Have a look at this scenario, then imagine it occurring not just in New York but also Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, Miami, Houston, Dallas, and Seattle. Obviously, the scale of casualties in other cities would not be quite as great as New York, but hundreds of thousands of people would die in each, with a disproportionate weighting towards the distinctly non-expendable. That's a grand total of 10 warheads. Let's designate two more warheads each to each of the US's carrier battle groups. If that's not enough, how about we devote one nuclear warhead to each of the 149 oil refineries in the United States. And we've still used less than 200 warheads.
That sounds pretty assured, and pretty destructive, to me...
Nuclear weapons are 60-year-old technology, which have been successfully reinvented (mostly independently) by the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, Israel, and to a lesser extent India, Pakistan and South Africa (the last three didn't/haven't mastered multi-stage designs, but that's at least partly because they don't need to).
Manufacturing the latest Intel or AMD CPU is much more technologically challenging (and expensive to set up the infrastructure for) than a nuclear weapon.
Sure. You ever heard of radium-dial wristwatches? There's millions of people happily wearing them, as am I.
Everything carries an element of risk. Compared to the risks of driving, drinking alcohol, or eating at McDonald's, the risk from a bit of natural uranium, for instance, is so small as to be lost in the noise.
Some of the isotopes have a half-life of hundreds of thousands of years. That means that they half in radioactivity every couple of hundred thousand years.
If their half life is that long, that makes them not very dangerous because they're not very radioactive. To simplify somewhat, the ones that represent the real risk are the ones that have a half-life of a few hours or days, such as Iodine-131, to a few decades, like Cesium-137.
The IAEA has just released the latest comprehensive assessment of the impact of the Chernobyl disaster.
Firstly, childhood thyroid cancer has, without doubt, increased a lot. However, luckily, it's very treatable. Therefore, very few people die from it. Aside from that, no increase in cancers has been detected. However, statistical projections based on dose rates suggest that about 4000 people will ultimately die from cancer caused by Chernobyl - but it will be impossible to attribute individual cancer deaths to it; it will be quite difficult even to prove that there *was* an increase. Certainly, outside the relatively small group of people exposed to very large amounts of radiation, no increase in cancer has been detected. The report also didn't find any convincing evidence to support a claim of increased birth defects, despite what that crappy propaganda piece Chernobyl Heart claimed.
The parent poster is right. Chernobyl, horrible as it is, was not nearly as bad as Bhopal, and pales in comparison to the number of miners who die from coal dust inhalation annually, let alone the excess deaths caused by air pollution (estimated at about 200,000 worldwide, every single year).
There's enough U-238 out there to keep breeder reactors going for thousands of years. Because there's so much energy available from it, you can even do silly things like extract uranium from seawater to obtain it.
The "energy" is always present, it's just that a fast breeder reactor converts U-238 (from which the energy is locked up) into plutonium (from which it can be usefully extracted).
As a very crude but hopefully useful analogy, imagine you had a lot of very heavily waterlogged and thus incombustible wood, a coal-fired heater, and a relatively small amount of coal. You use the heat from the coal to dry out the wood. You haven't violated the laws of thermodynamics, but you've got yourself a whole lot more useful fuel. And you can use the burning dried wood to dry some more wood, and so on.
Now, this isn't some kind of perpetual motion machine. Once you've burned the plutonium (the dried wood), you can't burn it again. But there is so much waterlogged wood (U-238) that we're not going to run out for a very, very, very long time.
...at which point you may as well mine the asteroids, which require much less Delta-v again, and some of which are pretty much chunks of high-grade stainless steel (with a bunch of platinum mixed in).
In any caes, for just about any conceivable exploration program, the startup and running costs of a mining/manufacturing colony on the moon are so huge that it's cheaper just to haul stuff from Earth. For one thing, you can't grow food on the moon under natural light, and the energetics of doing so with electric lighting are so ridiculously ugly as to be a complete joke.
Your first paragraph is correct, but the rest of your comment is complete and utter rot.
The one thing that the Space Station has demonstrated is that building infrastructure without a serious plan of what you want to do with it is a waste of money. Mining the moon for anything other than helium-3 is also a complete waste of time; there's nothing there that's not available in abundant quantities back on Earth, or, if you want to go sci-fi on us, from the asteroid belt (where you don't have to lift it out of a gravity well).
Oh, and as far as Mars goes, what are these compelling threats that are so insurmountable that warp drive is required to get them there and back safely? The chronic radiation dose isn't *that* scary (have you seen the latest report on Chernobyl?), and a fast ship will require just as much shielding from solar storms as a slow one.
There's nothing that annoys me more than that particular strand of environmentalism I like to call the sun worshippers. This group seems to believe all our energy problems can be solved by everybody's favourite G-class star, and it's only a conspiracy of the oil/coal/nuclear sector and their dastardly subsidies keeping solar power out of the picture.
If you bother to check out the websites of most of the green groups of today, their emphasis has gone off solar and concentrates much more heavily on wind. And there's a very good reason for that. Wind comes somewhat close to cost-competitiveness with non-renewables. Solar is way, way more expensive.
Of course, even if wind or solar were available free it still isn't a suitable replacement for baseload generation. Why? Because storing a kilowatt-hour of electricity is more expensive than generating it with a non-renewable plant. Maybe some miracle energy storage technology will come along (hydrogen is the usual suspect). Slightly more plausibly, when we've all switched to pluggable hybrid cars with big battery packs, we'll have enough storage capacity in the grid to make wind (and solar, if the costs ever come down) workable replacements for non-renewables. But I'm not holding my breath.
When following this story, one thing that didn't really seem to make a great deal of sense to me were the people who were left behind in New Orleans to take shelter in the Superdome and a couple of other hardened buildings. Now, while these buildings were designed to ride out even hurricanes like Katrina, from what I read this was definitely regarded as a "last resort" option.
While I understand that a hurried evacuation is a highly chaotic situation, and there were undoubtedly many foolhardy people who simply decided not to leave, I fail to understand why everybody that wanted to go couldn't have been shifted. Certainly, I would hope that if *I* was in a place where everybody who could drive out was told to evacuate, every possible effort would be made to provide some transport to those who didn't have their own. Heck, if I were evacuating and somebody needed a lift out of there, I'd certainly throw away any crap I was carrying to offer them a ride. Goods are replaceable, people's lives aren't.
This is the same guy who published a book which claimed that differences in GDP were explainable in terms of the differences in mean IQ between countries, using data that claimed that the average IQ in Equatorial Guinea was 59.
While I'm sure the average Equatorial Guinean is poorly educated and might well have received insufficient iodine as a child, that figure is so insanely low (more than 2.7 standard deviations below the global mean of 100) as to fail the laugh test.
For instance, this cool toy would handily outfly a 1940's warplane if you attached some weapons to it (assuming they get it flying without running out of money, which isn't assured given the track record of small airplane manufactureres).
Sorry for the factual error; the finer points of the US (and allied) military chain of command in the Cold War era aren't going to be my Jeopardy topic of choice.
As to your comment about the Delta Dart and its radio control; how did they ever sneak that one past the Air Force brass and the pilots, given their well-documented love of manned airplanes, the well-known example of what the astronauts forced the designers to do to their space capsules, and the not unreasonable fear that 1950's valve electronics weren't really up to the job of controlling a rather finicky interceptor?
In fact, the US military is again working on a nuclear-powered aircraft, but this time it's a UAV. However, it's using some kind of rather exotic nuclear reaction, not a conventional fission reactor. However, the appeal of this design is purely about the loiter time; I very much doubt it'd be a cost effective option for civilian transport.
As to the practicality of fission-powered aircraft, I'm not convinced it's as practical as you make out. Building a reactor that has a sufficient power-to-weight ratio to make the plane perform acceptably, and is sufficiently shielded that a crashed one wouldn't pose a radiation hazard, would seem to me to be a considerable challenge that hasn't changed all that much since the 1950's. Materials science has improved considerably, but not *that* much.
I can't find the reference, but part of the problem is that the US nuclear regulatory regime is designed around the assumption of monolithic, large light-water reactors. The idea of a modular system where you can add another reactor module quickly doesn't fit in with the approval process, removing one of the biggest advantages.
Secondly, US companies aren't developing PBMR designs; South African and Chinese ones are. Funnily enough, the subsidies for nuclear R&D and deployment currently floating around Washington are aimed at the American nuclear power industry, not its foriegn competitors.
Mind you, if Westinghouse's cost estimates on its new AP-1000 power plant design turn out to be it's going to be pretty competitively priced anyway. Pebble beds aren't the be-all and end-all. One concern is whether there'll be enough helium available to run them...
According to the figures I've been able to find, a conservative estimate for the number of global deaths caused by outdoor air pollution annually is 200,000. That's dwarfed, by the way, by the deaths caused by indoor air pollution (mostly using unflued solid fuel stoves in developing countries) of close to 3 million.
But that pales into insignificance compared to those evil environmentalists banning DDT, right? Wrong. As blogger Tim Lambert records in excruciating detail, DDT has never been banned for malaria control, and is indeed in use in a number of countries for just this purpose. It has, however, been banned for agricultural use; this actually *helps* its use for malaria control because insects are exposed to less of it, thus reducing resistance levels.
There are a number of ways in which you could argue that the nuttier green groups have hurt both the environment and humanity (for instance, their opposition to nuclear power), but the malaria-DDT story is a crock propagated by right-wing propagandists who never let the facts get in the way to smear everybody to the left of Genghis Khan.
This is a problem, which is why on occasion I have gone all Grammar Nazi on various articles. At the moment I'm completely rewriting one of the IT-related articles for just this purpose, in the process doing some severe culling of tangential points that obscure the ability to see the forest for the trees.
I'm not in the know (and the people that are won't be talking until the mission's over), but I can hazard a guess. Take it with as much salt as desired...
Firstly, the heat shield is well known as one of NASA's less brilliant ideas; if you read James Michener's novel Space one of his characters shakes his head at the inelegance and horrible complexity of the design, I believe reflecting the views of many within NASA at the time about the whole concept.
As far as why they're finding these problems now: it's mainly because they're looking a lot harder. The only reason NASA knows about the issue is that they're checking the heat shield with cameras while in orbit. As far as why they actually intMy guess is that the reason why they did the removal wasn't that the shuttle would have definitely crashed if it had reentered with those gap fillers; it was that NASA didn't *know* what would happen if those gap fillers were there. By the law of averages, the shuttle has probably landed successfully a number of times with the same problem.
However, imagine, hypothetically, that NASA decided not to remove those gap fillers, and the shuttle crashes on reentry. I can just imagine the congressional hearings now about NASA incompetence in not applying a relatively simple fix that might have saved the Shuttle. Given the relative risk of fixing the problem compared to not fixing it, and it's easy to see why NASA went with fixing it.
As I understand it, real science on the ISS won't begin the Columbus Science Laboratory is added (if it's added), and, really, not until they can have six crew there on a permanent basis.
But, frankly, it seems the history of science in LEO is pretty poor. Aside from using LEO as a convenient spot to look down upon the Earth or up at the stars, that is...
Can any Slashdotters make a convincing case that science on the ISS is a vaguely good use of funds? In the sense of "the scientific payoff is likely worth it in the first place", not "well, we've spent $100 billion now, we may as well spend the remaining $10 billion".
Zubrin's proposal is you tie the empty upper stage of your rocket on a tether, and you tie the Earth-Mars transfer craft on the other end, and gradually spin them up. Voila, gravity!
While I know that just about everything in space is difficult, compared to the other stuff we pull off routinely that doesn't sound terribly tough.
To construct a few of the diagrams in my thesis, I wrote a program that outputted SVG, which I then loaded into inkscape to add a few labels and the like. It's very, very straightforward to visualize scientific data in this way, easier than doing bitmaps in many cases.
The waste is toxic, but compared to the amount of power it produces the level of waste is really really small. Nuclear waste represents a relatively small amount of the waste that we *already* are storing indefinitely.
Unlike many of the other toxic wastes we're dealing with, it *does* become less toxic (radiologically toxic, that is) over time. After a thousand years or so it's less radioactive than the original uranium ore.
Air pollution from coal plants kills tens of thousands of Americans *every single year*. Additional pollution controls might reduce this to a couple of thousand. Even if you accept that Chernobyl killed thousands of people (for which the evidence is extremely shaky) that's multiple Chernobyls, every single year, from coal.
You can't replace more than 10-20% of your grid with wind because it's too unpredictable.
Using the waste to build nuclear weapons is really difficult, at most. The "easy" way to build nukes is with highly enriched uranium (which is not used in nuclear power plants). The plutonium produced in normal reactor operations contains a lot more Pu-240 than bomb-grade plutonium, which makes it have a tendancy (to a first approximation) to blow itself apart before enough fission has occurred to make a really big explosion.
As for the risks of leaks and meltdowns, it could happen, but they seem to be vanishingly rare events.
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That sounds pretty assured, and pretty destructive, to me...
Manufacturing the latest Intel or AMD CPU is much more technologically challenging (and expensive to set up the infrastructure for) than a nuclear weapon.
Everything carries an element of risk. Compared to the risks of driving, drinking alcohol, or eating at McDonald's, the risk from a bit of natural uranium, for instance, is so small as to be lost in the noise.
If their half life is that long, that makes them not very dangerous because they're not very radioactive. To simplify somewhat, the ones that represent the real risk are the ones that have a half-life of a few hours or days, such as Iodine-131, to a few decades, like Cesium-137.
Firstly, childhood thyroid cancer has, without doubt, increased a lot. However, luckily, it's very treatable. Therefore, very few people die from it. Aside from that, no increase in cancers has been detected. However, statistical projections based on dose rates suggest that about 4000 people will ultimately die from cancer caused by Chernobyl - but it will be impossible to attribute individual cancer deaths to it; it will be quite difficult even to prove that there *was* an increase. Certainly, outside the relatively small group of people exposed to very large amounts of radiation, no increase in cancer has been detected. The report also didn't find any convincing evidence to support a claim of increased birth defects, despite what that crappy propaganda piece Chernobyl Heart claimed.
The parent poster is right. Chernobyl, horrible as it is, was not nearly as bad as Bhopal, and pales in comparison to the number of miners who die from coal dust inhalation annually, let alone the excess deaths caused by air pollution (estimated at about 200,000 worldwide, every single year).
There's enough U-238 out there to keep breeder reactors going for thousands of years. Because there's so much energy available from it, you can even do silly things like extract uranium from seawater to obtain it.
As a very crude but hopefully useful analogy, imagine you had a lot of very heavily waterlogged and thus incombustible wood, a coal-fired heater, and a relatively small amount of coal. You use the heat from the coal to dry out the wood. You haven't violated the laws of thermodynamics, but you've got yourself a whole lot more useful fuel. And you can use the burning dried wood to dry some more wood, and so on.
Now, this isn't some kind of perpetual motion machine. Once you've burned the plutonium (the dried wood), you can't burn it again. But there is so much waterlogged wood (U-238) that we're not going to run out for a very, very, very long time.
...at which point you may as well mine the asteroids, which require much less Delta-v again, and some of which are pretty much chunks of high-grade stainless steel (with a bunch of platinum mixed in). In any caes, for just about any conceivable exploration program, the startup and running costs of a mining/manufacturing colony on the moon are so huge that it's cheaper just to haul stuff from Earth. For one thing, you can't grow food on the moon under natural light, and the energetics of doing so with electric lighting are so ridiculously ugly as to be a complete joke.
The one thing that the Space Station has demonstrated is that building infrastructure without a serious plan of what you want to do with it is a waste of money. Mining the moon for anything other than helium-3 is also a complete waste of time; there's nothing there that's not available in abundant quantities back on Earth, or, if you want to go sci-fi on us, from the asteroid belt (where you don't have to lift it out of a gravity well).
Oh, and as far as Mars goes, what are these compelling threats that are so insurmountable that warp drive is required to get them there and back safely? The chronic radiation dose isn't *that* scary (have you seen the latest report on Chernobyl?), and a fast ship will require just as much shielding from solar storms as a slow one.
If you bother to check out the websites of most of the green groups of today, their emphasis has gone off solar and concentrates much more heavily on wind. And there's a very good reason for that. Wind comes somewhat close to cost-competitiveness with non-renewables. Solar is way, way more expensive.
Of course, even if wind or solar were available free it still isn't a suitable replacement for baseload generation. Why? Because storing a kilowatt-hour of electricity is more expensive than generating it with a non-renewable plant. Maybe some miracle energy storage technology will come along (hydrogen is the usual suspect). Slightly more plausibly, when we've all switched to pluggable hybrid cars with big battery packs, we'll have enough storage capacity in the grid to make wind (and solar, if the costs ever come down) workable replacements for non-renewables. But I'm not holding my breath.
While I understand that a hurried evacuation is a highly chaotic situation, and there were undoubtedly many foolhardy people who simply decided not to leave, I fail to understand why everybody that wanted to go couldn't have been shifted. Certainly, I would hope that if *I* was in a place where everybody who could drive out was told to evacuate, every possible effort would be made to provide some transport to those who didn't have their own. Heck, if I were evacuating and somebody needed a lift out of there, I'd certainly throw away any crap I was carrying to offer them a ride. Goods are replaceable, people's lives aren't.
Or am I grossly misinterpreting the situation?
While I'm sure the average Equatorial Guinean is poorly educated and might well have received insufficient iodine as a child, that figure is so insanely low (more than 2.7 standard deviations below the global mean of 100) as to fail the laugh test.
For instance, this cool toy would handily outfly a 1940's warplane if you attached some weapons to it (assuming they get it flying without running out of money, which isn't assured given the track record of small airplane manufactureres).
As to your comment about the Delta Dart and its radio control; how did they ever sneak that one past the Air Force brass and the pilots, given their well-documented love of manned airplanes, the well-known example of what the astronauts forced the designers to do to their space capsules, and the not unreasonable fear that 1950's valve electronics weren't really up to the job of controlling a rather finicky interceptor?
As to the practicality of fission-powered aircraft, I'm not convinced it's as practical as you make out. Building a reactor that has a sufficient power-to-weight ratio to make the plane perform acceptably, and is sufficiently shielded that a crashed one wouldn't pose a radiation hazard, would seem to me to be a considerable challenge that hasn't changed all that much since the 1950's. Materials science has improved considerably, but not *that* much.
When you're Strategic Air Command and you're defending against the commies, you need three megawatts to power your computers :)
Or, if that's too much exercise, how about an electric scooter? Top speed 30mph, range of maybe 30 miles, costs you 15 cents to recharge from flat.
I can't find the reference, but part of the problem is that the US nuclear regulatory regime is designed around the assumption of monolithic, large light-water reactors. The idea of a modular system where you can add another reactor module quickly doesn't fit in with the approval process, removing one of the biggest advantages.
Secondly, US companies aren't developing PBMR designs; South African and Chinese ones are. Funnily enough, the subsidies for nuclear R&D and deployment currently floating around Washington are aimed at the American nuclear power industry, not its foriegn competitors.
Mind you, if Westinghouse's cost estimates on its new AP-1000 power plant design turn out to be it's going to be pretty competitively priced anyway. Pebble beds aren't the be-all and end-all. One concern is whether there'll be enough helium available to run them...
But that pales into insignificance compared to those evil environmentalists banning DDT, right? Wrong. As blogger Tim Lambert records in excruciating detail, DDT has never been banned for malaria control, and is indeed in use in a number of countries for just this purpose. It has, however, been banned for agricultural use; this actually *helps* its use for malaria control because insects are exposed to less of it, thus reducing resistance levels.
There are a number of ways in which you could argue that the nuttier green groups have hurt both the environment and humanity (for instance, their opposition to nuclear power), but the malaria-DDT story is a crock propagated by right-wing propagandists who never let the facts get in the way to smear everybody to the left of Genghis Khan.
This is a problem, which is why on occasion I have gone all Grammar Nazi on various articles. At the moment I'm completely rewriting one of the IT-related articles for just this purpose, in the process doing some severe culling of tangential points that obscure the ability to see the forest for the trees.
Firstly, the heat shield is well known as one of NASA's less brilliant ideas; if you read James Michener's novel Space one of his characters shakes his head at the inelegance and horrible complexity of the design, I believe reflecting the views of many within NASA at the time about the whole concept.
As far as why they're finding these problems now: it's mainly because they're looking a lot harder. The only reason NASA knows about the issue is that they're checking the heat shield with cameras while in orbit. As far as why they actually intMy guess is that the reason why they did the removal wasn't that the shuttle would have definitely crashed if it had reentered with those gap fillers; it was that NASA didn't *know* what would happen if those gap fillers were there. By the law of averages, the shuttle has probably landed successfully a number of times with the same problem.
However, imagine, hypothetically, that NASA decided not to remove those gap fillers, and the shuttle crashes on reentry. I can just imagine the congressional hearings now about NASA incompetence in not applying a relatively simple fix that might have saved the Shuttle. Given the relative risk of fixing the problem compared to not fixing it, and it's easy to see why NASA went with fixing it.
But, frankly, it seems the history of science in LEO is pretty poor. Aside from using LEO as a convenient spot to look down upon the Earth or up at the stars, that is...
Can any Slashdotters make a convincing case that science on the ISS is a vaguely good use of funds? In the sense of "the scientific payoff is likely worth it in the first place", not "well, we've spent $100 billion now, we may as well spend the remaining $10 billion".
While I know that just about everything in space is difficult, compared to the other stuff we pull off routinely that doesn't sound terribly tough.
To construct a few of the diagrams in my thesis, I wrote a program that outputted SVG, which I then loaded into inkscape to add a few labels and the like. It's very, very straightforward to visualize scientific data in this way, easier than doing bitmaps in many cases.