Why all the failures to natural disasters?

I've never encountered an infantryman or an artilleryman or a cavalryman who needed to have a building maintained in order to fight. The Navy has to keep their ships from floating and the Air Force has to keep their fuel farms and maintenance facilities functional, but the Marines fight on foot and from vehicles, they don't fight from inside buildings that they have to maintain.

So are you now recanting your opinion that the primary function of the military is emergency response?

In any case, logistics from the military viewpoint is mostly a matter of transport, not a matter of maintaining buildings.

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Not just the reactors. All the pipes and equipments are subject to corrosions. Salt deposits are insulating the parts they are trying to cool.

Cheaper than the hundred billions plus in cleanup cost.

It will be here as long as we can tell. Nevada site is dead. Are we going to spend another 10 billions to dig another hole?

That, quite frankly, is none of your damned business, so stop asking.

All that's fine, but none of it geared to fixing busted reactors or pulling civilians out of the rubble.

Patching up wounded soldiers is far different from clearing the rubble at Ground Zero or after the Big One hits LA.

If it's "a bunch of products" then it's hardly "pure". Sounds like an ill-posed problem.

Obviously it starts out pure and then it isn't.

So maybe you don't understand radioactivity as well as you thought you did.

--
[Complainer's syndrome:]
What, exactly, are you complaining about. [...] So, what's the complaint?
  -- John Stafford , 09 Dec 2010 16:30:53 -0600

After the first remark, I would venture to say that he lacks the aptitude to understand the mechanics.

The idiot expounding about firing a cannon toward space cannot possibly make valid assessments about those that brought the cannon logic flaw to your pathetic, narrow and limited attention span.

In other words, John... You are an absolute idiot. You ARE the same, retarded twit asshole that you were yesterday!

He is an idiot, and so are you. IF a space based rail gun were made, the power source for it would be vast as the solar array can collect ad infinitum, and we can put a LOT of storage in space.

Ant/the idiot that considered using the ISS for a rail gun firing payloads is nearly as stupid as John Larkin and his absolutely retarded responses.

I'd much rather slip you a cyanide tablet and then sit and watch you consume it, and then sit and watch it take you where you so belong.

In case you are too retarded (and we know you are), that was essentially me telling you that your pathetic responses deserve all the attention a freshly laid turd gets.

It's called half life, johnny.

It all depends on the half life of the contaminant.

You are truly stupid.

Have you even seen the flora and fauna around Chernobyl?

You are clueless, to say the least.

Of course 1/2-life may only be a rough guide.

All you can be sure of is the time something is contaminated with some substance can't be less than some multiple of the 1/2-life. But it can be much more.

As I mentioned elsewhere on this thread, radioactive substances don't exist in isolation. They typically have a place in a decay chain -- one substance decays into the next in the chain -- and maybe even more complex decay networks -- where there are multiple ways to obtain a given product.

Even a simple chains can greatly increase the time a given substance may be at harmful levels.

Here's a simple example.

Suppose substance a decays (e.g. alpha decay) into b, and b decays into c. Suppose the 1/2-life of a is 70 y and for b it's 7 years.

If we start with 1 kg of substance b than in (say) 30 years b is down to about 40 g and then continues to decline.

But if we start with 1 kg of substance a then at least 40 g of substance b is around for more than 100 years. b is continually "propped up" by further decay of the less active a.

This example also illustrates that total activity can increase over time -- not just simply decay. If we start with 1 kg of a and 0 b then it isn't until around 25 years that activity starts to decay -- up until that time it's increasing over time. The peak activity is around 8x the initial activity.

Unfortunately, many of these lessons are not known even to physics sophomores.

Hell, even graduate engineers.

--
[Lesson for today Oceania != Australia:]
[subject: US aid to Australia]
Oops! Caught LYING, again...
US Foreign Assistance & Grants 2000 - 2009
Oceania: $197,000,000 Total Foreign Assistance
$1,000,000 Total Military Assistance
  -- Patriot Games , 09 Jan 2011 15:57 -0500

Which is what you'd *really* enjoy watching.

John

Actually the reverse would be better: use an electromagnetic accelerator (such as a rail gun) to pre-accelerate the parcel, then use rockets to get the rest of the way.

Accelerators are limited in length by infrastructure costs, which limits added kinetic energy. Rockets are limited in delta-v. If you intend to combine both, an accelerator is therefore best employed for earlier stages where a given kinetic energy provides the most delta-v.

--
Tim

Great! If there's prime land that is going extremely cheaply due to measurable but negligible radiation levels, then I get to pay peanuts for it and sell it for huge profit when the hysteria cools down.

Where's the downside, again? Well, I suppose there is a downside to the idiots who panicked about tiny amounts of radioactivity and sold it too cheaply. So sad.

At worst, it's not the radiation that destroyed the land value, it's the anti-nuclear hysteria that destroyed the land value. So which do you think is the more damaging, again?

P.S. *All* land has measurable radiation levels, and they vary quite a lot. Half the area of the world has greater than the median background radiation level. Are you living in one of these radiation hot-spots? Have you checked? Maybe you should move, right now, before it's too late!

P.P.S. Radioactive elements released by coal plants to date in normal operation would, if the linear no-threshold model is used (hah!), account for about 10,000 cancer deaths caused by radiation produced through human activity.

Note: I believe that there is sufficient evidence against the LNT model below 100 mSv/yr that any such conclusion is invalid, and even somewhat likely that the slightly increased background radiation levels may have reduced cancers. E.g. see

for a rather carefully considered study on the effect of atmospheric radon levels on lung cancer incidence, among others.

--
Tim

But then the evil radioactive radon gas gets you. It's heavier than air, so there's more of it near the floor.

--
Tim

Hey, I have an even better idea! Use a two-stage rocket!

John

Multi-stage rockes have diabolical mass-ratios.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Try to keep track of who posted what. That was never my opinion.

Transport is mostly from warehouses to warehouses and storage bunkers. Leaving stuff left in piles in the open air isn't a good idea.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen