Why all the failures to natural disasters?

Tim's numbers here are right. Let me put a little background under them.

You understand that energy scales as the square of velocity, right? And you understand that what matters when you're moving a payload around with rockets is delta-v, right?

If you work the math it turns out that the kinetic energy of an object in a circular orbit is exactly 1/2 of the escape energy for an object starting at that altitude.

Orbital velocity in low earth orbit is roughly 7 km/sec. Escape energy is twice that. But since energy scales with the square of velocity, escape velocity is only sqrt(2) * 7 =3D 10 km/sec.

So you get that 3 km/sec delta-v is required to boost from low earth orbit to Earth escape velocity.

Given that delta-v, you're now in a roughly circular orbit around the Sun. The earth's orbital velocity about the sun is 30 km/sec and you had just enough velocity to get free of the earth with no energy to spare.

In order to get to the sun you would have to cancel out that

In order to reach Solar escape velocity you only have to increase your velocity to sqrt(2) * 30 =3D 42 km/sec. That's a delta-v of

Just so.

I haven't worked out the energy figures to know whether the usable energy produced from a given quantity of fuel is enough to give the resulting waste+vehicle a delta-v of 30 km/sec, even assuming that we had perfectly efficient rail guns to do it with.

You can bet that our reactors and our facilities are ten times better than any others around the world, including countries that use more plants than we do.

Even better. Fire them off to Jupiter.

The U.S. has more nuclear reactors than any other country in the world:

Thanks. I was under the impression that all the NIMBYs caused the US to fall behind in that realm as well.

Run the numbers on that and tell us how big that "anti-satellite missile" would have to be to result in something in a stable orbit at

Wow, *everything* you just said is wrong. Way to go, AlwaysWrong!

John

Who is this "we"? If you are talking about the US, US nuclear power plant development pretty much stopped more than 30 years ago, while the rest of the world continued. Our reactors are old designs with decades of wear on them, they are far from "ten times better than any others around the world". Fukushima is a US design, built by a US contractor, and is much like many power plants in the US.

Now if you're in Canada, or the UK you might have a point--they do have some interesting designs in service.

Certainly everyone should benefit from and apply lessons learned at Fukushima, but rushing to implement change for the sake of change before the analysis of the problems encountered is complete can easily result in doing the wrong thing.

You need more than word salad to do engineering.

If the rocket is better, why not use all rockets?

You are AlwaysWrong, and today is no exception.

John

And think about the reaction momentum!

John

Launch failures will get a lot of press.

John

Pass me some dilithium crystals, please.

John

FWIW, you're talking to a guy who's been nick-named AlwaysWrong in SED. There's a damn good reason for that.

er

Quite the contrary, i believe this (San Onofre) was poorly designed. It was build for 7.0 quake. I would have spec. it for 8.5. Fukushima core survived 9.0, but not the support structures.

Yes, we need it 10 times better. We can't do without it, and can't do with the way it is.

Any changes would have years of debates before being implemented. So, we need to plan now. We know the seawall is ineffective. We know ground level is insufficient. We know more backup systems are needed. We know the site is poorly chosen.

We should start taxing the old one to finance building new one.

Hi linnix, Do you really know any thing at all about radiation? or do you just read the greenie press and believe everything they write?

First, radiation does not kill very easily unless you get massive doses. Small doses have been shown to be beneficial. Just a few miles from the Japan plant, you probably have to have pretty sensitive instruments to know anything has happened. The real problem is all psychological. Folks have been bombarded with "Radiation is BAD" for a genereation know, starting with all the bad B movies in the '50s, that they instictively fear it. In truth, the increase in background radiation is probably negligible.

Now, hopefully, at nuke plants all over, they will take a look at their procedures, and understand what it means to have this extensive damage. There were so many obviously easy solutions to the problems in Japan, that they must have been really rattled not to be able to use them, from portable generators to portable pumps. I would not be worried about the plant at San Onofre for a great many reasons.

I mean, lets look at that. SO is on the Pacific plate, so it is on the more stable side of the San Andreas. There are not extensive major faults off shore, so the likelihood of a tsunami is very much reduced. And, it does have Pendleton, so there is a crew of easily available emergency folks if anything does go wrong!

Charlie

In other words, our test departments can now measure extremely small amounts of radioactive materials so that the media can panic the populace over nothing!

Charlie

How can anything permanently destroy land?

John

Or, someone will finally take them to task, and realize that you would have to eat that 5 pounds of spinach at one sitting, that the three dental xrays would be spread out over your entire lifetime and entire body, and not focused on one small part of the body, and that the actual biological effect would be so small that it could only be expressed in statistics utilizing parts per billion...

Charlie

Beds are good radiation shields, if you hide under them.

John