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China is planning on screwing over the future

 blather, Hmm..., news, nukes, politics  11 Responses »
Apr 252016
 

China plans fleet of floating nuclear power plants to provide energy to South China Sea islands

On the face of it, this is an idea I approve of: not only more nuclear reactors, but mobile, floating nuclear reactors. Something I would love to see the US do, and something at on a certain level I approve of China or virtually anybody else doing.

The problem I foresee is that I expect that the Chinese  contractors will half-ass this like they seem to do everything. Components that are supposed to be made of cadmium will instead be made out of cat food. Emergency coolant systems fabricated from papier mache. Nuclear engineers replaced with slave laborers.

The end result I’m afraid of is one or more of these floating reactors blowing its top, melting down, or getting zapped by an Exocet, trashing a substantial region. The usal pack of baying anti-nuclear zealots will then dutifully take this as an example of why nukes are Teh Ebil, and the American/Western nuclear programs will take another hit. While at the same time the Chinese will probably just shrug, write off the lost reactor, nonchalantly shoot a couple dozen stooges, and crank out a bagrillion more reactors and coal burning powerplants.

 

I have a potential solution. So long as we allow political correctness on federally funded universities, including  blocking certain otherwise protected political speech, then I propose that if the Chinese manage to make themselves a crappy reactor and cause trouble, anyone who proposes to use that incident to tar the *American* nuclear program will be deported to China. America is thus a “safe space” for honest discussion of nuclear power, and blaming American nukes for the dumbass decisions of Russian or Chinese collectivist stooges, or Japanese dumbasses who thought it would be a neato-keen idea to locate a reactor in a tsunami zone is hereby banned.

 Posted by at 2:30 pm

Water Thieves

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, Forward!, news, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  18 Responses »
Apr 242016
 

There are times when I despair about my fellow Americans. How can we be so dumb, so awful? But if I ever need a pick-me-up, the answer is simple: look at everybody else, and we don’t seem so bad.

Consider: there was a marathon in London. As is traditional for such events, there are “watering stations” along the route where runners can grab a bottle of water. And what I guess must be in the best tradition of St. George, Robin Hood, King Arthur, Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Winston Churchill and all the other great heroes from British legend and lore… the locals decided to steal all the water.

The London Loot-athon: Outrage as dozens of people are filmed brazenly snatching bottles of water left for marathon runners 

Neat.

I would assume that, were this in America instead of Britain, that these would be Sanders voters. Spreading the wealth and all that.

 Posted by at 7:32 pm

Yay! We’re doomed! Deathly-dumb edition

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., science, spacecraft, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  5 Responses »
Apr 242016
 

Oy. If you’ve seen this and been tempted to be worried about it… don’t.

Earth’s “Magnetosphere” COLLAPSED in space TODAY for two+ hours! Trouble ahead for all of us

They are basing this on blips in data downloaded from NASA satellites. FAR more likely than a sudden failure to exist of the Earths magnetosphere – an occurrence that frankly would defy the laws of physics – is a simple data dropout, a mistake on the servers, a computerized brain-fart.

If the magnetosphere suddenly vanished (this would require that the Earth spinning molten iron core either stop spinning, or stop being molten), the effects would be sufficiently obvious that you’d not need some conspiracy theorists to tell you. Birds going bonkers, that crappy Chinese compass you got in a Crackerjack box suddenly pointing every which way, airliners complaining of increased radiation levels, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.

Now, if for some reason you *really* want to ramp up The Stupid,  watch not only THIS VIDEO ON YOUTUBE, but read the comments as well. The narrator of the little video claims that this “collapse of the magnetosphere” is a result of experiments being done at CERN. Even better: the narrator claims that this has caused “compression” of the atmosphere, and a 180 foot wave out in the Atlantic. And is likely to cause earthquakes.

This is, of course, highly ridiculous. But what is distressing are he YouTube comments. Sure, chances are good that many of them may be mobys. But a lot of them almost certainly *aren’t.* Given that these idjits are claiming that scientists at CERN are intentionally trying to destroy the world, that they need to be shot, that they are possessed by demons or are demons themselves… I don’t know if I’d be worried about whackjobs doing something violent, but I certainly despair for the future if this is the caliber of person who gets to vote for the politicians who get to pick scientific funding priorities.

 Posted by at 5:27 pm

Seems like a good match to me…

 Forward!, history, news, politics, religion  9 Responses »
Apr 232016
 

From Sweden:

‘Green Party may have been infiltrated by Islamists’

It seems the Swedish Greens have been having themselves a few problems recently:

  • One Green politician refused to shake a female journalists hand. not because she was a journalist (you never know where one of *those* might have been) but because she was, y’know, a woman. And women carry Haram Cooties, I guess.
  • A Green Party housing minister was filmed comparing the Israelis to Nazis, because not letting the Palestinians into Israel is *exactly* like the Nazis incinerating millions of people. He also showed support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
  • A Green Party Deputy Prime Minister called the events of 9/11 “accidents” and had previously compared the recent “immigration crisis” to Auschwitz, because people drowning after sinking overloaded boats that they willingly boarded for the purpose of invading and colonizing another land and overturning their culture is *exactly* like people who got rounded up at gunpoint, loaded into boxcars and gassed.

The Green Party was a tool of the Soviets back in the day, aimed at overturning the west from within. The masters may have changed, but the core essence of the Green Party seems to remain.

 

 Posted by at 11:50 pm

Space Elevator Engineering Primer

 blather, Hmm..., projects, rockets, science, science fiction, spacecraft, wisdom, youtube  12 Responses »
Apr 232016
 

I’ve never really been much of a fan of the space elevator concept. Not so much that it relies upon nearly magical levels of structural strength (though some new materials are strong enough – at least at small scale – to make the concept feasible), but because it is something of a snail for getting payloads into orbit. If your elevator can climb at a brisk 100 km/hour, and that would be a massive challenge, it will take the elevator about 358 hours to climb to geosynchronous… slightly over two weeks. That’s a couple days in the van Allen belts, so your elevator had better be highly shielded… which means the ratio of payload to climber will be minimal. And then your climber has to either be jettisoned, or it has to make the climb all the way back down. That will be probably several days, during which time you can’t send another climber back up. So you’re probably looking at a turnaround time of around three weeks per “flight.”

Turnaround time can be improved by not going all the way to GEO. Instead, go several thousand miles up, then throw the payload overboard. The higher up you go, the more tangential velocity you’ve have, and the closer to a circular orbit you’ll have. To get into an actual circular orbit, you’ll need to have an onboard propulsion system; the lower your ejection altitude, the more propulsive capability you’ll need. But while this’d speed up the elevator system, it’ll reduce effective payload by *a* *lot.*

Jettisoning a payload puts it into an elliptical orbit with the jettison point being apogee. Perigee rises as the elevator rises; at some point you’ll have an orbit where the perigee is something convenient like 400 km. So all you’ll need is enough propulsive capability to circularize at perigee. But since I can’t be bothered to do the actual math, it seems to me the apogee altitude will be quite high for the elevator, so it might only shave a relatively small fraction off the elevator trip time compared to going all the way to GEO.

Then there’s the problem of actually climbing. How? The cable might be a flat ribbon, millimeters thick by centimeters wide, or it might be actually cable-shaped. But the materials under consideration, graphene and diamond fiber and such, have a little problem: they are virtually frictionless. Run wheels on them all you like, you probably won’t get much traction. Adding a ribbed surface for traction, or adding magnetic materials so a maglev system can haul up the elevator, will add vast amounts of weight to the system.

This video points out some of the engineering issues with the concept:

 Posted by at 7:33 pm
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