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I can't find anything easily linkable but the soviets used atomic weapons to put out oil well blowouts in the 60s.
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Apr 13, 2016 13:57
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Minarchist posted:Fur-lined self contained NBC suits Atomic Earth Blaster posted:\
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Apr 13, 2016 17:07
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Tom Swift, the world's most colossal blundering genius. You would think after the third or fourth time he invented something that went wildly out of control or exploded something they would lock him up, but nope. After this doomed adventure he immediately goes into space.
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Apr 13, 2016 17:34
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Kwyndig posted:Tom Swift, the world's most colossal blundering genius. You would think after the third or fourth time he invented something that went wildly out of control or exploded something they would lock him up, but nope. After this doomed adventure he immediately goes into space. Are we sure he wasn't encouraged to go to space to get him the hell away from earth?
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Apr 13, 2016 17:36
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Tom Swift and His Ultrasonic Cycloplane posted:
Kwyndig posted:Tom Swift, the world's most colossal blundering genius. You would think after the third or fourth time he invented something that went wildly out of control or exploded something they would lock him up, but nope. After this doomed adventure he immediately goes into space. Truer words were never spoken.
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Apr 13, 2016 18:11
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Kwyndig posted:Tom Swift, the world's most colossal blundering genius. You would think after the third or fourth time he invented something that went wildly out of control or exploded something they would lock him up, but nope. After this doomed adventure he immediately goes into space. Interpret how you will, but Tom Swift was also indirectly responsible for the naming convention on the TASER (Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle). 
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Apr 13, 2016 19:47
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Computer viking posted:Not surprisingly, the USSR also had a program for peaceful use of nukes; the best-known end result is probably Lake Chagan. I did appreciate the plans in the sixties which involved a chain of nukes to excavate a second Panama canal but across Nicaragua, or remove all those pesky mountain ranges in the Mojave. Operation Plowshare AKA Operation Put A Nuke On It.
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Apr 13, 2016 23:16
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darkwasthenight posted:I did appreciate the plans in the sixties which involved a chain of nukes to excavate a second Panama canal but across Nicaragua, or remove all those pesky mountain ranges in the Mojave. Operation Plowshare AKA Operation Put A Nuke On It. Operation: Keep Nuking the poo poo out of Nevada. I like this bit about making some propane too radioactive to use. Then issuing permits closer and closer to the site. quote:Three 30 kiloton detonations took place simultaneously at depths of 1,758, 1,875, and 2,015 meters. If it had been successful, plans called for the use of hundreds of specialized nuclear explosives in the western Rockies gas fields. The previous two tests had indicated that the produced natural gas would be too radioactive for safe use; the Rio Blanco test found that the three blast cavities had not connected as hoped, and the resulting gas still contained unacceptable levels of radionuclides.
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Apr 14, 2016 04:48
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The gas was too radioactive to sell forty‐three years ago, but we sure it hasn’t decayed enough by now?
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Apr 14, 2016 04:54
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Platystemon posted:The gas was too radioactive to sell forty‐three years ago, but we sure it hasn’t decayed enough by now? Yeah, I'm not sure what would be able to contaminate a gas. Anything like radon would have long since decayed to solids. Perhaps the neutron flux created a bunch of C-14 in the gas or something. That's the only thing I can think of that would make a difference, but even so carbon-14 naturally forms from cosmic rays colliding with nitrogen-14 atoms. Getting C-12 to absorb 2 neutrons would be pretty tough, and C-13 is rare enough it shouldn't matter even if it all absorbs one. I'd really like to know what it was contaminated with, and what the half-lives of the nuclides involved are. I'm having a hard time understanding why anyone should be concerned about it now. Maybe it's as simple as the unfissioned uranium still giving off radon, which gets into the gas in small amounts. Now I'm curious. Maybe there isn't any hazard at all and it's just ATOMZ fears. Deteriorata has a new favorite as of 05:10 on Apr 14, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 05:06
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The isotopes of concern were: Tritium: 12.3 yr Argon: 35 d Krypton 85: 10.8 yr As well as “small amounts of” Radon 222: 3.8 d Cæsium 137: 30.2 yr Strontium 90: 28.8 yr I haven’t found the actual quantities, though, from the original or more recent tests, just tests from nearby well that show that the radioisotopes haven’t spread.
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Apr 14, 2016 05:17
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Platystemon posted:The isotopes of concern were: Of those, only the Kr-85 would be a possible problem because it's a serious beta emitter with gamma rays, so its amount would indeed matter. Tritium is nothing, as it's a weak beta emitter that wouldn't cause any damage at almost any level, and after 30 years would be 1/8 of nothing. The Cs and Sr are metals that would quickly react with something and drop out of the gas phase. I'm not sure how you get them in the gas phase to begin with. So it looks like the only thing to worry about is the Kr-85. If that's only present in small quantities (and it's had three half-lives to help in that), then maybe there won't be much problem.
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Apr 14, 2016 05:37
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Found it, 85Kr had a peak of 380 pCi/ml (STP)
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Apr 14, 2016 05:58
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Keiya posted:Yeah but I can't really do that in my back yard, and something tells me getting the guys down at UW to light some faygo on fire for shiggles would be hard. If you're talking about University of Washington, email the guys in the Physics Lecture Demo lab. Their entire job is to make and maintain UW's collection of toys that professors use to demonstrate physics to their students. They love blowing poo poo up for fun. If that doesn't work, email the lady that does the same thing for the chemistry lab - I asked her about burning radioactive materials for pretty colors and she got a really cute manic gleam in her eye.
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Apr 15, 2016 01:23
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Bhodi posted:Any sufficiently advanced propulsion system is also a weapons system. Yuri Milner agrees. Which is why (aside from the economics of putting a 100 GW laser into orbit) he was recently quoted as saying: quote:“People who talk about lasers in space don’t think about policy issues, and they don’t think about cost,” he said. “Nobody will allow you to build something that you can point in all different directions, as you would be able to in space. This is a very big laser. It can do quite a bit of damage.” On Earth, it could only point in certain directions, and would be much easier for other governments to inspect. http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/yuri-milner-zuckerberg-starshot-interstellar-centauri/477669/
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Apr 15, 2016 02:35
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Pile of Kittens posted:If you're talking about University of Washington, email the guys in the Physics Lecture Demo lab. Their entire job is to make and maintain UW's collection of toys that professors use to demonstrate physics to their students. They love blowing poo poo up for fun. If that doesn't work, email the lady that does the same thing for the chemistry lab - I asked her about burning radioactive materials for pretty colors and she got a really cute manic gleam in her eye. University of Wisconsin, sorry. They probably have something similar, honestly...
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Apr 15, 2016 05:44
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I don't think there was any lecture demo lab, but when I was studying chem, I spent many days in the students lab doing assignments such as syntheses and analyses. During my master's (Science communication) I was making a physics/chem/bio class for primary schoolers. Getting some physics stuff (magnets, some simple optics stuff) for the demo was easy. Just go to the physics lab and ask for it. Chemistry was another story. All I needed from univ were some petri dishes with growth medium (so the kids could test which place in their school had the most bacteria). It's totally safe stuff, so I thought I'd go to the students laboratory supplies desk and ask for it. They told me no, nothing may leave the building, everything has to be accounted for. In the end I just went to a biochem prof in whose lab I had done some research before. He said: "I don't mind, as long as you make and pour the growth medium yourself." Cool. I asked him how much that would cost, because the Science communication teacher would cover expenses, he said "sorting that out would take enough of my time that it would cost the university more money than the value of those few dishes. Just take it already." I still think it's strange I had to go through hoops like that to get stuff for a simple primary school demo. I am not sure, but I think university teachers just keep their own stock of demo material in their own research lab. I mean, every chem teacher is a researcher as well.
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Apr 15, 2016 06:36
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Pile of Kittens posted:If you're talking about University of Washington, email the guys in the Physics Lecture Demo lab. Their entire job is to make and maintain UW's collection of toys that professors use to demonstrate physics to their students. They love blowing poo poo up for fun. If that doesn't work, email the lady that does the same thing for the chemistry lab - I asked her about burning radioactive materials for pretty colors and she got a really cute manic gleam in her eye. there's people who should be given a mythbusters-style destruction show
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Apr 15, 2016 17:23
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 quote:Explosives disguised to look like coal. They were thrown onto coal piles at railway stations, then they got into a locomotive furnace and incapacitated it. The idea actually dates back to the Civil War.
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Apr 16, 2016 07:55
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They did the same thing in WWII with dead rats. You kill a rat, gut it, fill it with RDX and sew it back up. Any stoker on a train who sees a dead rat in the coal skip will pitch it straight in the furnace. Boom.
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Apr 16, 2016 08:00
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This example was found in a Nazi saboteur cache unearthed in Latvia. On preview: SA’s forum software hates Cyrillic URLs, so here it is in plain text for copy & paste: http://копанина.рф/publ/5-1-0-558 Wikipedia pages on coal torpedoes, explosive rats Platystemon has a new favorite as of 12:36 on Apr 16, 2016 |
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Apr 16, 2016 08:10
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Platystemon posted:This example was found in a Nazi saboteur cache unearthed in Latvia. I was about to say, since when are non-ASCII URLs a thing, looked it up, and holy poo poo there's a bunch of internationalized TLDs now, including .中国 (China), .台灣 (Taiwan), and .香港 (Hong Kong). And Arabic: السعودية ,.مصر. and امارات. for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, respectively.
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Apr 16, 2016 12:11
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Technically they’re still encoded as ASCII at some level, which just gave me the idea to go back and fix the link by pre‐coding it that way so vBulletin doesn’t choke on it. It’s kind of a dirty hack, but better than telling the rest of the world to get hosed. Browsers sometimes display the underlying punycode for security reasons.
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Apr 16, 2016 12:52
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I like that one url-shortening service that registered the domain that is just an arrow.
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Apr 16, 2016 18:40
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Here's a thing that's interesting to me that I've never got an explanation for. Once back in the deep dark days of 1998, I was doing a series of experimental casting projects in college. I was trying different resin/hardener ratios and comparing how it affected curing time when using silicone molds. Part of this project (personal project, not assigned) included different tints for the resin. I was using FastCast urethane casting resin/hardener. Here's the crazy thing, I used some expired, very old, powdered dye and stirred it into the resin. Once I added the hardener, it foamed to 4 times it's size and got so hot I had to tear my gloves off. My hands were burning badly through the gloves within two seconds. I'm lucky that I always wore double gloves. It saved my hands. It was smoking as I threw it in the trash can. It was nearly at ignition when it hit the garbage. It started melting the other garbage in the can so I grabbed a large container that happened to be in the room and used it to pour water on foaming mess until it cooled off. I knew that the fire extinguisher would do nothing as it was an aggressive exo-thermic reaction that CO2 wouldn't affect. From my "exciting" experience, I then developed a weird technique, by using (less quantity) expired dye to create a foam texture in a silicone mold. It meant I could use about 1/3 the normal amount of resin and it was just as strong a finished product. It created an awesome texture and saved you a lot of resin. My question is to any molding and casting scholars is: WTF? This technique required powdered dyes that were at least 20 years old. The new ones never had any effect. My crazy, foaming, fire powered, death resin, was only possible if I used any of the ancient powders. They had no label so I can't tell you what was in them. Just left overs in the fire cabinet from a bygone era. I'd love to know what caused this reaction.
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Apr 18, 2016 03:28
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mostlygray posted:I'd love to know what caused this reaction. Something hideously toxic, I'm sure.
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Apr 18, 2016 03:36
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mostlygray posted:Here's a thing that's interesting to me that I've never got an explanation for. My first guess would be simply moisture. Urethane resins are incredibly sensitive to moisture, so the old dye had probably absorbed some water - or contained something that produced water when mixed with the urethane.
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Apr 18, 2016 03:47
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mostlygray posted:My question is to any molding and casting scholars is: WTF? This technique required powdered dyes that were at least 20 years old. The new ones never had any effect. My crazy, foaming, fire powered, death resin, was only possible if I used any of the ancient powders. They had no label so I can't tell you what was in them. Just left overs in the fire cabinet from a bygone era. My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply, and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught. About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck.
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Apr 18, 2016 03:59
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In reference to that idea to send a probe to Alpha Centauri via laser: One of the biggest problems that I could see resulting from that experiment would be sending/receiving data. The amount of bits (as in data) you can get a second from a platform that is well-beyond Pluto is abysmally low - for example, New Horizons, in it's Jupiter flyby managed to send roughly 38 kb/s, not bad for an object zipping through space several hundred million kilometers from Earth. Many goons were still surfing the internet at that speed back in the early 2000s. But as New Horizons goes further, and further out, the byte send rate is pathetically small - right now, New Horizons is broadcasting at roughly 2 kb/s, meaning that all the data from the Pluto flyby won't have finished broadcasting by December 2016. Extrapolate this further and you can see one of the huge, huge issues with an Alpha Centauri mission. Even if we could get a probe in the relative vicinity of the Proxima Centauri, and even get it within close enough distance of an exo-planet to actually take good resolution pictures (a feat which is actually more improbable than taking a jump shot in New York and landing it in a basket in Beijing), actually getting that data back, in a usable format would be unbelievably unlikely. We're talking bits/hour or bits/day for years, not accounting for any unforeseen events in transit (like our ideas about the make up of the Suns magnetic field being slightly incorrect).
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Apr 18, 2016 05:34
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I wonder how much of that slowdown is due to the protocol used. That might be an important part of the research for further and further exploration.
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Apr 18, 2016 06:11
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A White Guy posted:In reference to that idea to send a probe to Alpha Centauri via laser: Yeah, but with that many probes you can just torrent the data back.
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Apr 18, 2016 07:58
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Stagger a poo poo-ton of probes so they'll be at a distance from one another that allows them to relay the data back in a timely fashion.
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Apr 18, 2016 08:31
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TheRagamuffin posted:I wonder how much of that slowdown is due to the protocol used. That might be an important part of the research for further and further exploration. Well there's a lot of problems when you get far enough out, there's signal attenuation, there's power loss from your RTG elements decaying (because you can't use solar), there's interference from the solar wind, there's whatever the hell is out past the heliopause. In an ideal world, NASA would be able to slap several redundant power supplies on a probe so it would have enough juice to give us a nice strong high bandwidth signal until end of lifetime. Short of inventing new data compression tools there's not a lot left on the software side to fix that can overcome the complex hardware issues. You can't mount a nice high power laser on a space probe because it would be too heavy and maybe your neighbors might think you're going to use it for less peaceful purposes, so you're stuck with radio and maybe microwave.
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Apr 18, 2016 08:36
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Minarchist posted:My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply, and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught. About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck. Respect. (insert fist bump)
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Apr 18, 2016 08:46
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A White Guy posted:Even if we could get a probe in the relative vicinity of the Proxima Centauri, and even get it within close enough distance of an exo-planet to actually take good resolution pictures (a feat which is actually more improbable than taking a jump shot in New York and landing it in a basket in Beijing), actually getting that data back, in a usable format would be unbelievably unlikely. That is one reason why nobody is suggesting trying to take high resolution pictures with these things. Sending data as trickle of bits/day for years isn't a problem, it's the goal of the mission. It's the reason why they're proposing such tiny, redundant probes that will probably be more similar to thermal diodes on a motherboard than to New Horizons. e: packetmantis posted:Stagger a poo poo-ton of probes so they'll be at a distance from one another that allows them to relay the data back in a timely fashion. Syd Midnight has a new favorite as of 09:07 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 09:04
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packetmantis posted:Stagger a poo poo-ton of probes so they'll be at a distance from one another that allows them to relay the data back in a timely fashion. Ah, the Vint Cerf method.
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Apr 18, 2016 09:44
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Minarchist posted:My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply, and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught. About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck. i love this thread. 
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Apr 18, 2016 13:25
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packetmantis posted:Stagger a poo poo-ton of probes so they'll be at a distance from one another that allows them to relay the data back in a timely fashion. How would you keep them warm and powered in interstellar space? I've been imagining these things basically going cold and dormant until they get close enough to a star to wake up. Even if most of the mass of the probe were plutonium I don't think it would be enough considering how small they have to be.
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Apr 18, 2016 15:11
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Could they fall asleep as they leave solar power range then wake up when they get close enough to power back up?
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Apr 18, 2016 15:18
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DemeaninDemon posted:Could they fall asleep as they leave solar power range then wake up when they get close enough to power back up? You could probably intermittently warm them up using a shutdown-wake up sequence. But, these probes would be passing through interstellar space, which is (usually) not that far above absolute zero. You absolutely couldn't put thrusters on them - the fuel would need to be heated constantly, or else it would freeze solid. Basically, all of your power would need to be drawn from RCGs, and most of its power would be used in keeping the electronics in the spacecraft from getting too cold. What would really suck for a mission control would be sitting at their panels, waiting for telemetry from almost 4 years ago to come through. And if it didn't warm up after 20 years in interstellar space,  . Not a drat thing they could do about it. Another piece of humanities junk flying into the cosmos, forever.
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Apr 18, 2016 16:29
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