You really are a dumbass. Great logic; because another person is almost as ignorant as you are, everyone else is equallly ignorant.
It certainly is. There was even a big deal about it in the mainstream media in the past few years because they were using a gravitational assist from the Earth to boost one of the probes using an RTG. There were *many* articles and news reports documenting the safety of the RTG enevelope. Because you're an idiot, don't expect everyone else to be. That just makes you stupid. No surprises.
Tim Wescott wrote in news:fbednd snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
I'm amazed when I hear people talk about the Fukushima "disaster" that killed nobody while completely ignoring the tsunami that killed 15,000 people. Those were first generation reactors. Some countries like Germany are paranoid and paying for it, while many other countries are rapidly expanding their nuclear power.
How many people did Japan's tsunami kill? Fukushima disaster!
Germany is striving for clean energy while giving up its most efficient ZERO GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS (nuclear) power plants. You have to wonder. It's like Germany being misled all over again.
That's a little different. Unless you try to solve a problem, its solution never gets closer. Breeder reactors are usable now but politically incorrect. Thorium is a similar issue.
What is wrong with a good old TOPAZ style fission reactor running on U-235 ? You may need some mechanism to slowly pull out the control rods during the years to maintain constant thermal power, but other than that, there are no moving part. The thermal to electricity conversion is handled with thermoelectrical pairs.
For those who are afraid of lunch failures, the fission reactor is quite safe with U-235 700 million year half life and hence low initial radiation. Just start the fission reactor after inserted into an interplanetary orbit. Only then will the nasty isotopes form.
Pu-238 used in RTGs is nasty with 88 year half life will radiate very strongly from a start and a fatal launch failure would be really nasty. Where did that Apollo-13 RTG fall ?
The Wikopedia article is quite detailed about Asimov's state of mind when h e was writing it - he was deliberately exercising his academic writing styl e in preparation for writing his Ph.D. thesis, as a check that tha nine yea rs of writing profitable science fiction hadn't destroyed his capacity to w rite pompously. I doubt if he was giggling when he came up with it - comic inspiration works like every other kind of inspiration, and it takes a whil e for the comic aspect to become obvious, and once you've realised that the re's a comic aspect to be exploited, working out how to deploy it for maxim um effect is mainly more work.
There's a better reason for not buying stock in oil companies - increasing amounts of their profits are being spent on denialist propaganda, with decr easing effect, as the most recent "most powerful typhoon ever" undercuts th e effect. It's not a good place for long term investment.
The big fusion reactor up in the sky has been working for at least 5 billio ns so far, and while it's going to give us some problems in another 5 billi on years or so (in the unlikely event that we'll be around then, and not - by then - competent to sort them out) it does look pretty practical right n ow.
Nuclear power plants don't have "zero greenhouse gas emissions". The primar y power cycle doesn't involve turning fossil carbon into atmospheric CO2, b ut creating the concrete involved in the structure, and the long term stora ge for the nuclear waste generated (which has to be kept isolated for some
100,000 years, is less innocent.
And swapping CO2 for intensely radioactive long-lived nuclear waste isn't a ll that clever either.
Don't take this too hard. Krw thinks that everybody who disagrees with him is "stupid". In reality anybody who agreed with krw on everything would hav e to be both stupid and remarkably ignorant. Krw isn't - technically speaki ng - either ignorant or stupid, but he doesn't understand proof or evidence , so once an item of information has lodged in his head he believes it to b e absolutely true, and he believes a lot of stuff that is total nonsense. H e ought to have some sort of internal consistency checker, but it doesn't s eem to work very well or very fast.
And even more surprisingly in cardiac pacemakers. Back in the late
1960s, just before lithium cells were developed, someone made implantable electronic cardiac pacemakers with tiny isotope generators. Apparently they were designed to resist cremation without release of material.
I find this a bit surprising given that the greens kick up a huge fuss whenever a probe with a plutonium generator on it gets launched or uses the Earth as a fly by slingshot assist.
Zamboni piles were a lot cheaper to make electrostatic batteries. There is one in Oxford UK that has been ringing a bell since 1840.
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It is as close as you get to perpetual motion in this universe.
They were fun war surplus items from gen I night vision kit.
There was a program from the UK on fusion on ABC radio (Australian Broadcasting Commission) recently. 3 eminent commentators, all physicists with PhDs, and all apparently reknowned experts. Not a skerrick of stuff I hadn't heard endless times before. What is fusion, the sun, how does a tokamak work, ITER, JET, and the Americans are bombarding tiny pellets of frozen hydrogen with the most powerful lasers on the planet and that's going to one day generate all the clean power we need. Not a single mention of the formidable engineering and materials problems that may well not be soluble. As long as these guys keep getting their research grants it'll be sweet, mate.
Alphas are pretty safe if you make sure they're generated inside a block of nice corrosion-resistant metal. If the alpha emitter gets loose in your body, it's less good.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Well, 238Pu is almost a pure alpha emitter, and with an 87-year half life, you don't need too much of it. Cast it into a block of some refractory metal, and it would survive re-entry pretty well intact, and be pretty nearly harmless, except for staying (thermally) hot for a long time. No significant shielding would be required.
Fission produces all sorts of fast neutrons that make everything nearby radioactive. The cumulative damage to the electronics from the resulting beta radiation wouldn't be conducive to a long mission lifetime.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Only people living in a fantasyland reject ZERO GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS nuclear power.
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"Using historical electricity production data and mortality and emission factors from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, we found that despite the three major nuclear accidents the world has experienced, nuclear power prevented an average of over 1.8 million net deaths worldwide between 1971-2009 (see Fig. 1). This amounts to at least hundreds and more likely thousands of times more deaths than it caused. An average of 76,000 deaths per year were avoided annually between
2000-2009 (see Fig. 2), with a range of 19,000-300,000 per year."
"Likewise, we calculated that nuclear power prevented an average of 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) net GHG emissions globally between 1971-2009 (see Fig. 3). This is about 15 times more emissions than it caused. It is equivalent to the past 35 years of CO2 emissions
historical nuclear energy production has prevented the building of hundreds of large coal-fired power plants."
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