Because why not: someone has posted the 1979 disaster “epic” Meteor to YouTube. It is pretty awful on every level, but to me the worst of it is the incredibly half-assed miniature work on the spacecraft. That said, it’s entertaining in it’s awfulness. Just thing thing to MST3K.
When I was ten, this movie was awesome. Now… well, here ya go.
Here is a movie review from the period:
And here is a TV movie, “A Fire In The Sky,” from the year before “Meteor,” based on a similar concept.
A spokesman for Europe’s largest nuclear plant says the facility is on fire after Russia attacked the power station in the southern Ukrainian city of Enerhodar.
“We demand that they stop the heavy weapons fire,” Andriy Tuz, spokesperson for the plant in Enerhodar, said in a video posted on Telegram. “There is a real threat of nuclear danger in the biggest atomic energy station in Europe.” Tuz told Ukrainian television that it is urgent to stop the fighting to put out the flames.
BREAKING: Europe's largest nuclear power plant in southern #Ukraine is reportedly being shelled by Russian troops right now. Watch ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/HGklnjOuQL
— The News with Shepard Smith (@thenewsoncnbc) March 4, 2022
WATCH: The Associated Press reports there are elevated levels of radiation at the nuclear plant under attack in #Ukraine. ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/rv4mZUhVWQ
— The News with Shepard Smith (@thenewsoncnbc) March 4, 2022
From the AP:
Firefighters cannot get near the fire because they are being shot at, Tuz said.
A government official told The Associated Press that elevated levels of radiation were detected near the site of the plant, which provides about 25% of Ukraine’s power generation. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the information has not yet been publicly released.
This map might prove useful:
https://www.windfinder.com/#5/47.0252/47.3730
Shows current wind directions. At the moment, the winds in the region of the reactor under attack are circling around a region in north-eastern Ukraine, then seemingly drifting south-east over Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran. If the reactor pops, the Caspian Sea is likely to get trashed. Tomorrow the wins is to be more generally easterly, but Saturday the wind will come down from the north and then hang a right straight over Greece. From then on it looks like the region of Greece and Turkey will get a constant flow from the area of the reactor.
The invasion of the Ukraine doesn’t seem to be the overnight success I suspect Putin figured it would be. So now I have to wonder if he’s thinking of turning the place to ash on his way out. The rest of Europe and the US may also be in the crosshairs. This would do Russia no good, of course. Nobody would benefit from Russia getting nutty with their nukes.
Except…
I wonder if the Chinese Communists would like to be the unopposed barbarian warlords sitting atop a radioactive pile of skulls? Somehow I suspect that they wouldn’t mind a crappy standard of living if *they* were in charge of the whole planet, trashed though it may be.
Fortunately, the United States Government is here to help:
https://www.ready.gov/nuclear-explosion
Get inside the nearest building to avoid radiation. Brick or concrete are best.
Remove contaminated clothing and wipe off or wash unprotected skin if you were outside after the fallout arrived. Hand sanitizer does not protect against fall out. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth, if possible. Do not use disinfectant wipes on your skin.
Go to the basement or middle of the building. Stay away from the outer walls and roof. Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household. If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not a part of your household. Children under two years old, people who have trouble breathing, and those who are unable to remove masks on their own should not wear them.
Ahem. In the event a nuclear ᚠᚪᛣᚳᛁᚾᚷ bomb goes off near you, what you really need to worry about is social distancing. Not getting flash-fried or marinated in fallout.
And in the event of a major disaster, there are a number of things you should have at hand. But it’s curious that this government website seems to have forgotten a few:
Curiously only two references to “firearm” on the whole site:
A Douglas concept from 1963 for a large space booster that was to use both chemical and nuclear engines. The first stage was to have chemical engines; when the booster reached sufficient altitude, it would stage off and a purely nuclear stage would deliver a one million pound payload to low Earth orbit (in this case, a million pounds of liquid hydrogen for a large interplanetary spacecraft). both stages would be recovered for re-use.
*Somewhere* I have a paper that describes this at least a little bit, with a minimal diagram…
For the most part, I’m satisfied to let people be who they want to be. Do whatever you like in the privacy of your own home, so long as you’re hurting nobody else. But the fact is, some things (and people) really are nuts. Mental illness is a reality. And being mentally ill in one area could well mean you are not likely to make good judgements in another.
Behold who the Biden administration is hiring to help plan for the future of nuclear waste.
Tolerance goes just so far. And then it gets pushed *too* far and it snaps back. Are we at that point? near that point? beyond that point? I dunno, but if I was *kinda* like this person, but nowhere near as nutty as this person, I’d be *real* worried about the inevitable pendulum swing in the other direction. I would post the photos that this person happily and willingly puts out onto the internet, but I at least *kinda* try to keep this as a safe for work, safe for family and safe for life blog. If I included the photos, parent groups across the land would try to get my blog yoinked from public school libraries… and they’d be right to do so.
Apparently he has the right degrees, the right education to technically work in the field of nuclear waste handling. But imagine being a standard, normal engineer tasked with working alongside this guy in his dresses and dog-play. Yeeeeesh. If nothing else, he is making everything in his life all about him. There are reasons why “professional attire” is what it is… and conformity is part of that. It is not strictly from an authoritarian desire to make everyone conform to some arbitrary standard, but to make everyone focus on their *job* not on their attire, or on what Bob’s wearing today. The physical sciences are hard enough without having to deal with loonies that you can’t respect. The job needs to be about *the* *job.* Intentionally dressing bizarrely as a way to garner irrelevant attention to yourself seems to denote massive narcissism, if nothing else.
One of the odder concepts from the 1950’s was this circa 1959 Bell Aircraft concept for a nuclear powered helicopter. Very little has come out about it in the decades since; some crude schematics of how the reactor and propulsion systems would be arranged, a bit of text, and this one piece of art. Supposedly this vehicle would have a fuselage some 300 feet long (including rotors, it would be much longer), have a top speed of 200 miles per hour and weigh 500,000 pounds. The artwork looks more like the result of turning the artist loose on the idea of “giant nuclear helicopter” than an interpretation of an engineering study; nuclear reactors powerful enough to lift a half million power helicopter and neither small nor minimally radioactive. A heavily shielded reactor would have to be fitted within this vehicle *somewhere,* and there would doubtless not be windows in that region. This design, though, has windows along the whole length of the fuselage, with little space for a shielded reactor. This design seems to have been designated D-1007.
The full-rez scan of the art has been uploaded to the 2022-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox. This is available to all $4 and up Patrons and Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
I have one last copy of B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Stratofortress: Origins and Evolution. It is signed, numbered (#23 of 23) and comes complete with three bonus 18X24 prints, also all singed and numbered. The total *including* shipping within the US (I shudder to think what shipping overseas would be as the book is honestly fairly massive) is $62. If you would like this copy, the very last of this batch (and there’re no plans for a second batch), send me an email and I’ll send you a paypal invoice. First come, first served…
Update: SOLD.
Impressive enough if you are close enough to suffer damage from it, but 10 megatons is frankly small taters in the world of volcanoes and asteroid impacts. Still… the before and after photos of the island show that it suffered just a little bit of a dent:
In Goldfinger (1964), the villains plot was to set off a dirty A-bomb in Fort Knox, irradiating the US gold supply. The claim was made that the gold would be radioactive for 58 years, which would be… 2022. Well, here we are.
As an aside, I can’t say as I think too highly of the math here. Cobalt and iodine were mentioned as part of the bomb being “particularly dirty;” bombs “salted” with those substances were proposed back in the day because they would indeed make bombs dirty. The fallout would be *nasty.* But the half-life of cobalt 60 is 5.3 years; that of iodine 131 is 8 days. This means that 58 years gives cobalt 10.94 half lives and iodine 2,650 half lives. This means that cobalt would have decayed down to 1/(2^10.94) = 0.00051 of it’s original radioactiveness; iodine would be essentially nonexistent. It’s the less radioactive, longer-lived components of the bomb – the uranium, the metal bits of the casing, etc. – that should be more worrisome long-term.
I often wonder sometimes if Hollywood types even care about simple accuracy.
At the National Museum of the USAF:
Also: a fly-around of the SR-71. A bit zippier than I’d like, and it’d be nice if the drone would look *down* from time to time…