They are the few, the proud, and especially capable of doing what has to be done. And, I think American ingenuity is available there when they need it.
They'll make the equipment, get it made, or get it from someone who already has it.
If not the Marines, then there are the Navy Seals, a US Navy "special force". Those are some very capable men who can get things done and get things done right, in face of danger that deters others. US Navy has nuclear reactors, and expertise at handling everything associated with nuclear reactors, even a good safety record and a good record of having things done right and properly with nuclear reactors.
Heck, US Navy may not even need to resort to their Seals to respond to a need to move hot fuel rods that are not their own!
For San Onofre, we just need to move a few hundred feet inland and up. What the hack, build actively cooled conveyor belt to move them and guide it with marines. It could be done for a fraction of the potential costs in radioactive deprecations of properties in S.CA.
1c per kWhr energy tax should be enough to pay for it. Perhaps more to move the reactors as well. I am seriously thinking about writing to the congressmen/women.
I am not objecting to Nuclear Plants, but this one is fatally faulted.
So, that makes the body count from nuke problems roughly 14 so far, while a dam burst caused by the same earthquake was said to have killed
1500?
How many of those will die before dying from old age? Some fraction of the "some of the remaining 600". Would that be 150, 100, 20 or 10 or 4?
What about the same-earthquake-caused dam-burst said to kill 1500, and I think extremely few of those 1500 so much as updated or came-up-with their wills?
This is the inverse neutron bomb. Radiation causes more property damages than killing people. Hundreds of square miles of land are permanently destroyed.
Bioaccumulation makes Fukushima a cancer causing situation for California, and Washington and Oregon, and just like when Chernobyl happened it will affect the infant mortality rate in those areas again.
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The thing is any slow poison in the environment is never going to set off alarms, and is difficult to track.
Radiation damage in the body is dependent on many factors.
Not everyone has the same susceptibility because some may have iodine in them from taking kelp and hence protected to a degree and some may be iron deficient and hence more susceptible to other forms of radiation etc.
You see they will say, eating 5 lbs of spinach is equivalent to 3 dental x-rays or similar, except when you get a dental x-ray, that is a wave. When you eat Cesium, that is a neutron. So that is like swallowing a dental x-ray machine. One that doesn't turn off after a micro second.
Let me tell you something, if you are a person who takes vitamins, and not just the one a day, then you will learn over the period of about a year what each vitamin does to your body, just by the effect it has on you when you take it.
You will notice a difference in your body.
Unless you do that, you really don't have much feedback from your body that tells you what is going on in your body.
In fact you probably think vitamins have little affect or you get them in your diet. Not so.
If you really want to know about your body and how things affect you, every day, then you need to spend money and buy some key items and use them and see the difference.
D Drops is one thing that you would notice that almost everyone is deficient in Vitamin D in todays world.
If you have allergies or your nose runs or gets stuffy, that is because your body can't handle the crap that is coming into it. It is just not getting enough vitamin D. The daily recommendation is tiny, and they put a tiny amount in milk, but what most people need, is 5 drops of 1000 iu per day.
Humans need fish oils. We evolved somewhere where that was part of what made us. Unfortunately now, they take the vitamin D out of cod liver oil. So even if you buy D drops, they are putting D into sunflower oil.
So its still not replacing that factor in our diet, that we need.
The sun doesn't give most people enough D except for midsummer.
And that is just one vitamin.
Wherever it was that we developed a large brain, and body fat layer, it was probably by the sea, and humans ate plenty of sea food.
I am not going to say aquatic ape, but we must have ate a lot of sea food. Well now its all contaminated with mercury and radiation and our diet is completely different.
Many people are not evolved to drink cow's milk even. They haven't adapted yet. Same with wheat. Gluten.
These aren't natural to our bodies.
When corn was developed by the people of South America, they had to boil it in lye, in order to break it down enough to digest it. It wasn't edible otherwise. It was sheer starvation that forced them to find a way to eat it. Since then corn has been hybridized to make it more digestible but humans by nature would not have been able to eat it unless they adapted and adapted it.
So really to make your body work properly, requires a lot of things we don't get in our diet. Not in the proper amounts. Its a young science and it will be a long time before science is able to properly prescribe vitamins, nutrients correctly.
Whereas somewhere out there is an environment we are suited to, as a species. And it was probably by the sea somewhere.
This is ridiculous. 10,000 miles away? I do not for a moment worry about radiations from Japan. I worry about repeating the incident here. The incident can certainly be prevented, with relatively minor costs. We just have to act fast before the big one here.
It has to achieve escape velocity to go to the Sun.
And it is not the proto rail gun you read about that shoots a tiny slug projectile.
First, John, you would have to have the aptitude to grasp the technology. Then you have to have the conceptual acumen to understand adaptation to a given circumstance.
Have you ever seen the "Punkin' Gun contest" TV shows?
Anyway...
You use rocket power to pre-accelerate the parcel, then the rail force stage.
Actually it needs a lot more than mere Earth escape velocity. It takes something like 32 km/s delta-v, whereas Earth's escape velocity is only about 11 km/s.
It would be cheaper to send it to some other star than it would be to send it to ours.
You have to leave them for a while (around a year or too) to cool down a bit while the short lived radioactive nucleides decay. It is precisely this short term latent energy in the fuel that made Fukushima go pop when the cooling failed after the reactors had been scrammed.
It is easier said than done to reprocess. You can end up with insane amounts of messy mid level long lived radioactive waste streams. And servicing a hot plant is not easy once the chemistry has started.
UK and France have significant reprocessing capability but the newest plant Thorpe has been something of a monumental disaster and dribbled a lot of nasty radioactive acid gunge without the operators noticing. A level 3 nuclear accident if I recall but didn't hurt anyone.
The new MOX plant also has a poor productivity record and had to subcontract promised work to Cogema. Time for a renaming I think.
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It is also energetically unfavourable to fire them at the sun - far more expensive than giving it escape velocity from the solar system. And the latter means that they will be on very long period orbits even if you do not quite achieve it.
If you miss the sun you will put it into an orbit that intersects with Earths orbit very frequently since its semimajor axis will be half that of the Earths its period will be 6/sqrt(2) months.
Problem with launching stuff into space is the relatively high proportion of launch failures. I would count vapourising things at the muzzle of the rail gun in amongst those failure modes.
At least burying the unwanted components in geologically stable dry ground is reliable and cheap. Although in the UK the best site is under the most expensive housing NIMBY zone in the SE so we will bury it in the NW under Sellafield in heavily fractured wet rocks instead.
Deep salt or gypsum mines are tempting for long term storage as some have been bone dry for hundreds of millennia and salt flows on timescales of hundreds of years to seal any gaps.
My understanding is that once you get the material into space, a well calculated trajectory and a good shove is all it takes.
Perhaps an ISS resupply mission (Russian) should take a railgun and use some ISS waste as a dummy load to launch into a well calculated trajectory straight into Sol?
Or maybe somebody could figure out a way to safely collect a whole bunch of the orbital debris and launch that into Sol?
Only if there was no gravity. In actuality, even from low Earth orbit it takes another 3 km/s "shove" to escape Earth's gravity - any less and you just end up in an elliptical orbit about Earth.
That accomplished, you've also got to shed essentially all of Earth's
30 km/s orbital velocity around the Sun - or again, you just end up in an elliptical orbit (this time about the Sun).
It takes only about 12 km/s to leave the Solar System.
No railgun has yet been developed that can impart 30+ km/s to a payload. Even if there was, the ISS certainly couldn't power it.
Which is all *very* annoying; the Universe should allow you to move into lower energy orbits ballistically without using energy.
In practice, you could do it with sufficient delta V to reach Venus where you could do a slingshot to the Sun past Mercury. Maybe even via the Moon, if you didn't mind it taking hundreds of years.
Of course, it will never be economic to dump waste in space; the Marianus trench seems custom made for that purpose, or deep under the Australian outback.
If it were, just find some orbital slot at 40,000 kms or elsewhere without much commercial use, and zone it for radioactive garbage dumps.
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