An analogy. We should quit researching cancer cures because we've failed miserably at curing it so far, and radiation and chemotherapy are dangerous and cause the patients to feel really bad.
Research and investments don't always pay off immediately. Anti-ABM folks have gone from claiming it will never work to it doesn't work often enough. Sooner or later, it will work often enough. And then what will they say?
The problem with your little theory is that in the case of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the delivery systems cost more than the nuclear bombs on them. Your rogue state would be better off building 10 missiles and putting 10 warheads on them.
Additionally, most nuclear (implosion) payloads are a little more finicky than conventional explosive payloads. If you damage the explosive lenses or tampers of the implosion device, it will probably be a fizzle or a zero-yield result. Which is much better than the 550 kiloton or 750 kiloton yield of the standard Russian MIRV warhead.
If that is the case, then why are countries like North Korea and Iran investing substantial amounts of their rather limited capital into ballistic missile research?
Fair enough. In my defense I thought we were talking about oil derived stuff.
Yeah, but the counter point to that is, if you set off a nuke, the water will get considerably hotter than the 2000 degrees or so it takes for water to thermally decompose. At which point you are going to have lots of free oxygen atoms swirling around which will have equal opportunity to reduce hydrogen or carbon atoms.
But when they burn under water are they really doing to by using O like O2? I would expect them to be reacting with OH - then again I haven't looked at a chemistry book for 15 years...
Yeah, I think you are right that it reacts with the hydroxide. But burning is burning (...is energetic oxidation). There are conditions where the oxidizer can be water.
Water's main claim to a fire suppressant is by transferring heat away from the fire more than it is suppression of a source of oxidization.
The shock and thermal effects from the blast would be fairly localized, and since this is at 5,000 feet below sea level, very little marine life would be affected at least initially. The threat is radioactive contamination.
It doesn't have a bond with O until it steals it from the H2 molecule. And in fact, the reason why magnesium and sodium burn under water is exactly because the O in H2O acts as O2.
Again, I'm skeptical that one nuke in the Gulf is going to be enough to start killing everyone. It could, theoretically, contaminate stuff there in the Gulf.
It won't necessarily kill "everyone". What it will do is introduce radioactivity into the food chain which would take years to disperse. There are a lot of people that depend on food from the Gulf of Mexico for their livelihood, and I am not just talking about Americans here. Want to tell the fisherman in Haiti that sorry, you can't feed your family for 4 years because we just torched off a nuke?
But I don't know that it would be any worse in the long run than letting everything get contaminated with oil.
It would be a lot worse. Oil is relatively separable from water. If you neutron activate 23Na to 24Na in salt dissolved in the water, it's still in solution. But now it's highly radioactive, and it will disperse in the currents much faster and farther than a droplet of oil would have.
But, in theory, you'd have very little radiation. If you did it right. Of course... If we'd done it right, we wouldn't have the current problem either.
No, you will have a metric shitload of radiation. On the order of millions of tons. if it's done right, most of that radioactive debris would be contained under a seabed dome. If it's done wrong (ie, the fireball breaks through the floor), you'll have a massive amount of that injected into the ocean with calamitous effects.
I like nukes as much as the next guy, but this is a bad idea. By the time you bore the hole deep enough to drop the nuke in, you could probably have fixed the issue with conventional means.
Yes, because detonating a nuclear weapon under water would have no effect on the environment. Churning up a couple of million tons of radioactive sea water and ocean floor debris and atomizing them so they disperse in the GoM currents is a great idea.
I recall the nuke thread and didn't really get to ask the question: why is nuking this oil well a bad idea?
If you think a couple of million barrels of oil is bad for the environment...try neutron activation of a couple million tons of sea water. Oh sure, H going to D isn't that bad, but 24Na is some nasty stuff, and a nuke detonation at the sea floor is going to churn a lot of radioactive debris that would find its way into the Gulf currents. This isn't like the Bikini atol, where there are maybe 50 people living within 1000 miles. You have tens of millions of people that live in close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico.
There's zero funding in tuition, but do you really think that large amounts of Federal money doesn't somehow find its way to Harvard, MIT, Princeton, et al?
The government loaned me about $5,000 in student loans. I am a college dropout that was pre-med at a mediocre state school, but I do software development. I pay about $40,000 a year in taxes every year.
The idea that you need a college degree to be financially successful is idiotic. There are plenty of blue collar professions, for example, where you can easily make a six figure income with nothing more than a year or two in trade school and some job experience.
The real key to making good money in anything is to be an expert in your field.
College degrees are used by HR recruiters simply to screen out candidates. But they are not any sort of guarantee of financial or career success, nor are they necessarily a pre-requisite. It is more difficult to pursue a white collar profession without one, but certainly is not impossible. You just won't be working from an established template.
"Acknowledgements This list is not fully exhaustive, but we would like to acknowledge the support of the following funders (in alphabetical order):
British Council, British Petroleum, Broom's Barn Sugar Beet Research Centre, Central Electricity Generating Board, Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS), Commercial Union, Commission of European Communities (CEC, often referred to now as EU), Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), Department of Energy, Department of the Environment (DETR, now DEFRA), Department of Health, Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Eastern Electricity, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Environment Agency, Forestry Commission, Greenpeace International, International Institute of Environmental Development (IIED), Irish Electricity Supply Board, KFA Germany, Leverhulme Trust, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), National Power, National Rivers Authority, Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), Norwich Union, Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, Overseas Development Administration (ODA), Reinsurance Underwriters and Syndicates, Royal Society, Scientific Consultants, Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), Scottish and Northern Ireland Forum for Environmental Research, Shell, Stockholm Environment Agency, Sultanate of Oman, Tate and Lyle, UK Met. Office, UK Nirex Ltd., United Nations Environment Plan (UNEP), United States Department of Energy, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Wolfson Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF). "
Depends on what the purpose of the sub-kiloton blast was for. They may have been testing a thermonuclear primary...most of these are sub-kiloton in yield. But then they kick off the secondary fusion stage...
More than likely it was just a standard atomic bomb fizzle, but there is the possibility that they were reaching for an h-bomb.
Um, he got it the usage of effect right. Affect is a verb. Effect is a noun. "The affect" would be wrong, but unfortunately for your point, Romancer used "The effect".
I don't have any problem with people making money honestly, but Al Gore isn't. He's the 21st century version of a snake oil salesman. Worse, he preaches an energy impoverished lifestyle for all of the proletariat, but consumes stupendous amounts of energy himself. I don't know about you, but I think it lends a certain amount of credibility when evangelists actually manage to live the life they are calling/demanding other people to live.
Yep, going by their leaked emails, those scientists at the CRU were bastions of integrity. Nothing unethical about conspiring to hold back data they were legally obligated to provide or conspiring to deny alternative theories access to peer review so they can then handily dismiss skeptics for not having any published peer reviewed papers.
you get newspapers with front page stories saying "argh all ice is melting we're all gonna die in 2020!"
It's not just newspapers. It's folks like that Nobel laureate Al Gore. And when he and his 20 SUV entourage drive 200 meters to attend a conference after flying a private jet 2500 miles, he buys carbon credits from the company he has ownership stake in to offset it.
As an adamant supporter of the Scientific method, I have to wonder why so many in the AGW camp are not concerned that data and methods have been lost.
Dude, like, it's settled science. Didn't you get the memo from the Nobel laureates? We're talking about completely apolitical scientists with nothing but the concern for the well being of their fellow earthlings in their hearts. They don't have a political bone in their body or any agenda besides the little agenda of crushing capitalism and relegating the vast majority of the earth's human population into either grinding poverty or the graveyard.
Slashdot Mirror
An analogy. We should quit researching cancer cures because we've failed miserably at curing it so far, and radiation and chemotherapy are dangerous and cause the patients to feel really bad.
Research and investments don't always pay off immediately. Anti-ABM folks have gone from claiming it will never work to it doesn't work often enough. Sooner or later, it will work often enough. And then what will they say?
The problem with your little theory is that in the case of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the delivery systems cost more than the nuclear bombs on them. Your rogue state would be better off building 10 missiles and putting 10 warheads on them.
There is no credible threat of a nuclear attack from a non-state actor.
Additionally, most nuclear (implosion) payloads are a little more finicky than conventional explosive payloads. If you damage the explosive lenses or tampers of the implosion device, it will probably be a fizzle or a zero-yield result. Which is much better than the 550 kiloton or 750 kiloton yield of the standard Russian MIRV warhead.
If that is the case, then why are countries like North Korea and Iran investing substantial amounts of their rather limited capital into ballistic missile research?
Fair enough. In my defense I thought we were talking about oil derived stuff.
Yeah, but the counter point to that is, if you set off a nuke, the water will get considerably hotter than the 2000 degrees or so it takes for water to thermally decompose. At which point you are going to have lots of free oxygen atoms swirling around which will have equal opportunity to reduce hydrogen or carbon atoms.
But when they burn under water are they really doing to by using O like O2? I would expect them to be reacting with OH - then again I haven't looked at a chemistry book for 15 years...
Yeah, I think you are right that it reacts with the hydroxide. But burning is burning (...is energetic oxidation). There are conditions where the oxidizer can be water.
Water's main claim to a fire suppressant is by transferring heat away from the fire more than it is suppression of a source of oxidization.
The shock and thermal effects from the blast would be fairly localized, and since this is at 5,000 feet below sea level, very little marine life would be affected at least initially. The threat is radioactive contamination.
It doesn't have a bond with O until it steals it from the H2 molecule. And in fact, the reason why magnesium and sodium burn under water is exactly because the O in H2O acts as O2.
Again, I'm skeptical that one nuke in the Gulf is going to be enough to start killing everyone. It could, theoretically, contaminate stuff there in the Gulf.
It won't necessarily kill "everyone". What it will do is introduce radioactivity into the food chain which would take years to disperse. There are a lot of people that depend on food from the Gulf of Mexico for their livelihood, and I am not just talking about Americans here. Want to tell the fisherman in Haiti that sorry, you can't feed your family for 4 years because we just torched off a nuke?
But I don't know that it would be any worse in the long run than letting everything get contaminated with oil.
It would be a lot worse. Oil is relatively separable from water. If you neutron activate 23Na to 24Na in salt dissolved in the water, it's still in solution. But now it's highly radioactive, and it will disperse in the currents much faster and farther than a droplet of oil would have.
But, in theory, you'd have very little radiation. If you did it right. Of course... If we'd done it right, we wouldn't have the current problem either.
No, you will have a metric shitload of radiation. On the order of millions of tons. if it's done right, most of that radioactive debris would be contained under a seabed dome. If it's done wrong (ie, the fireball breaks through the floor), you'll have a massive amount of that injected into the ocean with calamitous effects.
I like nukes as much as the next guy, but this is a bad idea. By the time you bore the hole deep enough to drop the nuke in, you could probably have fixed the issue with conventional means.
Then tell me why magnesium and sodium burn under water?
It dies?
And that's worse than letting the oil spill kill things?
Yes, it's worse. The oil won't kill humans. Radioactive water will. Radioactivity in the food chain will.
And if BP doesn't, the Chinese or Russians will. This area is in international waters. The Chinese are already drilling off the coast of Florida.
Yes, because detonating a nuclear weapon under water would have no effect on the environment. Churning up a couple of million tons of radioactive sea water and ocean floor debris and atomizing them so they disperse in the GoM currents is a great idea.
I recall the nuke thread and didn't really get to ask the question: why is nuking this oil well a bad idea?
If you think a couple of million barrels of oil is bad for the environment...try neutron activation of a couple million tons of sea water. Oh sure, H going to D isn't that bad, but 24Na is some nasty stuff, and a nuke detonation at the sea floor is going to churn a lot of radioactive debris that would find its way into the Gulf currents. This isn't like the Bikini atol, where there are maybe 50 people living within 1000 miles. You have tens of millions of people that live in close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico.
There's zero funding in tuition, but do you really think that large amounts of Federal money doesn't somehow find its way to Harvard, MIT, Princeton, et al?
The government loaned me about $5,000 in student loans. I am a college dropout that was pre-med at a mediocre state school, but I do software development. I pay about $40,000 a year in taxes every year.
The idea that you need a college degree to be financially successful is idiotic. There are plenty of blue collar professions, for example, where you can easily make a six figure income with nothing more than a year or two in trade school and some job experience.
The real key to making good money in anything is to be an expert in your field.
College degrees are used by HR recruiters simply to screen out candidates. But they are not any sort of guarantee of financial or career success, nor are they necessarily a pre-requisite. It is more difficult to pursue a white collar profession without one, but certainly is not impossible. You just won't be working from an established template.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080627194858/http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
"Acknowledgements
This list is not fully exhaustive, but we would like to acknowledge the support of the following funders (in alphabetical order):
British Council, British Petroleum, Broom's Barn Sugar Beet Research Centre, Central Electricity Generating Board, Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS), Commercial Union, Commission of European Communities (CEC, often referred to now as EU), Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), Department of Energy, Department of the Environment (DETR, now DEFRA), Department of Health, Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Eastern Electricity, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Environment Agency, Forestry Commission, Greenpeace International, International Institute of Environmental Development (IIED), Irish Electricity Supply Board, KFA Germany, Leverhulme Trust, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), National Power, National Rivers Authority, Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), Norwich Union, Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, Overseas Development Administration (ODA), Reinsurance Underwriters and Syndicates, Royal Society, Scientific Consultants, Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), Scottish and Northern Ireland Forum for Environmental Research, Shell, Stockholm Environment Agency, Sultanate of Oman, Tate and Lyle, UK Met. Office, UK Nirex Ltd., United Nations Environment Plan (UNEP), United States Department of Energy, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Wolfson Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF). "
Ooops, you are right, I was wrong...I only caught the second usage ("So the effect would have to be caused by the speed of the passing gravity well")
Depends on what the purpose of the sub-kiloton blast was for. They may have been testing a thermonuclear primary...most of these are sub-kiloton in yield. But then they kick off the secondary fusion stage...
More than likely it was just a standard atomic bomb fizzle, but there is the possibility that they were reaching for an h-bomb.
Um, he got it the usage of effect right. Affect is a verb. Effect is a noun. "The affect" would be wrong, but unfortunately for your point, Romancer used "The effect".
I don't have any problem with people making money honestly, but Al Gore isn't. He's the 21st century version of a snake oil salesman. Worse, he preaches an energy impoverished lifestyle for all of the proletariat, but consumes stupendous amounts of energy himself. I don't know about you, but I think it lends a certain amount of credibility when evangelists actually manage to live the life they are calling/demanding other people to live.
And the CRU got funding from Shell and BP.
Yep, going by their leaked emails, those scientists at the CRU were bastions of integrity. Nothing unethical about conspiring to hold back data they were legally obligated to provide or conspiring to deny alternative theories access to peer review so they can then handily dismiss skeptics for not having any published peer reviewed papers.
you get newspapers with front page stories saying "argh all ice is melting we're all gonna die in 2020!"
It's not just newspapers. It's folks like that Nobel laureate Al Gore. And when he and his 20 SUV entourage drive 200 meters to attend a conference after flying a private jet 2500 miles, he buys carbon credits from the company he has ownership stake in to offset it.
As an adamant supporter of the Scientific method, I have to wonder why so many in the AGW camp are not concerned that data and methods have been lost.
Dude, like, it's settled science. Didn't you get the memo from the Nobel laureates? We're talking about completely apolitical scientists with nothing but the concern for the well being of their fellow earthlings in their hearts. They don't have a political bone in their body or any agenda besides the little agenda of crushing capitalism and relegating the vast majority of the earth's human population into either grinding poverty or the graveyard.