Maximal temperatures in the US have DECREASED over the last 100years

On 24/09/2019 12.41, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Mon, 23 Sep 2019 07:17:42 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Sun, 22 Sep 2019 14:17:58 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

--- snip ---

We will never eliminate the CO2 emissions inherent in chemical
processes. Some chemical processes cannot be avoided, including the
deoxidation of iron ore and the making of cement. The generation of
power is something e should tackle but the present enthusiasm for wind
and solar is in the process of failing, just as engineers predicted.
We are wasting time and money chasing chimeras.


False. It is growing hugely here.

Check on the subsidies and hidden tax benefits. I think you will find
the profits are in the latter.

So? Energy production is a national issue and needs to be incentivised to
do what's best for the national/global interest. Can't depend on
short-sighted companies which are only interested in next year's profits.

THat's an interesting theory. I thought that if really was a national
issue it wouldn't need subsidising: the business would go ahead under
its own steam.

No, they don't.


Even fossil fuels are subsidised.

Yep. With other peoples (read: our) money.



--
Cheers, Carlos.

Paul wrote:
Chris wrote:
Paul wrote:
Chris wrote:
Eric Stevens wrote:
On Mon, 23 Sep 2019 07:22:42 -0000 (UTC), Chris

Right now I think its pebble bed reactors with thorium reactors not
too far away. That's if only we could start working on them again.
Untested, theoretical technology which is at best 20 years away. That's not
withstanding the public (and therefore government) unease with nuclear
power. Not really a solution; more of a hope. What do we do in the
meantime?

I'd say fusion is better long-term hope.

I think what society wants, is reactors that don't melt down.

And spent fuel that doesn't need storing for millennia.

Fusion has that going for it.

Plus the limitless source of fuel, short half-life waste and orders of
magnitude more energy.

I think fission is still a valuable source of energy, but the TCO is huge
and not enough countries are investing in it. The UK had three serious
plans on the go until recently, but two bids failed. The remaining one
won't come online until 2027 and will have taken nearly 20 years to
achieve.

It will have 3GW of power generating capacity. Whereas, In the last 10
years we've built 18GW of wind energy capacity to the point where it is
contributing almost as much as nuclear to the grid.


Do you know if they have a solution for the size of the
rest of the plant ?

I didn't know there was a problem.

One thing that impressed me during a tour of a nuclear plant,
was the size of the generating (turbine) hall.

https://www.opg.com/powering-ontario...ngton-nuclear/

"Turbine hall

580 metres long by 137 metres wide by 45 metres high.

It’s a space approximately six football fields long and twelve storeys high
"

The one I was in, was a bit smaller than that. The equipment sits at
floor level, and isn't that tall overall. This means the "volume" above the
turbine, is *huge*. So part of the cost of the plant, is structures like that.

When you're standing in the hall, the scale of the building takes your
breath away.

I presume this is an attempt to hold materials that escape during a failure,
but I don't know if this is true or not. The materials on the loose in there,
should be in a secondary loop, and relatively clean.

The main reactor has six foot thick walls. And it might be a bit taller than
that hall. The fusion one won't need to be anything like that.

While a fusion reaction chamber could be relatively small, and material
control from that part will be different, I wonder if the turbine hall
can be made more compact than it is now. It will probably need the same
cooling towers or access to fresh water for cooling. From the outside
of the plant, it's not going to look that much different. That's if you
can actually transfer all the released energy out of a fusion reaction,
into steam. I haven't seen any discussion about how that part might work.

I don't think the size of tokomak fusion reactors is an issue. They will
be big.

One reason for keeping the reaction chamber small, is to make
it easier to machine and build.

Yeah, the engineering challenges of ITER have been pretty substantial. The
tiny tolerances for something so large are quite something.

It's so disappointing that progress has been so slow. It should have been
built by now. I genuinely believe this is future of energy production.

Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 24/09/2019 20.15, Paul wrote:
Frank Slootweg wrote:


Â* For some *very* large value of "older"! My car is over *sixteen* years
old and is suitable for E10 (10% ethanol) fuel. For the same brand -
Renault - cars from 1997 on - i.e. nearly *twenty three* years - are E10
compatible.

[Dutch site: https://www.e10check.nl]

Â* FWIW, I think that - as you and others describe - use of ethanol in
petrol fuel is a dumb idea, but mis-/biased information about
non-compatibility of "older" engines is not helping.

I used to get tidbits about cars when visiting
the repair shop.

For example, the car had a current flow monitor, possibly
tied into the charging path. I was told the reason that
feature was added to the cars, had to do with the
damage caused when the voltage regulator "jammed on"
and the battery would be cooked by a railed field winding
(the alternator could produce 18V @ 70A or so, boiling the battery).
This had, on a number of cars, caused the battery to blow, and
coated everything under the hood with battery acid. The
car, after this happened, was normally a write-off. The
added feature, was there to stop that from happening.

It measured battery current, positive or negative. My father two first
cars (a Seat 600 and and Austin 1300) had a lamp instead, which would
light when the dynamo or the alternator were not producing enough
current and the battery was providing it. And the lamp did light often
while idling at a traffic light. Later cars I do not know if they have
such a lamp (the other lamp warned of low oil pressure), or it is lost
perhaps in the dozens of other warning lamps a car of 1980 had. But if
it exists, it does not light - perhaps as a consequence of switching
from DC dynamos to AC alternators.



So when having these discussions at the shop, the staff
could provide historical perspective, of why something
existed, or what the history was. For that battery
one, some of the staff had opened the hood on a customer
car, and found it coated with battery acid. They could
attest to the damage it caused. Even if you cleaned up the
car, the car would never be reliable again (that acid
has a way of getting into everything).

Yep...


Now, if someone could only explain why "daytime running light
relays" wear out :-) That's a regulatory difference between
Canada and the US. Our cars here, the (running) lights remain on during
daytime, for safety. Typically the rear running lights fail
to come on, and it's a five dollar relay that does it.

No "rear light on" during daytime here (Spain). I believe we should.

In Northern Europe that is mandatory. I've noticed here in Scotland most
cars since 2013 have them despite it not being mandatory. Curious, but it
makes sense as in winter it gets dark early.

All cars have a frontal daylight which is LED on most cars. Older cars
are mandated to light manually the "night" main lights instead.

Some
evenings, when I'm driving around, I'll count a half dozen
cars with DTR failures. (They have brake lights working,
but the running lights that help people space properly
when driving, would be off.) In the electrical panel,
the US car has the relay pulled, in Canada the relay
is inserted. (The presence of the relay is part of the
circuit design, so the car knows the difference.) And
the net effect, is one more failure mode in the electrical
system. (I've had one fail, and didn't notice until someone
pointed it out to me.)

Curious!

Your wiring is more complicated because you use the same red rear lights
for turning indicators. I don't know if it is the same bulb as the
"night" light or the "brake" lights. All Europe has a yellow-orange
separate light as turning indicator, then a bulb for "night" light, and
another for brake. These two (red) can be combined in a single bulb with
two filaments. So three functionalities, three filaments or bulbs.

Good point.

On Tue, 24 Sep 2019 17:13:33 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Mon, 23 Sep 2019 07:22:42 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Sat, 21 Sep 2019 12:14:39 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 21/09/2019 04.26, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Fri, 20 Sep 2019 22:34:04 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 20/09/2019 02.33, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 12:30:32 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:

I asked you a general question and you answer with a specific example.
:-(

Because all the problems, all the industry, can not be tackled all at
once. Start somewhere with something, and continue. A step at a time.

So, you have no general answer to the problems. You can only pick off
occasional examples.


And you refuse to solve a part of the problem just because it does not
solve it all. Instead of doing what we can NOW.

No. Like you I want to solve the problem but like you I recognise that
what is needed is a solution of broad aplicability which wind and
solar are not.

And what is your broadly applicable solution, then?

Right now I think its pebble bed reactors with thorium reactors not
too far away. That's if only we could start working on them again.

Untested, theoretical technology which is at best 20 years away. That's not
withstanding the public (and therefore government) unease with nuclear
power. Not really a solution; more of a hope. What do we do in the
meantime?

Neither are untested. The USA was working on the thorium reactor in
the early 70s but gave it up because it would not produce weapons
grade materials. The chinese are now well ahead with both pebble bed
and thorium reactors.

I'd say fusion is better long-term hope.

If it ever works sustainedly. Even then I think it will be further
away than the fission alternatives.

--


Eric Stevens

There are two classes of people. Those who divide people into
two classes and those who don't. I belong to the second class.

On 24 Sep 2019 14:48:11 GMT, Frank Slootweg
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Mon, 23 Sep 2019 10:15:05 -0400, Paul
wrote:

As I mentioned on another post, ethanol acts as additive with effects
that, if ethanol is removed, have to be produced by other chemicals they
would have to add. And apparently it doesn't have other bad effects on
exhaust, so ethanol is good to have :-)

It's not compatible with older engines.

It's been known to affect seals on some engines.
(That's what I was told at the dealership.)

True, all modern cars have had to be re-engineered to enable them to
survive ethanol if and when they encounter it.

See my response to Paul. "modern" as in as much as more than *twenty
three* years old!

My car is sixteen years old and by my definition is modern as meaning
not old.

[Agreed stuff deleted.]

--


Eric Stevens

There are two classes of people. Those who divide people into
two classes and those who don't. I belong to the second class.

On 2019-09-25 7:07 p.m., Eric Stevens wrote:
On Tue, 24 Sep 2019 17:13:33 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Mon, 23 Sep 2019 07:22:42 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Sat, 21 Sep 2019 12:14:39 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 21/09/2019 04.26, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Fri, 20 Sep 2019 22:34:04 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 20/09/2019 02.33, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 12:30:32 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:

I asked you a general question and you answer with a specific example.
:-(

Because all the problems, all the industry, can not be tackled all at
once. Start somewhere with something, and continue. A step at a time.

So, you have no general answer to the problems. You can only pick off
occasional examples.


And you refuse to solve a part of the problem just because it does not
solve it all. Instead of doing what we can NOW.

No. Like you I want to solve the problem but like you I recognise that
what is needed is a solution of broad aplicability which wind and
solar are not.

And what is your broadly applicable solution, then?

Right now I think its pebble bed reactors with thorium reactors not
too far away. That's if only we could start working on them again.

Untested, theoretical technology which is at best 20 years away. That's not
withstanding the public (and therefore government) unease with nuclear
power. Not really a solution; more of a hope. What do we do in the
meantime?

Neither are untested. The USA was working on the thorium reactor in
the early 70s but gave it up because it would not produce weapons
grade materials. The chinese are now well ahead with both pebble bed
and thorium reactors.

I'd say fusion is better long-term hope.

If it ever works sustainedly. Even then I think it will be further
away than the fission alternatives.


ITER is still 6 years away from a proposed startup, If it works!! and if
it stays together!!! And at what cost.

Rene

Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2019-09-25 7:07 p.m., Eric Stevens wrote:
On Tue, 24 Sep 2019 17:13:33 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Mon, 23 Sep 2019 07:22:42 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Sat, 21 Sep 2019 12:14:39 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 21/09/2019 04.26, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Fri, 20 Sep 2019 22:34:04 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 20/09/2019 02.33, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 12:30:32 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:

I asked you a general question and you answer with a specific
example.
:-(

Because all the problems, all the industry, can not be tackled
all at
once. Start somewhere with something, and continue. A step at a
time.

So, you have no general answer to the problems. You can only
pick off
occasional examples.


And you refuse to solve a part of the problem just because it
does not
solve it all. Instead of doing what we can NOW.

No. Like you I want to solve the problem but like you I recognise
that
what is needed is a solution of broad aplicability which wind and
solar are not.

And what is your broadly applicable solution, then?

Right now I think its pebble bed reactors with thorium reactors not
too far away. That's if only we could start working on them again.

Untested, theoretical technology which is at best 20 years away.
That's not
withstanding the public (and therefore government) unease with nuclear
power. Not really a solution; more of a hope. What do we do in the
meantime?

Neither are untested. The USA was working on the thorium reactor in
the early 70s but gave it up because it would not produce weapons
grade materials. The chinese are now well ahead with both pebble bed
and thorium reactors.

I'd say fusion is better long-term hope.

If it ever works sustainedly. Even then I think it will be further
away than the fission alternatives.


ITER is still 6 years away from a proposed startup, If it works!! and if
it stays together!!! And at what cost.

Rene

And that's why the work goes slowly. You don't
want to put a lot of effort into it, and just
burn the inside out of your gadget on the first
run.

I thought these things were going to be pulsed,
but it looks like they're aiming for ignition
and long hold times. That means you've got something
as hot as the sun, confined and not touching the
walls for periods of up to 100 seconds. Then the inside
of the gadget, needs cooling plates to extract the
energy, before the walls burn up.

There still seem to be pulsed projects. Since the last
time I looked at this one, it's getting bigger. I think
that's called "doubling down", where, if your first
project wasn't big enough to leave an impression,
you make it bigger.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...2030-1.3953187

And the Fire Chief wants to "inspect" that one,
before they fire it, because "it might explode".
Well, duh. Why else would they be doing this
research, if stuff couldn't explode ? What if the
project opens a Black Hole ? Does the Fire Chief
have the right extinguisher on the truck for that ?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...tiny-1.1121718

This is why we can't have nice things.

Canadians are going to be the last people on Pluto
at this rate...

Paul

"Paul" wrote

|
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...tiny-1.1121718
|
| This is why we can't have nice things.
|
| Canadians are going to be the last people on Pluto
| at this rate...
|

One wonders if they might have been able to build
a hydroelectric dam *and* the river to go with it for
less money.

Which brings up the one thing that might be scarier
than nuclear war and global warming: dumbass,
technophiliac scientists who don't consider the implications
of what they do, producing things like hybrids of
smallpox and being absurdly confident that there's
no risk.
I remember some kind of documentary on TV years ago
in which they said that the scientists at the Manhattan
Project were not sure they wouldn't blow up the earth
with their first test. But they did it anyway, after warning
the governor of New Mexico to take his family and drive out
of state. Just in case they incinerated NM but didn't blow
up the Earth, the governor would come in handy to manage
the resulting disaster.
The combination of stupidity and arrogance is frightening.
What sci-fi disaster plot might they be working on right now?
Windmills, by contrast, are not "sexy". Just practical.

Mayayana wrote:
"Paul" wrote

|
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...tiny-1.1121718
|
| This is why we can't have nice things.
|
| Canadians are going to be the last people on Pluto
| at this rate...
|

One wonders if they might have been able to build
a hydroelectric dam *and* the river to go with it for
less money.

Which brings up the one thing that might be scarier
than nuclear war and global warming: dumbass,
technophiliac scientists who don't consider the implications
of what they do, producing things like hybrids of
smallpox and being absurdly confident that there's
no risk.
I remember some kind of documentary on TV years ago
in which they said that the scientists at the Manhattan
Project were not sure they wouldn't blow up the earth
with their first test. But they did it anyway, after warning
the governor of New Mexico to take his family and drive out
of state. Just in case they incinerated NM but didn't blow
up the Earth, the governor would come in handy to manage
the resulting disaster.
The combination of stupidity and arrogance is frightening.
What sci-fi disaster plot might they be working on right now?
Windmills, by contrast, are not "sexy". Just practical.


Well, we don't want to be over-dramatic.

Certainly, in very immature areas of work, our reach
outstretched our grasp. There were the people drinking
radium cough syrup. The people XRaying their feet at
the shoe store. You can thank these people and times,
for the existence of the FDA.

When coal oil extractions were being done a hundred
years ago, people were "sniffing" and especially
"tasting" carcinogens. A number of them died, without
knowing exactly what killed them. What we learned from
this, is a set of rules for Chem 100 students to keep
them safe. That's an example, where some careless technique
with safer materials, was wiped out when actual dangerous
materials were discovered, and nobody knew how to handle them.

For nuclear explosions, there was a theory at one time
that "the atmosphere could catch fire". Now, maybe I
haven't precisely captured the concern there, as the
atmospheric constituents aren't particularly fuel-heavy.
And atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons got to the
50 megaton level, without anything catching fire as predicted.

You can remove the gaseous shell from around the Earth.
You can remove all the water. But it takes a collision
with a relatively large "rock" to do it. The rock would
unleash the equivalent power of *millions* of nuclear
weapons.

On the Large Hadron Collider, a concern was that a Black
Hole might form. But there was also a theory that small
Black Holes "evaporate" in a fraction of a second - they're
not around for very long at all.

Creating fusion inside a small metallic chamber, is a small
cross-section of what happens in the Sun. And if you make
a mistake, all it does is "ruin your gadget" and prevent
you from doing a second run with it. There isn't a risk of
a chain reaction, because the conditions for it are not present.
Even if you had a hundred tons of the fuel used by the
device sitting next to it, the material is neither "compressed"
nor "heated" to the correct temperature for fusion ignition.
This is what makes the technology safe, even in its present
crude state of understanding.

Paul

On Wed, 25 Sep 2019 19:56:53 -0500, Rene Lamontagne
wrote:

On 2019-09-25 7:07 p.m., Eric Stevens wrote:
On Tue, 24 Sep 2019 17:13:33 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Mon, 23 Sep 2019 07:22:42 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Sat, 21 Sep 2019 12:14:39 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 21/09/2019 04.26, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Fri, 20 Sep 2019 22:34:04 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 20/09/2019 02.33, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 12:30:32 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:

I asked you a general question and you answer with a specific example.
:-(

Because all the problems, all the industry, can not be tackled all at
once. Start somewhere with something, and continue. A step at a time.

So, you have no general answer to the problems. You can only pick off
occasional examples.


And you refuse to solve a part of the problem just because it does not
solve it all. Instead of doing what we can NOW.

No. Like you I want to solve the problem but like you I recognise that
what is needed is a solution of broad aplicability which wind and
solar are not.

And what is your broadly applicable solution, then?

Right now I think its pebble bed reactors with thorium reactors not
too far away. That's if only we could start working on them again.

Untested, theoretical technology which is at best 20 years away. That's not
withstanding the public (and therefore government) unease with nuclear
power. Not really a solution; more of a hope. What do we do in the
meantime?

Neither are untested. The USA was working on the thorium reactor in
the early 70s but gave it up because it would not produce weapons
grade materials. The chinese are now well ahead with both pebble bed
and thorium reactors.

I'd say fusion is better long-term hope.

If it ever works sustainedly. Even then I think it will be further
away than the fission alternatives.


ITER is still 6 years away from a proposed startup, If it works!! and if
it stays together!!! And at what cost.

That's what I mean.

--


Eric Stevens

There are two classes of people. Those who divide people into
two classes and those who don't. I belong to the second class.

On Wed, 25 Sep 2019 22:57:13 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote:

"Paul" wrote

|
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...tiny-1.1121718
|
| This is why we can't have nice things.
|
| Canadians are going to be the last people on Pluto
| at this rate...
|

One wonders if they might have been able to build
a hydroelectric dam *and* the river to go with it for
less money.

Which brings up the one thing that might be scarier
than nuclear war and global warming: dumbass,
technophiliac scientists who don't consider the implications
of what they do, producing things like hybrids of
smallpox and being absurdly confident that there's
no risk.
I remember some kind of documentary on TV years ago
in which they said that the scientists at the Manhattan
Project were not sure they wouldn't blow up the earth
with their first test. But they did it anyway, after warning
the governor of New Mexico to take his family and drive out
of state. Just in case they incinerated NM but didn't blow
up the Earth, the governor would come in handy to manage
the resulting disaster.
The combination of stupidity and arrogance is frightening.
What sci-fi disaster plot might they be working on right now?
Windmills, by contrast, are not "sexy". Just practical.

That's agross exageration of what actually happened. The possibility
was raised - and dealt with.

--


Eric Stevens

There are two classes of people. Those who divide people into
two classes and those who don't. I belong to the second class.

On Thu, 26 Sep 2019 01:48:12 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Mayayana wrote:
"Paul" wrote

|
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...tiny-1.1121718
|
| This is why we can't have nice things.
|
| Canadians are going to be the last people on Pluto
| at this rate...
|

One wonders if they might have been able to build
a hydroelectric dam *and* the river to go with it for
less money.

Which brings up the one thing that might be scarier
than nuclear war and global warming: dumbass,
technophiliac scientists who don't consider the implications
of what they do, producing things like hybrids of
smallpox and being absurdly confident that there's
no risk.
I remember some kind of documentary on TV years ago
in which they said that the scientists at the Manhattan
Project were not sure they wouldn't blow up the earth
with their first test. But they did it anyway, after warning
the governor of New Mexico to take his family and drive out
of state. Just in case they incinerated NM but didn't blow
up the Earth, the governor would come in handy to manage
the resulting disaster.
The combination of stupidity and arrogance is frightening.
What sci-fi disaster plot might they be working on right now?
Windmills, by contrast, are not "sexy". Just practical.


Well, we don't want to be over-dramatic.

Certainly, in very immature areas of work, our reach
outstretched our grasp. There were the people drinking
radium cough syrup. The people XRaying their feet at
the shoe store. You can thank these people and times,
for the existence of the FDA.

When coal oil extractions were being done a hundred
years ago, people were "sniffing" and especially
"tasting" carcinogens. A number of them died, without
knowing exactly what killed them. What we learned from
this, is a set of rules for Chem 100 students to keep
them safe. That's an example, where some careless technique
with safer materials, was wiped out when actual dangerous
materials were discovered, and nobody knew how to handle them.

For nuclear explosions, there was a theory at one time
that "the atmosphere could catch fire". Now, maybe I
haven't precisely captured the concern there, as the
atmospheric constituents aren't particularly fuel-heavy.
And atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons got to the
50 megaton level, without anything catching fire as predicted.

You can remove the gaseous shell from around the Earth.
You can remove all the water. But it takes a collision
with a relatively large "rock" to do it. The rock would
unleash the equivalent power of *millions* of nuclear
weapons.

On the Large Hadron Collider, a concern was that a Black
Hole might form. But there was also a theory that small
Black Holes "evaporate" in a fraction of a second - they're
not around for very long at all.

Creating fusion inside a small metallic chamber, is a small
cross-section of what happens in the Sun. And if you make
a mistake, all it does is "ruin your gadget" and prevent
you from doing a second run with it. There isn't a risk of
a chain reaction, because the conditions for it are not present.
Even if you had a hundred tons of the fuel used by the
device sitting next to it, the material is neither "compressed"
nor "heated" to the correct temperature for fusion ignition.
This is what makes the technology safe, even in its present
crude state of understanding.

But then there will still be a hell of radioactive scrap, some of
which will have been vapourised.

--


Eric Stevens

There are two classes of people. Those who divide people into
two classes and those who don't. I belong to the second class.

"Paul" wrote

| For nuclear explosions, there was a theory at one time
| that "the atmosphere could catch fire". Now, maybe I
| haven't precisely captured the concern there, as the
| atmospheric constituents aren't particularly fuel-heavy.
| And atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons got to the
| 50 megaton level, without anything catching fire as predicted.
|
| You can remove the gaseous shell from around the Earth.
| You can remove all the water. But it takes a collision
| with a relatively large "rock" to do it. The rock would
| unleash the equivalent power of *millions* of nuclear
| weapons.
|

I thought they believed they were risking blowing
up the Earth and they only thought they were risking
burning it to a crisp? Silly me.

For me the shocking part was that they proceeded
with such doubts. There's always been technophilia.
I remember once seeing an electricity vest advertised
in an old catalog that was thought to cure all ills. The
same thing happened with the "magic" of radioactivity.
But that's different. It's not the scientists themselves,
and it's not consciously risking life on Earth.

Mayayana wrote:
"Paul" wrote

| For nuclear explosions, there was a theory at one time
| that "the atmosphere could catch fire". Now, maybe I
| haven't precisely captured the concern there, as the
| atmospheric constituents aren't particularly fuel-heavy.
| And atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons got to the
| 50 megaton level, without anything catching fire as predicted.
|
| You can remove the gaseous shell from around the Earth.
| You can remove all the water. But it takes a collision
| with a relatively large "rock" to do it. The rock would
| unleash the equivalent power of *millions* of nuclear
| weapons.
|

I thought they believed they were risking blowing
up the Earth and they only thought they were risking
burning it to a crisp? Silly me.

For me the shocking part was that they proceeded
with such doubts. There's always been technophilia.
I remember once seeing an electricity vest advertised
in an old catalog that was thought to cure all ills. The
same thing happened with the "magic" of radioactivity.
But that's different. It's not the scientists themselves,
and it's not consciously risking life on Earth.



OK, so let's dig up a few quotes. It was Edward Teller who came up
with this notion. That much I remember, and it gives me a search term.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com...-end-of-earth/

"Horgan: I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the
story of Teller's suggestion that the atomic bomb might ignite
the atmosphere around the Earth.

Bethe: It is such absolute nonsense [laughter], and the public
has been interested in it… And possibly it would be good to kill
it once more. So one day at Berkeley -- we were a very small group,
maybe eight physicists or so -- one day Teller came to the office
and said, "Well, what would happen to the air if an atomic bomb
were exploded in the air?" The original idea about the hydrogen
bomb was that one would explode an atomic bomb and then simply
the heat from the atomic bomb would ignite a large vessel of deuterium…
and make it react. So Teller said, "Well, how about the air?
There's nitrogen in the air, and you can have a nuclear reaction
in which two nitrogen nuclei collide and become oxygen plus carbon,
and in this process you set free a lot of energy.
Couldn't that happen?" And that caused great excitement.
"

So that's not ignition, it's transmutation. As likely to happen
as making Gold out of inferior materials.

"(The Impossibility of) Lighting Atmospheric Fire"

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/chung1/

"Bethe notes that even a 1 MeV temperature is equivalent to
11 billion Kelvin, whereas fission and fusion weapons only
produce temperatures "usually of the order of a hundred million degrees,"
with even one billion degrees being an inconceivable temperature.
Thus, if Bethe's temperatures are correct, the safety factor
for any current nuclear weapon should far exceed even 1000."

And the reasons are precisely the same ones that make
fusion so hard to do. It takes temperature and pressure,
and some of the mechanisms require symmetric application
(like the ITER lasers) to achieve a tiny environment
for the reaction to take place. AFAIK, the ITER equivalent
temperature is 100 million degrees (but only where the
lasers meet, at the target).

Still, these ideas capture the public imagination, which is
why the ideas live on.

The thing is, in a fusion weapon, the conditions *inside*
the weapon are right for fusion to occur. But immediately
*outside* the weapon, the conditions are "way off". It's
"cold as hell" outside the weapon, and that's why nothing
outside the weapon is part of the reaction. And to make the
conditions just right inside the weapon is tricky - it's
harder to make good fusion weapons than fission ones.

Paul

"Eric Stevens" wrote

| I remember some kind of documentary on TV years ago
| in which they said that the scientists at the Manhattan
| Project were not sure they wouldn't blow up the earth
| with their first test. But they did it anyway, after warning
| the governor of New Mexico to take his family and drive out
| of state. Just in case they incinerated NM but didn't blow
| up the Earth, the governor would come in handy to manage
| the resulting disaster.
| The combination of stupidity and arrogance is frightening.
| What sci-fi disaster plot might they be working on right now?
| Windmills, by contrast, are not "sexy". Just practical.
|
| That's agross exageration of what actually happened. The possibility
| was raised - and dealt with.
|

Dealt with? Of course you didn't provide any links or
explanation for that conclusion.

They didn't know what would happen, so there
was nothing to "deal with" except to not create the explosion.
They were taking bets on how powerful it might be. One
scientist was sharing his suntan lotion for protection...
And afterward many were horrified at what they'd done.

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhatt...45/trinity.htm

Smallpox? There has been talk of experiments and some
virus has been saved for that purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallp...on_controversy

This one's especially scary:
https://www.nti.org/gsn/article/who-...rism-research/

The list goes on and on. Much of it is simply naivety and
immaturity on the part of scientists who only care about success.
The so-called "killer bees", for example, which are now in
the southern US, originated from the mating between Brazilian
bees and 12 hives of African bees that had been imported
for research. Somehow they managed to not consider the idea
that there might be problems. Who gave them that right?

When I was a kid we used to ride our bicycles behind the
"bug truck" because it released a fun cloud of smoke. DDT.
You would have been one of the scientists complaining about
silly "longhairs" and Rachel Carson who warning against DDT.

Then there are also power issues. For example, glyphosate,
which Monsanto/Bayer has tried to shield from suspicion for
years. People use it for things as idiotic as killing weeds
in their driveway. Now the lawsuits are starting over
cancer. Yet it's used on wheat crop for no reason but to
dry the wheat more quickly after it's harvested. Non-
organic wheat is generally doused with glyphosate just
before harvesting! Monsanto was a classic case of gov't
revolving door. For many years that protected them. They
had too many powerful, former politicians working for them.

Time and again, ostriches and technophiles refuse to
consider risks, or even good science. Caution is not
anti-science. It's the essence of science. Technophilia
such as yours, on the other hand, is an emotional
reaction. Technology is your god and it's a benevolent
god. That makes you biased toward slick, futuristic
solutions.

So now you're trying to make the case that only
nuclear power is relevant going forward, while wind and solar
are "not broadly applicable" and are "advocated by people who
don't understand the problem". Yet I linked to sites a few
days ago indicating that wind farms planned now will eventually
be major factors all along the US east coast. One off the
coast of Massachusetts is expected to provide about 30%
of the state's energy needs, more than replacing nuclear,
and it wouldn't need to be "decommissioned" after 30 years.
Currently the Feds are blocking it. I don't know the details,
but I'm guessing that's a favor asked by the oil
companies of the Trump people.

https://www.wbur.org/earthwhile/2019...-wind-in-doubt

Paul provided a quote of 60% of Canadian energy being provided
by hydroelectric. Coastal areas could also use tidal generators.
Those are not fringe sources. More to the point, they're non-polluting,
non-exhausting sources. 2,000 years from now we'll still only need
maintenance of windmills and tidal generators.