Sending Plutonium to Pluto
Posted January 17th, 2006 by Howard TaylerI’m excited about NASA’s “New Horizons” launch. We still have so much to learn about the universe we live in, and we know next to nothing about objects like Pluto that lie out in the Kuiper belt.
There’s controversy surrounding the launch, because some folks think that putting plutonium on a rocket is too dangerous — a launch accident could spread radioactive material. Well… okay, it IS dangerous. But I’m with the scientists who think that ultimately it’s MORE dangerous to not learn as much as we can about our Solar system. It is, after all, only a matter of time before some wandering rock decides to play “Extinction Event Roulette” with us, and that’s only the beginning of the threats we know about.
Using radioactive materials to power our space probes may pose a danger at launch, but it poses a huge advantage once those probes are out there in the big, black sky. They last longer, go farther, and ultimately we learn more. Like G.I. Joe said in those cute PSA spots right after Cobra’s latest plan had been thwarted, “now you know, and knowing is half the battle.”
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January 17th, 2006 at 11:46 am
How much plutonium are we talking here? 1kg? 10kg? Just say the word RADIOACTIVE and your average schmuck (especially politician schmucks) dives under his bed and whines till mommy comes and makes it go away.
What’s really needed is a more rational reaction to words like radioactive and plutionium. Till we get over this “my god, it’s radioactive” impulse, we’ll never progress…and the stored solar energy from millenia past is running out!
Oh, uh…I guess I’m ranting. Thanks for listening. :)
January 17th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
24lbs of plutonium, or just over 10kg.
And the launch is right down to the wire, apparently. If they don’t go in the next few minutes, they miss their launch window for today. They have until February 14th to get into orbit, and then the whole 10-year flight plan is screwed up.
January 17th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
as usual, fear trumps science. *sigh* Not saying that plutonium can’t be dangerous, but we’ve shot up far more deadly things and, on average, we shoot up far more deadly things every hour.
January 18th, 2006 at 7:12 am
Perhaps the issue should be phrased this way – plutonium on Earth is a dangerous thing. There is now 10 kilograms less on Earth. This is a good thing. Turning a hazard into a resource and reducing the size of the hazard overall is a smart trick, and we should do it more often.
Peter
January 18th, 2006 at 7:28 am
I remember talking to a greenie some time back who was worried that our efforts in space might pollute the ecology of the moon.
I’m not joking, for a moment I wondered if this person was kidding, particularly since I’d read “Fallen Angels” about a year prior.
She wasn’t.
This is the kind of idiocy that sends out protestors and files briefs with federal courts over “radeeashun” and “nukular…stuff”.
God must love stupid people, he made so darn many of them.
The really sad part is, this woman was not some teenager, she was someone allegedly educated enough to provide instruction to minors, young adults, and the odd member of the over-21 working class who have time to go to Community College.
I don’t see anything surprising in the uproar, save that it’s a small as it is.
January 18th, 2006 at 7:54 am
Actually there is very little danger from the plutonium. It’s encased in very tough ceramic pellets that can take the heat of reentry and the impact of falling to earth without spreading their contents around. The rocket the probe is on top of is much more dangerous.
January 18th, 2006 at 8:08 am
Thanks for the voice of reason, Karl.
Interesting factoid — Jerry Pournelle told us over dinner that measurements on-site at Three-Mile Island just following the incident indicated that you’d get more radiation while onboard a flight from LA to Tokyo than spending a similar amount of time at TMI.
Anecdotal, yes — I wish I had the measurements handy so I could compare for myself.
Upshot — we HAVE the technology to protect ourselves from nuclear mishaps. It’s a pity more people can’t be made to understand that.
January 18th, 2006 at 8:21 am
“Remember Three Mile Island!”
I saw this on a protestor in Wisconsin, who was marching in protest of the small research reactor at the UW-Madison. It had a lurid picture of of the reactor housing of a different containment facility. I asked the person if she remembered Three Mile Island. She admitted that it had happened before she was born.
So, I asked, “How many people died because of Three Mile Island?” She answered “I don’t know…”
So I asked, “How much radiation was released by Three Mile Island?” She answered “Lots! I’m sure of it!” I asked if she had a number to give quantitative analysis. Her answer was “Ummm. No. But it doesn’t matter…”
So, I looked at her and said, “Well, I can see you’re at the UW. From your accent, I’d guess you’re from out of state. Therefore you must have lots of money, I’m sure of it! Hey, can you buy me a Mercedes?” (Said girl was of the “I’m a flower child of the ’90s” student hippy persuasaion; one of those people who apparently has no problems sending credit card bills home to the parents, but thinks money is icky and evil.) She started getting upset with me then, and I said “Quantitative analysis matters just as much in radiation measurement as it does in money.” She up and left.
In short order – Three Mile Island is the most dangerous nuclear incident we’ve had in the US since we stopped air-testing bombs in the desert.
The shift that caused 3MIs problem literally had to combine gross negligence with willful stupidity and sheer bad luck. If they’d had a bomb with them, they might have made it worse, but it’s doubtful. (And, something that got smothered fast by the press of the time, with the exception of one manager and an engineer, everyone else on the shift was an affirmative action hire…)
The amount of radiation released to the surrounding environs never exceeded the background radiation for that region.
Translation – we demonstrated that even when the “thing going wrong” is comparable to shooting oneself in the foot with a mortar, the safety of the public was not compromised.
So, yeah, remember Three Mile Island. And point out that the safeguards worked.
(I don’t doubt that if we got working Solar Power Satellites, the Greens would protest about it. After all, it’s much more virtuous to make evil capitalist swine sweat to do their own labor.)
January 18th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Howard, I can give you more in the way of verification on radiation exposure. I interned at Diablo Canyon (last nuclear power plant to go operational in the U.S.) and when we went in certain areas of the plant you were required to wear a dosimeter. When you left those areas you turned in your dosimeter.
One of my colleagues forgot to turn in his dosimeter on the way out of the secured area. He then got on a plane, made a short flight from San Luis Obispo to San Francisco for a meeting, then got on the plane and flew back, a round trip of about 350 miles. He then was back at the plant, went back into the secured area, and turned in his dosimeter when he went home that night.
He got a call from the radiation monitoring guys asking how he had managed accrue 5 times his allowable weekly exposure in one day. Where did the exposure come from, flying for about an hour and a half, that’s all.
After having worked in a nuclear power facility for a year and a half, I came to realize that almost no one in this country has a clue about radiation, its sources, and what’s “normal.” But they know its evil.
January 18th, 2006 at 9:59 am
Let’s not forget that this isn’t the first time. Cassini, the probe that recently visited Saturn, was also powered by a plutonium reactor. Not only that, but it utilized Earth for a gravity slingshot. I still remember the stink it caused in 1997. People are too afraid of the things they don’t understand and far too willing to simply allow themselves ignorance rather than learn about these things. I’m with all the previous posters. The danger here is negligible.
January 18th, 2006 at 10:15 am
That reminds me of something else Jerry said: the TMI incident happened because for 24 hours the people running the plant did EVERY POSSIBLE THING WRONG. And even then the leak was negligible.
It makes my point — we have the technology for safe nuclear power. I’d vote “pro nuke” if such a party existed.
January 18th, 2006 at 11:43 am
Here is another fun fact:
As you previously heard, the reactor is using ceramic coated pelets. In the 1980’s, a reactor in West Germany tested the saftey level of the reactor using the then new system of ceramic coated pelets. To do this they pulled out the control rods and turned off the cooling system. Then then waited to see how long it would take before meltdown became imminent and they would have to restore the safties. After a week they put the safties back on not because of danger, but because the temprature stabilized well before going critical on the first day and they needed the plant for another test.
January 18th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
They call those “pebble-bed” reactors, right? I’ve been led to understand that the Republic of South Africa will be building some of these for power. Cheap, safe, clean power.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get some of that over here?
January 18th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Hell Yeah. They’re breaching dams to “save” non-endangered species of game fish, burying-instead-of-recycling high level radioactive waste in a tectonically unstable zone, (apparently, burying something is equated by these morons with making it go away), blocking oil refinery reconstruction in the NW (used to be three in Anacortes alone, now there’s one-barely, which covers three states that used to be served by fifteen), opposing new oil extraction, and…
blocking construction of the safest, most stable, most CONTAINABLE efficient power production known to exist. (Solar isn’t efficient, the materials are a whole new breed of toxic and it requires LAND, Wind turbines are well-hyped and costly to maintain, little return on investment in parts and labour).
I’m with you, Howard, “More Nukes Please.”
Even the damn loonatic Iranians know Nuclear power is a good idea. The scary part is that the damn third world may well bury us without firing a serious shot-by using technology to prosper that our home-grown reactionary dirt-worshippers have driven offshore and away.
Meanwhile, Hanford is still leaking, because it’s too damned old and there’s nowhere to really deal with the junk-it was forbidden, dontcha know. goddamned greenies will have us all glowing in the dark and drinking toxic sludge…
January 18th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
It seems to me that the discussion of Three Mile Island is not entirely relevant to the question of whether it is safe or desirable to put a Plutonium powered rocket into space. First, I think it is probably a fair assumption that nuclear reactors, with all their containment mechanisms, are more resistant to releasing nuclear material into the environment during accidents than rockets. Second, Three Mile Island was by far not the worst nuclear disaster in the world; as far as I know the only remarkable feature of this particular accident is that it happened in the U.S. Much worse accidents have happened in other countries, including Ukraine, and if I remember correctly, Argentina and Japan. Third, when assessing the safety of plutonium on a rocket, one should probably compare it to plutonium on an airplane, rather than reactors on the ground. In the area of airplanes and nuclear material, the list of past disasters is very long and scary.
This list includes a bomb that was ejected by a U.S. B-50 and self-destructed over Quebec in 1950, scattering 45kg of depleted Uranium; a U.S. B-47 bomber that crashed into a nuclear storage site in England in 1956, setting three nuclear weapons on fire and narrowly avoiding a (non-nuclear) explosion that would have scattered their radioactive material; and a collision of a U.S. B-52 with a jet tanker in Spain in 1966, causing two hydrogen bombs to disintegrate over some farms, and two others to crash intact (one on dry land, one in the ocean).
Personally, I am convinced (based on the available information, which is scarce) that a small amount of Plutonium carried on a space rocket probably poses a much smaller risk than the routine transport of nuclear weapons on airplanes. Of course, this depends on factors that haven’t been discussed, for instance, where the pellets will drop, and whether they can be recovered.
However, on the bigger question of the safety of nuclear technologies in general, I believe the established record of nuclear accidents is sufficient to justify some reasonable doubts. I don’t think it is fair to label all protesters as automatically stupid, just because they may not pass a pop-up quiz on quantitative aspects of the relatively minor accident on Three Mile Island. Especially since the protest was about something else.
January 18th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
It may not be fair to label all protesters that way, but in general the no-nuke movement capitalizes on the knee-jerk reactions of an uneducated populace, and does pretty well at keeping nuke plants from being built. The more educated people become about nuclear power, the more likely we are to have more of it.
I’m a PIMBY. Put it In My Back Yard.
January 18th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
Im reading Schlock Mercenary from Germany, so please excuse me if my english is bad, but i have to say something about it.
1998-2005 the “Greens” (a party) were part of the German gouvernment. The first thing they announced was the stop to nuclear power in Germany. That means several new reactors wont go online and in the next 5-25 years all nuclear power plants will be shut down(if it isnt canceled).
At the moment the nuclear industry in Germany is one of the best in the World, building extremely secure reactors that are exported in i dont know how many countries. This announcement means this industry will fall behind or wander off(i suspect the latter), and it wont make any difference in the long run because all other countries in Europe are still building nuclear power plants(and in east europe theyre not even near german standards).
They told us the main reason why this nuclear stop is necessary is that noone knows what to to with nuclear waste, because final dumps are not researched atm.
But in 1992 the “Greens” in Niedersachsen(translated: lower saxon?), a federal state of germany closed the WORLDWIDE UNIQUE RESEARCH CENTER FOR FINAL DUMPING OF NUCLEAR WASTE! (Sry, lost my temper)
Its still in the process of closing and i visited it last year. There are over 50 physical and chemical barriers preventing radiation to escape! I was standing 3m over a room with deadly radioactivity, and while i dont remember the numbers, i think we didnt even encounter 1/10 of the normal surface radiation.
That shows the typical behaviour of many greenies. First prevent research because it may be dangerous, and then say its an abomination because its not researched.
How is it possible to deal with such ignorance?
While the research center is past any hope of reopening(90% are sealed already), i hope this nuclear stop is revoked.
January 18th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Of course the only possible reference at this point is to .
btw, I remember reading on sci.astro about a number of similarly pinheaded protestors at the Cassini launch. They were complaining that if it missed by >50km on its slingshot past Earth it would, um, exterminate all life, or something. As if the *radioactive* uranium that Cassini used hadn’t come *right out of the ground, on Earth*.
In the event it was within a few *metres* of its predicted trajectory as it slingshotted by, as usual. And now, oddly enough, nobody’s complaining about it, and the Terrible Radiation seems to have been forgotten, perhaps because it’s returning wonderful results. But that doesn’t stop another round of protests because they can’t see far enough into the future to recognise that this mission, too, will if it gets there return wonderful results.
January 18th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
Jan makes a damn good point, and it’s something I see all too much of here in the “Great” Northwestern U.S.-first, they want to ban all research “Because it might be dangerous”, then they want to ban the systems because…yup, it’s not researched fully and probably IS dangerous.
Kind of a topic-hijack, but we see the same thing with the “Stem Cell” argument, Nanotechnology, Genetic Research (probably more of that out your way, Jan, the whole altered-dna-food-scare that pops up on the news every couple years…) about the only things we don’t see lots and lots of protests about, are things that have little to no long-term benefits unless we do all that ’scary stuff’ first. Increased lifespan? Okay, that’s twenty more years working for someone else in a shrinking job market (people still have to eat) living with higher cost-of-living and dealing with increasingly smaller spaces and higher prices… oh, and more taxes, sucked up by an increasingly UNS-looking mindless Beaurocracy.
A longer life would be nice, if there was a guarantee that there would be room to live it without the neighbours suing you for painting your house the “wrong” colour.
(as the Cartoonist has noted, being able to eat is good too…)
For an industrial economy (and to have any standard of living above “grass Hut in a third-world hellhole” you need one), Energy is something you want “Cheap”. Energy allows mechanization, which in turn allows you to afford that very-educated population that makes for a civil society in this day and age (it also allows you to have heat in the winter, air conditioning in the summer, food storage that isn’t “Sun dried, or slowly rotting”…) Energy needs to be as cheap as you can make it.
Oddly enough, unless you like using random-unprocessed-raw-sewage for fertilizer, you need energy for Agriculture too. LOTS of energy if you don’t like the Mao Model of Collective Farming circa 1968’s “Cultural Revolution” design. Tractors need to run on SOMETHING. Somehow, I don’t think I’ve seen a windmill run a tractor over a forty-acre field. I don’t really expect to.
Irrigation requires energy. If you’re geographically lucky enough to be in a “bowl” surrounded by snow-crusted peaks, you can use gravity, and channel that energy (and that water) quite cleverly. IIRC, the LDS people did just that when they built their city in Utah. Unfortunately, this won’t work if you’re in the middle of Oklahoma, or in some of the drier, yet fertile, areas of the southwestern inland U.S.
Pumps need energy. Build dams, build nuke stations, whatever, they require wattage to move that water. You’re not going to get enough off the wind, they tried that, didn’t work. Still doesn’t probably won’t until we get a nice, room-temperature superconductor. (which won’t be the result of otherwise nice people staring at their bellybuttons and worrying about their Katras and their relation to “Mother Earth”.)
Said superconductor had better be cheap. Gold is a great conductor, terrrific stuff, we’re using copper and aluminum for the most part-they’re cheaper enough to be worth the loss over the lines-kind of like how there are composites and ceramics that are stronger than steel in most every way, and lighter… and cost more than you’ll save in operating life to use in an automobile, building structure, or any of the thousands of places we put steel.
Until we get a magical superconductor, (which will probably require oodles of cheap energy to produce in any useable amount), we’re a-gonna need that power to be cheap. with population going nowhere but “UP”, we’re likely going to all need as much cheap energy as we can figure out how to get, and the time-limit isn’t going away, it’s headed for everyone. Europe, the US, China, even, everyone. Nobody is exempt.
THis goes back to Nuclear rockets, oddly enough.
See, eventually, there’s a big-ass rock gonna hit this little blue world we’re on. Boom. Splat. No more culture, no more mona lisa, no more Grateful Dead, no more internet. Boom, gone.
IF that doesn’t happen, we can still look forward to that supervolcano over in Wyoming. It’s called “Yellowstone National Park”, it’s been on the rise. When volcanoes go on the rise, it means they’re eventually gonna burp. the last time something that big went off, there was quite some number of species rendered extinct… globally.
Bang, gone.
It might be in our species’ self-interest to maybe have a few places already established and going concerns before something happens here that our tech really can’t deal with.
It’s GOING to happen, we don’t get to know precisely when, until it’s waaaayyyy too late.
As the wise Mr. Taylor stated, it’s a good idea to maybe have something working to deal with the very-real-gonna-waste-everyone threats… threats that aren’t “Debatable” like whether or not Global Warming is human caused or the result of being in an interglacial period with a lot of tectonic activity and a bit of pickup in the sun’s output (start worrying when Greenland becomes a major grain producing region and they’re growing wine-grapes in england without Genetic modifications-as they did in AD 1000, )
Getting off this rock isn’t just about “ooh, neat pictures”, it’s about SURVIVAL. It’s about maybe having a future with Human Beings in it that isn’t tied to a consistent run of extremely good luck.
January 18th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Space probes don’t use reactors at all, and the fuel they carry is not metallic plutonium, but a compound made from plutonium. The power system has few moving parts, and is called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG).
The fuel used in the probe is a ceramic *made from* plutonium. With all the priority placed on plutonium being radioactive, one glosses over the fact that it’s a metal. Just as ceramic blades can be made from aluminum oxide, so can plutonium dioxide be made into ceramic pellets. The plutonium in the pellets continues to decay, and produces a modest amount of heat. That heat, when placed against the cold of space (on the shady side at least), creates a thermal gradient. This heat is converted into the voltage to run the spacecraft. East peasy.
The ceramic fuel pellets are not capable of being turned into useful nuclear fuel. If I had to put a label on PuO2, I’d say it was “plutonium ore”, despite the fact that no such material is found in nature. If the material were scattered in the atmosphere, then we’d have about 200 or so cancer-causing pebbles around, somewhere, dependent on the size of the RTG in question.
January 18th, 2006 at 7:40 pm
Everyone gets up in arms about plutonium, but it seems to me, now, that uranium is much more of a danger.
In the most recent Scientific American, there’s an article that states that there are an estimated 50 metric tons of HEU (highly-enriched uranium) in civilian use worldwide. The bomb which destroyed Hiroshima contained about 60 kg. That’s 833 Hiroshima-scale weapons, assuming similar levels of enrichment. It seems that many of these facilities do not have the kind of security you’d see for a bank vault, even. That’s leaving out about 1750 metric tons in military possession, mostly in Russia and the US.
HEU can be detonated in a simple gun-like chamber, but a plutonium implosion weapon requires specially shaped explosive charges to detonate in a precise manner in order to go critical. I’m no engineer, but I think I could figure out how to make a uranium weapon now, and the stuff that -isn’t- uranium would be cheap.
Not to be alarmist, but I’m just saying, that’s pretty damn scary. :D
Carry on.
January 18th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
Not the first time it’s happened, nor even the second. Back when they launched Apollo 13, they had some experiments loaded into the lunar lander that were powered by an isotope-decay power cell in a ceramic cask – one designed so that it would remain intact even if the Saturn V – with the explosive power of a kiloton of TNT – blew up like a firework under it.
When Apollo 13 was limping back to Earth, the story goes, the government pressured NASA to ensure that after the lunar module Aquarius was abandoned, it didn’t land on any populated areas, for fear the isotope battery would breach and release radiation. An indignant flight controller (who was probably OD’ing on coffee at that point) snapped that the only way that thing would be a threat to anybody would be if it came down and bonked somebody on the head…
January 18th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
And how many of those protestors have a microwave?
Thank you.
Morons.
This is why they’re called MRIs, not NMRIs. Guess what the N is for?
I’m going to hit this on my blog, too.
January 18th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Howard,
Pebble Bed reactors are, in fact, extremely safe. Much like almost all modern nuclear reactors.
The Japanese have a reactor that you stick in the ground. It requires maintenance once ever thirty *years*. You take it out, swap the core, replace the coolant lines in the heat exchange system and put it back in. The turbines require more frequent maintenance, but there aren’t part of the reactor itself. The thing will power a small city.
That’s just one design. There are several others. With modern designs, the only way to end up with a Three Mile Island situation would be to deliberately damage the reactor.
As for the probe, it’s my understanding that the fuel elements are designed is such a way that the rocket could blow up and the things would survive intact. I feel the same way about this that I felt about the Galileo launch, which used the same system, and I lived down wind of the space center during the Galileo launch.
January 18th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
Everyone forgets that the Voyager probes also use nuclear material to power them. And they were launched decades ago.
January 18th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
The funny thing about Cassini was that after the launch, there were still groups protesting. They wented NASA to stop it. before the slingshot. It was as if they got their entire understanding of orbital mechanics from an episode of star trek.
January 18th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
I’m in an odd position – I happen to be an environmentalist AND an advocate of spaceflight, manned and otherwise. I reconcile it thus: we cannot stay where we are. This is an unstable situation. Either we cause our own extinction event, by fouling the nest, or one will happen to us. Our best hope of survival is to get out there, start moving the really dirty industries off Earth as much as possible, and start responsibly using the resources of our star system.
The problem is that there are as many stupid ignorant Greens as there are stupid ignorant (fill in the blank for your favorite scapegoats). There are people who want to put the genie back in the bottle and turn back the clock to some mythical perfect time. This is impossible. The only way out of this mess is forward. We need to get off this planet before we completely screw it up.
(That last is a rhetorical point. I don’t think we CAN completely screw up something as big as a planet, but we can certainly make it impractical for US to live here. For example, if global warming results in many more hurricane seasons like this last one, we may have to give up on living on the Gulf Coast for the indefinite future…)
January 18th, 2006 at 11:01 pm
Had to jump in on this one, as I wrote the White House in support of Cassini back when it launched. I got a polite “thank-you-for-your-support” form letter back with the presidential stamp on it (big deal), and a nice little artist’s rendition of the Hyugens probe descending on Titan.
Here are a few idiocies uttered by the anti-nukers at that time (yes, they actually believed this stuff):
1. The probe might spontaneously undergo a nuclear explosion.
2. Plutonium is the most poisonous substance on Earth.
3. We ought to power a Saturn probe with solar power.
If you don’t know what’s wrong with each of these three statements, you might be completely ignorant.
Sadly, I daresay the current protestors repeated all of the above, as these people are incapable of learning anything. :-P
Here’s a pithy quote to hit the next anti-nuke person you meet with: “You know, more people died in Ted Kennedy’s car than at Three Mile Island.” It’s factual, too.
(Great comic, Howard.)
January 18th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
one thing not noted is that shortly after launch it will aperently be over the ocean.
i argree with most of you. at the moment the nuclear boogiemans bark is astronomicaly larger than its bite. but i did get in to a very interesting conversation with an engeener. that the instilling of tearror of the nuclear boogie man was actualy a interesting and reletivly good and effective political tool. for one thing it ended the pacific theater of worldwar two, even though the two bombs were distructive, they wehre not nearly as destructive as other bombing raids. and the nuclear boogie man efectivly keept the cold war cold…. just an interesting veiw point i ran across, that i thought one or two of you might enjoy.
about compairing it to stemcell reserch/gennetic engeneering. i feal this is inacurate. those two venture farther into the relms of morality. and they with nano technology have a far mor significant threat. they would creeate self replicating problems, designed with intent to create vercitility/ability to survive adverse situations. fundementaly a nuclear accident doesn’t realy have the ability to expand beyound its innital capabilitys. dont get me wrong these fealds do merit reserch. i just dont see how they can be compared to nuclear reaserch/implimentation. whell i grant that most people have rather limited knowlege of them. but even the missinformation scale seems far tillted agenst the nuclear.
just the two cents of a persone who should have gon to sleep several hours ago. an whome as you note hase difficultys with spelling.
January 19th, 2006 at 12:10 am
Don’t worry, according to http://www.uow.edu.au/eng/phys/nukeweb2/reactors_nuc_v_coal.html (and its source, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory web site), a 1000 Megawatt coal-fired power plant releases about 13 kg of uranium and a little over twice as much thorium into the atmosphere per day.
I wouldn’t be so worried about the probe with its relatively tiny amount of radioactive material.
January 19th, 2006 at 12:31 am
Oh, I’m coloured in environmentalist shades as well. It’s just that I consider that before warning about horrible dangers, it behooves us to actually do some research to find out if there really *is* a horrible danger. All too many people in the various environmentalist movements seem to think that the precautionary principle is a good reason to warn about *everything*, and base their protests on the basis that the one protesting knows nothing about whateveritis so therefore it must be hideously dangerous — and then they complain because if you complain about everything and give no practical solutions, nobody listens to you.
Some of us remember the old tale of the boy who cried wolf. Many of the major environmentalist groups remember it, and have calmed down over the years as their more frothing members have moved on: you’ll note that the more ludicrous opposition to GM foods, and the `animal-rights’ terror tactics in Europe and the UK has come in large part from shadowy groups outside the environmental mainstream. The mainstream still has an irrational phobia about nuclear power, though :(
There are severe environmental threats on this planet. There’s no longer much room for doubt that global warming is one, as is habitat destruction and nuclear proliferation (I’d say that if you have vapourised much of your landscape and radioactively contaminated or nuclear-wintered the rest, you’ve got an environmental problem). RTGs on spacecraft aren’t even *visible* in comparison to the sheer oh-shit size of the threats we *actually* face.
January 19th, 2006 at 3:05 am
I am a science teacher, and I am living in a stubbornly anti-nuclear country. It has finally been admitted by even the
greens in Australia that Nuclear power looks like the only practical alternative to coal, which nobody thinks is a great
idea except the bean counters:
Coal power:
Pro
- reasonably cheap
- available in large quantities in Australia
Cons
- Pollution to the max.
- Fossil fuel – we’ll run out sooner or later
- Pollution (deserved being mentioned again)
- Inefficient.
Nuke:
Pro
- Little pollution (still some)
- Available in GINORMOUS quantities in Australia
- Mega cheap
- Efficient
- Won’t run out for a long time.
So if you want to get the greens on side, just burn coal for long enough that entire regions
of your state are shrouded in soot. They’ll get the idea.
January 19th, 2006 at 3:31 am
Johno, you have a great point. We used to live about 17 or 18 miles from the Navajo reservation, and well-within the soot-depositing radius of the Coal-fired plants that were built there because the res doesn’t have to comply with EPA regs or deal with lawsuits.
(this is when I war a keed, you know.)
unfortunately, while being slapped around by experience WILL teach some, others are so ensconced in their fantasies that they will simply incorporate said fantasies into their existing rhetoric, American “Greens” are dominated by Luddites and Fanatics.
January 19th, 2006 at 4:04 am
I’m generally in favour of nuclear power, except for two points:
1. The technology might be tremendously safe, but it will still be operated by people, who are infinitely falliable, and the facilities will be run by managers. Now, I don’t know if there is some special source of superior Management that they can ship in to run nuclear power plants, but otherwise I think they’re going to be the regular-type Management I’ve met in every place I’ve worked, and that scares me way more than plutonium.
2. The waste from nuclear powers plants needs to be stored for periods of time that are orders of magnitude longer than recorded human civilization. And for that entire time, the waste will have to be stored in facilities operated by people AND continuously funded by governments, who for the next hundred thousand years or so will presumably never have anything more urgent to do with their money.
Now, I don’t actually have an kids, and I don’t plan to have any, so my personal investment in the next few dozen millenia is small. However, I’m still not comfortable with the idea of saying, HELL, YES, we’ll generate all this toxic, radioactive waste we have absolutely no idea what to do with, and we’ll just leave it for you to deal with, future generations — good luck with that! That seems tremendously rude.
January 19th, 2006 at 4:24 am
Actually, we have many perfectly safe spots to put nuclear waste. The only difficulty is getting it there. If you want someplace thats been techtonically stable for a few orders of magnitude longer than, say, multicellular life, try the moon. Real short trip, less then what some people do for fun. And if a hole in the ground thats not going anywhere isn’t good enough for you, you can always drop it in the sun. Very big target, and gravity is on your side on that one. Either of these would make a very permanent end to any dangers posed by any waste.
Course, if 10kg of extremely safe chemically bonded plutonium gets people upset, I imagine multiple tons of waste people are already unduly afraid of being launched might cause some uproar.
January 19th, 2006 at 5:37 am
RTGs are safe. They’ve actually been crash-tested from orbit multiple times. No breaches. People are stupid.
January 19th, 2006 at 6:04 am
New slogan.
“Save a coal miner – go nuclear.”
Yes? No?
January 19th, 2006 at 6:07 am
Peter2:
First, “Three Mile Island was by far not the worst nuclear disaster in the world; as far as I know the only remarkable feature of this particular accident is that it happened in the U.S. Much worse accidents have happened in other countries, including Ukraine, and if I remember correctly, Argentina and Japan.” The worst accidents happened with unsafe reactor designs that aren’t used in the U.S. Yes, we know how to build safe power-generating reactors. The one in 1999 in Japan was about the worst, but that was where fuel was being processed, not an actual power-plant issue.
Management and procedures are critical to preventing such accidents, but it can be managed, and the risk is not more than that from other power generation methods – e.g. coal, which kills miners, releases far more radiation into the air per annum than even the Japan accident, can suffer explosions, etc.
Second, “a bomb that was ejected by a U.S. B-50 and self-destructed over Quebec in 1950, scattering 45kg of depleted Uranium”? A bomb would not have *depleted* uranium; that’s useless for creating an explosion. It would have *enriched* uranium. (Naturally-ocurring uranium is a mix of U-238 with a little U-235. You “enrich” uranium by concentrating the U-235; the U-238 left over is called “depleted”. Depleted uranium can’t be made into a bomb; it can be chemically toxic in large-enough doses, but isn’t more of a cancer risk, really, than living in Denver. It’s very very dense, though, and has some unusual metallurgical properties, which is why it’s used in armor-piercing projectiles.)
Oh, and if you’re worried about nuclear waste? Yes, it’s possible to put it into space economically (http://www.nuclearspace.com/a_liberty_ship.htm).
January 19th, 2006 at 6:43 am
I was going to post something akin to Bryan’s comment about how much uranium was guaranteed to be released into the air by a coal-powered plant as opposed to how much plutonium might possibly be released into the air in the event of some unforeseen catastrophic failure on the New Horizons mission. Bryan, of course, beat me to it.
As for Tom’s comment – I’m all about the safety of RTGs, but crash-testing them from orbit?!? That doesn’t seem like the smartest of moves. I did a google search on “crash test” RTG, but nothing of interest was immediately forthcoming. Do you have a link for this, or is this something you heard from someone or think you read somewhere?
January 19th, 2006 at 8:02 am
An intelligent and technically focused comic like Schlock attracts plenty of
intelligent and technically minded readers. I think the ‘Schlock-mind’ has to be
cautious about labeling the folks who are not ‘like-minded’ as morons.
There are legitimate issues regarding nuclear power in general and the
plutonium on the New Horizons spacecraft specifically. Pointing out the
absurdity of some of the environmentalist arguments does not invalidate
those issues. (Pointing out the absurdity of some of the arguments does
feel good, however. Labeling folks who spout absurd arguments does
legitimately qualify them as morons too.)
Designing, building and operating a safe and efficient nuclear power plant is
entirely within our technical capacity. Dealing with extremely long term waste
storage is a more challenging issue with aspects beyond the mere technical.
(Sending all the nuclear waste to the sun or moon is NOT a particularly well
thought technical solution. Tons of radioactive waste that was not designed as
well as the plutonium RTG on New Horizons is not something I’d want to deal with
if a rocket failed at launch.)
And to emphasize one point… technology deals with the problems and needs of
mankind. Politics and leadership, spirituality and morality, even a good pint of ale
also play that game. To really fix any problem requires a contribution from more
than just us techno-geeks.
But boy, the rest of them would be screwed without us, wouldn’t they?
January 19th, 2006 at 8:06 am
Re: crash testing RTGs… See
http://www.ne.doe.gov/infosheets/MMRTG_Oct2002.pdf
It briefly discusses the design and mentions that two incidents occurred where RTGs
were involved… a weather satellite launch failure in 1968 and Apollo 13 in 1970.
Not exactly tests…
January 19th, 2006 at 9:03 am
Just for the record. I’m a ‘greenie’. *And* I’m an advocate of spaceflight. So there. ;-)
I’m also, since the topic has been broached, against nuclear energy, within reason – mainly because of the as yet unsolved long-term storage of waste problem. It doesn’t seem like a clever idea to me to just assume that whichever deep hole we dump the stuff in will *always* be safe in the enormous space of time it takes for the waste to ‘cool off’. It smells of hubris to me.
Of course, we can’t just switch off all the plants immediately, either, and it may be the best strategy to replace the old, unsafe ones with new, safer ones for now, before we start switching them off.
I also think there is something *fundamentally wrong* with the idea that you can’t have a modern, civilised society which allows people to live comfortably without unlimited, really cheap power. I think that – unless we make a lot more progress in the spaceflight department within the next few decades than I expect us to make – we should not forget that for now, we live on a planet with *limited* resources (even potential nuclear fuels are limited, btw). Maybe we should start trying to *act* like it…?
Of course, the idea of limiting our use of *anything* collides pretty heavily with the assumption that the only way to maintain a civilisation worth its name is to have continual material *growth*. Stagnation, let alone self-imposed stagnation (on a material level) is unthinkable in the current political/economic system.
And I’m afraid I have no idea how we might change that.
But, you know, I could imagine living in a society where, yes, everybody has a computer, but it doesn’t have to be a newer, faster, ‘better’ one every year; where you can still have a mobile phone, but you don’t ‘need’ a new one all the time; where you don’t use a car unless there *really* is no other way to get where you have to go; where you don’t fly halfway around the globe for your holidays twice a year but only, perhaps, once a decade, or once every five years or something, and go somewhere a lot closer the rest of the time. Etc. It wouldn’t have to be the end of civilisation. It wouldn’t be a return to the Middle Ages. It wouldn’t even have to be a return to the 1950s. Yes, it would require serious restructuring of lots of areas of employment and so on, but why shouldn’t that be possible?
Yes, I know, I’m probably naive to even believe people could still live like that. And maybe I’m naive to believe that the situation may be serious enough already for us to have to consider it. And, anyway, I have nothing to say, politically, so I can think whatever I like and it won’t make a damn difference.
January 19th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Sorry. That was ‘a damned difference’.
And I’m afraid I rambled on a lot longer – and a lot less clearly – than I intended to. Basically, I’m not a scientist, I’m not a politician, and I’m not an economist, so it’s quite possible I don’t understand the first thing about how the world really works. It just *seems* to me that the way things are going is wrong on some fundamental level, especially with economics as it is being ‘practised’, and touted as almost a law of nature.
January 19th, 2006 at 10:29 am
A couple of people have talked about storing nuclear wastes as if it is a big problem. One solution (there are many) is to make glass out of the waste and bury it. “But what if the desert turns into a swamp and the nuclear wastes reach the water table?” you might ask.
So what? Glass is non-soluable, you now have wet glass bricks. Even if you grind the glass into sand, most of the radioactivity is still locked inside the sand particles. “Can I prove that NO radioactive material won’t escape into the water table?” No I can’t. Tiny amounts almost certainly will.
So what? More than 15 naturally occuring nuclear reactors have been found in the congo basin. They used ground water as a moderator. Just one reactor cooked up over 5 tonnes of plutonium over its lifetime. (This was all reported in Dec 2005 or Jan 2006 Scientific American.) Apparently many tonnes of plutonium in the Congo water table historically had no effect anyone can discern on the environment.
The world is filled with radioactive ores. They are not causing an enviromental catastrophy. In fact, nuclear plants cause these materials to ‘burn’ faster. Nuclear plants ‘destroy’ radioactivity.
A 1000 MW Coal burning plant spews out 40 kg of radioactive material per DAY (in addition to TONNES of CO2, NOx, Tars, and other toxic chemicials). The media (for some reason) doesn’t seem worked up by this.
I think that the line the media takes on nuclear power and nuclear waste has more to do with the Saudies owning 7% of the USA than any real danger.
January 19th, 2006 at 10:31 am
re: crash testing RTG from oribt.
I cannot find the link but I did read a reliable report covering how they crash tested them. You could do it from orbit using something non-threatning for the payload but that would get mighty expensive. What they do (again IIRC) is slam the container at very high speed into a very hard wall.
Some jobs are just naturally more fun than others. I bet the guys who get to hurl stuff into walls for a living are very happy at their work.
January 19th, 2006 at 10:35 am
Parzival, actually, plutonium is pretty toxic stuff (much worse in fact than it’s radiologic hazard). While lableing it the MOST toxic is a little ignorant, I’ll let people slide on your #2. Most toxic stuff on earth may very well go to oxygen. Try living without that!, but it’s almost instantly deadly in high enough concentrations. (You’d think I’d would have picked that up in some of my science courses, but it actually took SCUBA diving to drive that little acknowleged fact home.)
January 19th, 2006 at 10:44 am
“The world is filled with radioactive ores. They are not causing an enviromental catastrophy. In fact, nuclear plants cause these materials to ‘burn’ faster. Nuclear plants ‘destroy’ radioactivity.” Richard, as much as I’d like that to be true it is patently false. Yes, nuclear plants destroy Uranium, but they make many more shorter lived (and therefor more radioactive) isotopes.
My problem comes with the permanent disposal of the ‘waste’. Much of what is in spent nuclear fuel is recycleable. I can forsee a time in 300 – 1000 years when fission has gone out of use (due to fusion of hydrogen) and these radioactive materials are in demand and here we’ve made it bloody hard to retrieve. Of course my position of retrievable storage is in a vast minority even in the scientific community, so what do I know.
Sorry, bit of a rant.
January 19th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Several posters have stated they are against nuclear power because we can’t safely dispose of the waste. I have a solution I would like to offer.
How to dispose of nuclear waste? Use it as a target and/or projectile in a particle accelerator (a.k.a. atom smasher). This will split the waste atoms down to stable isotopes.
Pros
Gets rid of waste a lot faster. (Within a human lifetime versus 10 million years.)
Stable isotopes could be disposed of by conventional means. Landfill, recycling, ect.
It could provide data for original research in particle physics while destroying the waste.
Cons
Requires a LOT of power. (Could be nuclear powered. ;^) Oh, the irony. )
Energy released will cause some of the atoms in the containment vault to become unstable. Turning it into low grade radioactive waste too. Same thing happens in any nuclear reactor bty. But you could then just smash that too.
Only a percentage of the target is changed to a different element so you need to sweep up the pieces and smash it again, and again, and again…
How many tons did you say you wanted to smash? Existing accelerators only handle lab sized amounts. Technical difficulties need to be overcome for industrial quantities. So keep those researchers working on it.
Thank you, for listening to my idea. (It’s not really mine I got it from a book somewhere.)
Bty Love the comic. Keep up the great work Howard.
January 19th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
That’s always puzzled me: if there’s enough radiation for it to be DANGEROUS, shouldn’t there be enough radiation to make it USEFUL?
“My god! That’s high energy waste! How are we ever going to destroy it?” Umm…high energy? waste? I fail to see how it’s waste…we just need to be more creative in what we do with it.
January 19th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
I’m delighted it went off safely. Only nine more years until we know if Pluto’s a planet! *grin*
As for safety issues with the plutonium fuel, I actually wrote about that myself. It turns out that while the risk of it blowing up was a high 1/700-1/300 (depending who you ask), the actual radiation dosage was less than the typical person gets in a year from background sources.
January 19th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
I agree whole-heartedly with the “retrievable storage” approach. Ideally you need a storage site which is geologically stable (so that it doesn’t get cracked up in earthquakes), dry (so that steel drums don’t corrode) and politically stable (so that the wrong people don’t get their hands on a pile of high-energy waste. Oh, and some place where nobody wants to live.
Well, there is an ideal place – The Simpson Desert of Australia. Some of us have been lobbying for years for the government to store the world’s wastes! Unfortunately, the hurdle of the clueless faction of the greens remains in place. . . .
January 20th, 2006 at 5:38 am
Much of the “waste” that we’re storing, can and should be recycled using existing technologies-it’s not, because of a presidential Executive Order signed during the Carter Administration that halted all work in that direction beyond the merely theoretical.
Safe production has been tested at the Argonne 7 reactor in Montana (about 1987), they deliberately tried to melt that one down-it didn’t. Nuclear Pebble-beds are similar. Here’s what happens if you breach containment with a Nuclear Pebble bed:
Suit the guys up in lead suits, issue shovels, and buckets.
If you actually want to treat them like you do managers, you give ‘em a neat little robot with a shovel AND bucket. Clean up the mess. No flowing metals, no radioactive gasses, cleanup is, as they say in the ads, “a breeze”.
If you close the fuel cycle, you don’t have to dig up more dangerous, toxic, Uranium (it is both), and you generate less high-level waste that can’t be reprocessed-this solves an ENORMOUS amount of the Storage problem.
Neat thing about it, is that unlike the radioactive crap put out by coal plants, your waste is able to be contained at all-rather than dispersing into the air and going where it will.
THAT is one of the beauties of Nuclear power with decent reactors (Not 1940’s tech garbage like Hanford N or Tchernobyl, we want Gen III or better here…).
Problem is, the knee-jerk reactionary luddite bastards have the ‘green’ faction in their palm, and in the U.S., that faction has LOTS of another kind of “green”, the kind that buys advertising, and the kind that buys Congresscritters. IMHO, they’re aided and abetted by (censored-verbadword) in high positions at outfits like Enron and other groups that pull crap like using substandard materials to chivvy construction costs (this HAS happened. They made a movie about it… “Silkwood” anyone?) who go about making the damn fanatics look good to the average voter.
Realistically, this is all circular, since the mold’s been set, and we’re stuck with it unless a major change happens. We’ve had three generations or more learning “Nukular iz Bad” and it’s a growth industry to predict the end of the world/civilization/global catastrophe. There are working “Passive safety” reactors, but you can’t get them built on a commercial scale because it WILL be blocked by enough lawsuits, protests, congressional investigations, etc. etc. etc.-launched from what, to me, appears to be a bottomless financial pool of resources abetted by well-meaning dupes who’ll do some or most of the dirty work pro-bono and get a tax-writeoff for their charitable works.
I’m afraid that by the time we get our collective heads removed from our posteriors, it will be too late.
January 20th, 2006 at 5:49 am
Something for the “global warming” file.
Earth’s axis is not stable. Its angle has a wobble of up to 3 degrees over a period of about 41,000 years.
Currently the angle is decreasing, the axis is moving closer to vertical. This is moving the Arctic and
Antarctic circles closer to the poles by about 14 meters per year, give or take some because there are
shorter period wobbles in the axial tilt measureable on a yearly time scale.
The total range of the arctic and antarctic circles over the 41K year period is 200+ kilometers.
Wrap that around the planet and it’s quite a lot of surface area. (Anyone wanna do the math?)
How this affects Earth’s temperature is that as the axis’ angle decreases, there’s less and
less surface area that experiences 24 hours or more continous darkness each year.
Conversely, there’s the same decrease in surface area that experiences 24 hours or more continous
sunlight each year.
You’d think it would balance out. Nope. During the continous darkness, all that keeps the polar
zone from being as cold as the dark side of the moon is convection from air and water currents.
Meanwhile, the surface is constantly radiating heat into the darkness, with a minor fraction being
reflected back by some gasses in the atmosphere, but that’ll re-radiate again until the sun
rises above the horizon.
At the opposite pole, the sun beats down non-stop, pouring in the heat. The surface doesn’t
get a chance to radiate any heat until the sun begins to set, or if there’s a weather system that
creates reflective clouds.
(This is also why there are periodic “holes” in the ozone layer over the poles. Solar radiation creates AND destroys it.
In darkness, no ozone gets created.)
So for the mathematically gifted, look up how far the arctic and antarctic circles range over the
surface, calculate the surface area of those two bands, then calculate the difference in heat radiation
between maximum and minimum axial tilt, plus how much it’s changing per year.
Just keep in mind that the axial tilt is _decreasing_ now and there’s a few thousand years to go
before it begins to tip the other way. This will keep edging temperatures up slowly (barring events like
massive volcanic eruptions, asteroid/comet strikes, or other natural things that can block incoming
solar radiation) and there’s absolutely nothing humans can do to stop it.
January 20th, 2006 at 5:57 am
Oh, I forgot to mention that all of NASA’s RTG’s are built in eastern Idaho now, including the one on this Pluto probe.
Until somone dreamt up “Radioisotope Thermal Generator”, they were called SNAP or “System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power”.
The Viking Mars landers each had a pair of SNAPs, they’re the two vertical cylinders on top.
How these generate electric power is by letting the heat move through multiple parallel cascaded (stacked) Peltier
Junctions, similar to those in an iceless electric cooler.
Any space probe intended to operate beyond the orbit of Mars needs an RTG because the density of sunlight past there
is too low for any practical size of photovoltaic array.
January 20th, 2006 at 6:04 am
One more thing, this text box has a bug in Internet Explorer. It runs off to the right side, missing a border over there and the text just vanishes into hammerspace or somewhere for a bit before it wraps back into view. I’m currently at 1024×768 in IE on XP Pro and the
text vanished right after “the” in the previous line. The previous line wrapped back into view at the word “into”.
(I do use Firefox as my main browser on MY computer, which has been taken to bits for over a month, waiting on replacement RAM and other upgrade bits.)
January 20th, 2006 at 6:46 am
Nutation vs. Precesssion
bizzybody – I think you’re getting nutation confused with precession. Although the Earth’s axis does nutate, precession is far more significant. Precession means that Polaris is becoming less and less accurately the “North Star” as our axis begins to point in a different direction (but still at 23.439 degrees). The precessional period is approximately 26,000 years, but nutational periods are short – 13.66 days, half-year, one year, 9.3 years, and 18.6 years. The maximum nutation (at a period of 18.6 years) is only 9.2 arcseconds.
Neither of these has any affect on Earth’s long-term climate.
January 22nd, 2006 at 12:53 am
Hi Karl,
I know I was over simplifying things (thus the quotes around some of my statements) but the short term wastes burn up furiously. After a few decades they are basically gone and the amount of overall radiation has decreased.
Bryan, I agree it is a darn shame that the wastes are being put in such inaccessable locations. I do think we will want them again before too many decades are out.
January 22nd, 2006 at 4:33 pm
Since all of this radioactive material came out of the Earth to begin with, we should consider recycling it back into the Earth. After all, if our planet didn’t have an active geothermal core, we’d be a cold dead world like the moon. So let’s look at using helicopters to drop our nuclear wastes down the mouths some remote volcanoes, to sink down into the magma.
January 22nd, 2006 at 9:12 pm
Hi Owen,
If you want the radioactive material to go back into the Earth, bury it in the ocean floor just before the ocean floor moves under the continental plate. This will take the stuff down deep into the mantle. However, the Greens have pressured the USA in to passing laws making it illegal for scientists to STUDY this means of dealing with nuclear wastes. You would almost think that they don’t want the ‘problem’ of dealing with wastes solved.
I think that is a fine thing… these radioactive materials are far too valuable to throw away.
Karl:
As for Plutonium being the most toxic material on the planet, that is completely wrong. Plutonium oxide is poisonous but pure plutonium is not particularilly so.
I would be willing to eat a gram of pure plutonium if you will eat a gram of pure nicotine. (The nicotine will kill you dead instantly, the plutonium will pass thru my digestive system giving me a few Rads on the way.)
Live Smallpox virus, botulism toxin, rattlesnake venom, Florine, the cyanides, curare, ricin, strychnine, carbolic acid, prussic acid,solanine, etc., etc. There are thousands of materials more poisonous than Plutonium. Heck, arsenic is poisonous and it has a half life of billions of years. At least plutonium degrades over time into less toxic substances.
January 22nd, 2006 at 10:15 pm
The problem is not the greens. It’s the governments,
Think about it: a western government in trouble, wants to stay in power. Needs to score a few popularity points to be re-elected.
Watch an anti-nuclear rise from nowhere, create a big media storm, see the government get re-elected.
I’m an australian, and periodically I see some press about some idiot greens (I’m sure there are smart ones out there) protesting the Lucas hights reactor which produces….. medical isotopes.
The idiots want it shut down, want to forfeit the lives it saves!
January 23rd, 2006 at 9:27 am
Ray Ingles: “Second, ‘a bomb that was ejected by a U.S. B-50 and self-destructed over Quebec in 1950, scattering 45kg of depleted Uranium’? A bomb would not have *depleted* uranium; that’s useless for creating an explosion. It would have *enriched* uranium.”
Actually, according to Wikipedia, the depleted uranium was used as a tamper in the bomb, which at the time was not carrying its plutonium core (”pit”). The (deactivated) bomb was ejected when the plane had engine trouble, and was set to self-destruct at 750m above ground, which is exactly what it did.
January 24th, 2006 at 5:12 am
Richard: I’m pretty sure the ‘Greens’ DON’T want the waste problem solved-for one simple reason: It would destroy their power-base. Protesting Nuclear industry is an industry all its own-there are people whose Mercedes Benz and Bentleys are paid for out of this industry. It’s like the old joke about “If the IRA won tomorrow, would Gerry Addams go back to being a bartender?” Same thing. If the problem goes away, so does their funding, and their power-base.
Power (political) is TASTY, once someone gets that taste, they want more, and more. They definitely do NOT want their ‘fix’ cut off. Raising Hysteria and proclaiming the end of the world is good for getting things like Grants, contributions, and raw political juice. This is especially true the more scientifically illiterate the general populace is in relation to the amount of money you can soak them for.
We in the West have a horribly ignorant general populace in relation to issues of science, and in relation to the technology nearly every single one of our voters relies on daily. People who can quote baseball statistics going back 20 years can’t figure out their own car’s actual Miles-per-gallon, folks who count Calories and worry about their PSA can’t tell you how many watts their television sucks up, or what temperature in degrees has to be reached in a chicken to make it safe to eat.
This is basic sh*t, when you get into more complicated problems, their eyes glaze over, and they don’t want to hear it, or they repeat back what they heard someone heard on teevee one night.
The problem isn’t even the ignorance, it’s the inability to effectively counter the people who are manipulating the ignorant. “if it bleeds, it Leads” still is the by-word of News Coverage. Science doesn’t get that much until and unless some muckety-muck is claiming that the world is gonna end and it’s all mankind’s fault. It used to be, that only wild-hair street-preachers played that schtick, but now, we have ‘respectable’ scientists doing the same thing. The Mann graph on global warming made headlines and influenced policy-in spite of the fact that you plug any random numbers into it, and you get exactly the same result.
Nevertheless, an entire treaty was written and almost ratified in the U.S. (and ratified in several European nations) based on this piece of junk-science. “Snake Oil” salesmen abound, and the product of choice is doom and gloom predictions of the coming Apocalypse.