERYTHING!
Or don't you think that someone else might manage to convince the government that HIS pet peeve is important enough to deserve a government mandate?
While NERVA or something better would be nice for going to Mars, it's not really required. LOX and LH2 (or even LOX and kerosene) is more than sufficient for the job. Just requires getting enough of it into orbit.
Build a railgun that can push 20 tons to lunar escape speed (~2373 m/s).
Then use it to launch a rocket with 4km/s deltaV in an orbit that'll pass just above the atmosphere. Burn ~3.6km/s of your deltaV as you pass Earth close.
At that point, assuming you launched at the right time, you're outward bound for Jupiter and can expect to arrive there in about 33 months.
There are a lot of interesting things you can do with the Earth's gravity well if you start from the moon.
Outer Space Treaty makes that illegal, so noone is going to be planning on doing that.