Interesting, I hadn’t realized the range was so short. I guess if they did trans-Pacific it would mostly be limited to Seattle to Tokyo, or routes with a stopover in Hawaii.
I think the real advantage would be for transpacific flights. San Francisco to Tokyo is currently about 11.5 hours, assuming a similar ratio (maybe slightly better due to flying supersonic for longer), Boom’s time would be around 6.5 to 7 hours. Savings would be more significant for East Coast flights, ATL-HND would go from 14.5 hours to under 8.5.
Old World Vultures are not closely related to New World Vultures (which are closer to storks). The mechanism which kills vultures in India and Africa does not present the same issue in vultures native to North America.
But the severity of Chernobyl definitely fomented anti-nuclear sentiment much further than it had been. It “showed” that a major radiological release could happen in a civilian power plant (nonwithstanding that such designs weren’t used in Germany). Ultimately the formation of the sentiment was a process, of which Chernobyl is a core part.
1. Being on the front lines of the Cold War, in the event of a hot war, most nuclear weapons would be used in West Germany. (Yes, weapons aren’t power plants, but they can be hard to separate in popular discourse.)
2. Plans to build a nuclear power plant at Wyhl were opposed by locals, who occupied the site, and were forcefully removed by police. This was broadcast on television and helped galvanize the anti-nuclear movement.
3. The Chernobyl accident led to fallout being deposited on German soil, which furthered opposition, and in my view, was the killing blow.
DC has an advantage in newness and in materials selection (tiny tiles with lots of grout looks cool for 5 minutes), as well as having relatively fewer station layouts.
No, it gives off alpha particles and gamma rays. Hypothetically, you could build a device to harvest that energy (along the lines of an RTG), but the energy density and conversion efficiency would be laughable, given the 3.8 day half-life and gaseous state.
This is a real disappointment. My most recent Best Buy purchase was a PS4 copy of GTA V to give as a gift. I’d previously purchased several movies from them. I liked being able to buy these items in person, without having to worry about damage or getting scammed.
As a blank check, sure. But there are specific regulations that could be removed. For example, the U.S. prohibits automatic load following equipment in nuclear plants, while the French allow it. It would allow for a control room operator to not have to constantly micromanage the reactor.
I know your comment was sarcastic, but today I was wondering if you could do remote control via SIPRNet or JWICS (military computer networks) and avoid the issues associated with conventional controls.
Quantity. One of the big issues with nuclear power is that we aren’t building frequently enough, and therefore lose expertise and capability, which drives up costs, both from screw-ups and from not being able to amortize over a large production run. To give an analogy, imagine if Boeing only made one 737 every five years. That aircraft would be insanely expensive.
Personally, I’m bullish on the companies in the micro reactor space that have minimal site construction. I’m less bullish on Oklo, given that their application had some glaring omissions and got denied an NRC license.
There are plenty of cleared jobs that don’t do polygraphs. I work for a DOE contractor. Q-cleared, no poly. The vast majority of positions where I am don’t have a polygraph associated with them.
A lump of raw ore on a shelf in your home office? Sure.
Uranium ore in ton quantities, underground in a poorly ventilated mine? That’s a big health risk, due to radon, other daughter products, and the inherent heavy metal hazards of uranium.
Yes, you can have the reactor offline, with control rods inserted for launch. Then when you reach the requisite altitude, withdraw the control rods and start up the reactor. In the event of a launch accident and potential destruction of the reactor, the enriched uranium fuel would be a chemical hazard (uranium is a heavy metal like lead), but only a mild radiation hazard (since there are no high-gamma fission products, and the uranium has undergone heavy purification prior to fuel fabrication).
Hypothetically, if the technique can enrich U, Pu, or other fissile isotopes in decent quantities, you run into other issues. Stirring an aqueous enriched uranium solution is a great way to have a criticality accident (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident). That’s not to say it’s impossible to manage, just difficult. UF6, the current compound of choice for enrichment, is in the gas phase during the process.