OT Nuclear material used as a power supply

And a kilometre of cable would weigh how much?

Outer planets missions need to take lots of pictures, and have to keep very good attitude control to keep their high gain antennas pointed at the Earth.

KISS is key.

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

Since I'd probably be hospitalised with shock if Jim-out-of-touch-with-real ity-Thompson ever posted a URL pointing at Wikipedia, probably not. It's an exceedingly hypothetical question, and does suggest that you are almost as far out of touch with reality as Jim Thompson.

I am pointing out that no respectable news organisation would have publishe d the rubbish the John Larkin re-posted, bearing in mind that the Wall Stre et Journal has published similar rubbish which John has also re-posted.

The Wall Street Journal is now owned and controlled by Rupert Murdoch - whi ch makes it thoroughly disreputable, an indisputable fact which I suspect t hat you may find difficult to accept.

I doubt that anybody is anybody is bribing you - you are just one more righ t-wing nitwit - and I suspect that "The Register" is more idle than corrupt . Denialist boiler-plate text is a cheap way of filling column inches, and publishing it probably makes some big advertiser a bit happier, and a bit m ore willing to buy ad space.

Recognising denialist boiler-plate isn't difficult, if you know the science it is denying, and nobody who's publishing it can claim to be well-informe d.

Dream on. It takes roughly six mutations to convert a normal cell into a ca ncer cell, and linking a cancer to any one exposure to radiation is corresp ondingly difficult. Cancer cells are mutants, and something generates those mutations. Background radiation isn't the only source of mutations, but it 's certainly a significant source.

So what's your explanation of the differing life expectancies between two p airs of otherwise similar countries? There's nothing random about the stati stics, and it wasn't me who introduced the radon-from-granite story, which happens to be well-documented medical fact.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

It's not a problem to anybody but you. I didn't start reading Analog until about 1958, but I took to collecting old Analog's a few years later, and actually owned a copy of the issue of Analog in which the first of the thiotimoline stories got published for about twenty years.

The Wikipedia article reports the story pretty well, and adds plausible detail about Isaac Asimov's activities at at the time he wrote it.

I like Isaac Asimov's work, and have read quite a lot of it, but I haven't been tempted to write a Wikipedia-style comment about it, and it probably wouldn't have been good enough for Wikipedia if I had.

Since you are the kind of clown - like DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno - who wants to keep on using his clunky old newsreader software to check the usergroup, despite the fact that Google Groups offers more convenient access, I'm posting this via eternal september, just to make you marginally happier.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

:)

With respect to nuclear power, then there is the lost massive amounts of inexpensive ZERO GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS power. And like in Germany's case, they scramble to make up for that loss in power by using the dirtiest coal and buying nuclear produced energy from France.

You have to wonder about Germany being horribly misled all over again. And then there is China that is going bonkers for nuclear power.

"It's like a tear in the hands of a western man, Tell you about salt, carbon and water. But a tear to an oriental man, He'll tell you about sadness and sorrow or the love of a man and a woman." (Jefferson Starship)

Not anymore!

snipped-for-privacy@downunder.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

A little research shows that they are gitting government help. Out of business and into the money.

It's not the nuclear, it's the 'fraidiation.

Cheers, James Arthur

Beijing powered by coal, or nuclear. I know which one I'd rather live in. (or even visit.)

George H.

No moving parts, either.

I am well aware that the question was hypothetical - I thought it was obvious that such an exaggerated example was sarcasm.

It sounds like you are thinking of some specific example, but I don't know what. However, you should remember that bad media sources sometimes get things right, good media sources sometimes get things wrong, and individuals (such as John - and even Jim) can get some things wrong and some things right.

About the only way you can be sure of being completely wrong is to make wild generalisations or judgements based on little evidence.

/Why/ would I find it difficult to accept the indisputable fact of the ownership of the WSJ? It is a /fact/.

Maybe you have some idea that I am a fan of Murdoch (I am not), or the WSJ (I have never read it), or perhaps you think I am an "anthropogenic climate change denialist" (I am not - but that doesn't mean I am not sceptical to some proposed "solutions" of the issues).

You haven't actually /read/ any of The Register's articles, have you? You have simply assumed that because John Larkin linked to them, then the whole site is right-wing denialist idle corrupt rubbish, as is anyone who reads it or links to other articles there.

And you haven't actually read anything I've written either, nor looked at any threads I have been involved in, before condemning me based on the source of a link I gave.

I haven't posted here much for a while, but most of the regulars have me classified firmly in the "leftist weenie" camp.

But don't let a bit of reality, or thought, spoil your enjoyment of a good rant.

Post some links of The Register articles that you classify as "denialist boiler-plate" and I'll have a little look to see if I agree.

No, background radiation is a minor source of carcinogenic mutations. We have evolved with background radiation all around - our normal DNA repair processes have no problem dealing with the huge majority of effects of background radiation.

/Excessive/ radiation overwhelms these mechanisms, and increases the likelihood of several types of cancer. But for most cancers, there is no known major cause - and where major influences are known, they are either chemical (such as from smoking) or viral (such as HPV).

The one exception here is radon - it can be a significant factor in lung cancer incidence amongst non-smokers. The effect is small, even in high radon areas, but big enough that some people like to have fans in their cellars to stop it building up. But that is a rather specific cause, rather than general background radiation - it is not the radiation emitted from the rocks in the ground that are the problem, but the alpha particles from gas inside your lungs.

Stress, such as from excessive worrying, has been very clearly linked to several types of health problems. That's what has killed people that lived around the Fukushima reactor (excluding physical injuries and deaths due to the tidal wave) - not radiation.

Norway and Sweden are not twins - there are /many/ differences. One that will significantly affect life expectancies is that the population in Sweden is much more urban, or at least people live closer to urban centres and have better roads to them - in Norway, people are more spread out. That means people in Sweden have faster and easier access to hospitals and emergency health care.

Finding the next dozen differences that could have more influence one way or the other is left as an exercise for the reader.

As for Scotland compared to the UK, there are again lots of differences. On average, there is more poverty in Scotland, and again there is a larger (proportionally) rural population. There are differences in lifestyle and diet.

But the biggest factor is probably the deep-fried Mars bar.

Same with Chernobyl. 32+o(epsilon) victims, the cause was pure stupidity + complete bypass of the safety systems, but the impact on the nuclear power generation has been enormous...

Best regards, Piotr

Don't forget the hysteria from the 1960s about "duck&cover" and the H bomb. People were building nuclear shelters on mass scale. IMHO most of the current radiophobia has its roots there.

Best regards, Piotr

There could be some truth in that. Of course, the radioactive fallout from an atomic war /would/ have been dangerous - the legacy of the WWII bombs shows that the long-term effects of a couple of small atomic bombs is not quite as bad as feared, but for a few decades the risk of serious atomic war with lots of big bombs was very real.

Home-made shelters would not have helped much, of course - but it makes people feel as though the authorities care. It's like the idiocy of airport security checks - it does almost nothing to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks, but it lets authorities claim how hard they are working in their war on tourism.

well, that looks like a good place to stop reading your argument.

--
umop apisdn

It was fairly obvious that you were aspiring to sarcasm. Sadly, you fell a long way short.

John's choice of stuff to re-post from "The Register" and "The Wall Street Journal" has a depressing uniformity. There are quite a few examples. If yo u've missed most of them, lucky you.

When John's posting about electronics - or a least the kind of electronics where his hand-on approach works - he can be quite informative. When he ven tilates his general knowledge he makes quite a lot of mistakes.

That's a wild generalisation.

It's the disreputability that's the fact.

I certainly read the ones John Larkin re-posted.

You might like to think that, but it doesn't happen to be true.

That merely means that you aren't a Tea Party supporter. The US political s pectrum runs from the right to the far right.

I've yet to see you introduce any reality.

John Larkin's done if for me.

Sure. Sadly, it's minority that they don't deal with that get you.

And how do you think smoking causes lung cancer? Mutation is a chemical pro cess, and certain chemicals - mustard gas comes to mind - are rather effect ive mutagens.

Obviously. In fact it's the chemical effects of the ionising radiation in t he cells of the lung that create the mutations, some of which aren't repair ed properly, and go on to cause cancers. Quite why you see this as a "speci fic cause" rather than a specific example of a general mechanism escapes me .

Perhaps. If they hadn't been stressed by being evacuated, they might have b een exposed to enough extra radiation to have given them a fighting chance of dying of cancer first.

It's easier to devise plausible explanations that it is to get access to th e fine-grained statistics that sort out the real differences.

Probably not. When our experimental ultrasound machine went to Glasgow in 1

979, if found more right ventricular heart disease - a complication of cirr hosis of the liver - than left ventricular heart disease. Some parts of Sco tland do have a serious alcohol problem. The Scots generally don't eat gree n vegetables either - they couldn't get them for half the year until recent ly, and they are still expensive.

But the radon doesn't help.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

So having first misunderstood the sarcasm, you now claim it was obvious, yet failed. OK...

In other words, no, you cannot find any such examples from The Register. (I assume you are right about the WSJ - as I say, I don't read it so I have no idea what's in it. My general opinion of American news sources is quite low.)

I had a brief look through the The Register's archives, and didn't find any articles that are "denialist". There were some that were mocking global warming fanatics and doomsday prophets, but that's not bias - The Register is happy to mock anyone given half an excuse. And there were several expressing scepticism about the practicality of wind and solar power - but again, that's not bias when it is based on fact.

I've certainly seen OT threads where John is wrong (or at least, holds rather odd opinions). But I don't take that to mean that if he links to a website article, then everything related to that website is somehow corrupt.

What's your specialised subject on Mastermind? The bleedin' obvious?

No, it's the ownership that's a /fact/. It's disreputability (sic) is an opinion, not a fact. I have no good basis for agreeing or disagreeing about that opinion - but my knowledge of the WSJ (it is American, it is owned by Murdoch, and it is from Wall Street) make it very easy for me to believe it is disreputable.

So again, why do think I would find this hard to accept?

You silence suggests that this /was/ what you thought (and I use the word "thought" in its loosest sense).

And you think you think that gives you a view of the website? You have told us how little regard you have for John's opinions, and how biased you think he is, yet you use /his/ choice of article to form your own judgements?

You pretty much said it was above. You have condemned the site as "right-wing denialist idle corrupt rubbish", and condemned me equally for linking to it. And yet the only articles on it that you have read are those linked by John.

Or do you have other justification for your characterisation of the site as right-wing, denialist, corrupt, idle, and in the pay of nuclear power companies? If so, please be explicit.

Or do you have other justification for your characterisation of me as a "right-wing, denialist nitwit"? If so, again please be explicit.

Or give an apology for your hasty remarks - that would be nice.

I am well aware of the spectrum of American political opinion. But I am not American - and even here in Norway I would rate as quite strongly leftist (but perhaps not as a "weenie"!). That's what makes your accusations amusing - they are /so/ wrong they are barely conceivable.

Who is in denial now? Getting back to the facts I posted, are you suggesting that it really was the radiation at Fukushima that killed people? If so, lets have the references.

John has not posted any Register "denialist boiler-plate" links in this thread, as far as I can see. Can /you/ justify your claims here, and fight your own battles? Can /you/ give me some examples of these links your case is built on? /You/ are the one making extraordinary claims about corruption and bias, or at least idleness and plagiarism, so it is not unreasonable for you to make the effort to justify those claims.

No, it is the minority that they don't deal with that can be a contributing factor to cancer. Assuming (just to avoid more argument) that your "six mutation" theory is fact, a mutation due to background radiation means only five more mutations are needed due to viruses, chemicals, or other factors. I can happily agree that background radiation can be a /contributing factor/ to cancer - but not a significant /cause/ of cancer.

As I said, it is a chemical carcinogen. Various chemicals in tobacco smoke cause damage to cells, and can lead to cancer.

Mustard gas hardly rates as a major source of cancer! Few people (fortunately) ever come in contact with the stuff, and in most serious cases people don't survive long enough to get cancer.

Yes, I know all this.

Most background radiation does you no noticeably harm - because it consists of low-level gamma rays that mostly pass through you (and if they do cause damage to DNA or other important molecules, it is small and usually fixable). Radon is different because the radiation is released inside the body (in the lungs), and the alpha particles do a lot of damage in a small space - perhaps causing multiple mutations in a cell's DNA.

No, they would not - there were only small areas that had significant radiation (due to prevailing winds), and even in the worst places it would not have caused serious risk (at about 40 mSv - the lowest yearly levels directly linked with cancer risks is about 100 mSv).

Of course, it was a good idea to have the initial evacuation, for at least some of the area - there /could/ have been wider leakage. But the health problems people have suffered is due to their long-term evacuation in inhumane conditions, combined with panic from exaggerated reports, ignorant politicians, and media fear-mongering.

Meaning there is no justification for thinking that a single difference, such as background radiation, has any noticeable effect - and certainly no justification for claiming (or at least strongly implying) that it is the /major/ effect.

In other words, the issue is mainly lifestyle and diet. Who would have guessed? I mean, apart from almost everyone who has lived in the UK, or who knows anything about health issues? And apart from me, who said /exactly/ the same thing above?

The radon is irrelevant. It's a drop in the ocean. When the people of Scotland eat healthily, exercise regularly, drink moderately, give up smoking, and live to an average age of 100, then you can start looking for statistical differences in cancers between Aberdeen and the rest of the country.

But given that Aberdeen is about the only centre of population in Scotland with significantly higher radon levels than the rest of the UK, Aberdonians would have to /all/ be dying of radon-induced cancer in their teens or early twenties to cause a 2 year difference in the average lifespan.

Forget about the WWII, the USA and the USSR performed 900+ test explosions each. Hiroshima is well in the noise.

Yes, but it also implies the following: you need a shelter => nuclear devices are inherently evil => fear of radiation. I used to know a man who used the phrase "sub-molecular furnace" in order to avoid the hated term "fusion reactor". :-)

best regards, Piotr

I know a man who described his occupation as "small scale on-shore drilling consultancy" in order to avoid people's fear of dentists :-)

What makes you think I first misunderstood it?

That I didn't give you the response you were angling for?

There was radiation at Fukushima that needed to be taken seriously. It was taken seriously, so it didn't kill people, but that isn't any reason to cla im that the reaction was an over-reaction.

Sure, and enough nuclear radiation will kill you fast enough that you don't get cancer.

The problem is that you were making a false distinction between cancers cau sed by chemical mutagens and cancers caused by radiation - it's all cancer.

Twaddle. There's never been any good evidence of a threshold effect in radi ation response. Small quantities of radiation represent a small risk and la rger quantities represent a bigger risk. There have been proposals that the re is a threshold - a knee in the response - but the statistics don't seem to support the claim.

There's plenty of justification for thinking that a single difference can h ave an effect. Pulling that effect out of a background of other effects is more difficult.

Double-blind experiments are pretty much the only tests that give reliable results, but it's unethical to expose people to differences which we've got good reason to suppose will make some of them sick.

It looks a bit different if it is you who is running the risk of getting th e radon induced cancer.

Every cancer is a matter of life and death to the person who gets it. They are going to die of something, eventually, but breathing radon doesn't make their lives any more fun, and can kill them earlier than something else.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I /do/ live in an area with relatively high radon and background radiation. It does not bother me in the slightest.