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ITAR is loving moronic. The government will come knocking at your door even if you're doing something as simple as rolling your own GPS receiver with no intention to export it and based entirely on academic materials. God forbid it operates both above a given altitude and above a given speed  That said, I understand why ITAR is needed, it's just that like most government regulations, its incredibly byzantine sometimes as the above few examples indicated. Hadn't heard about the UK and their Chinooks, that's pretty  InitialDave posted:We couldn't move one of our CNC machines during our latest shop-floor reorganisation without them sending out an agent to reset it after we did so. Apparently they had an issue where someone sold a machine on to a company in Iran, and it ended up being used to make things people would rather Iranians didn't make, leading to them getting a massive bollocking, and the machines being set so that breaking them down to move them locks out all the control software until they reset it. Totally buy this, that's a pretty interesting story. They probably didn't consider (or more likely, chose to ignore) that the customer they are selling to is a front for someone else, or they chose to ignore the used market whatsoever.
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Dec 22, 2012 22:45
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StandardVC10 posted:Interesting that they mention Asiana. As far as I know they still have only the one 767-300F. I've always wondered about single-plane subfleets in larger airlines (another example: Icelandair's TF-FIX, their only 757-300 amidst 757-200s.) It seems like it would be a hard thing to schedule around. But I'm really unfamiliar with how airlines schedule their fleets. The name or definition of an airframe model is pretty subjective to what you're interested in. Some people just care that it's a 767, others only care what engines are on it. The uniqueness can be specific down to the customer or even tail. Looking further into it, the uniqueness of the UPS 767 appears to be mostly internal; just a really large order. I only hear 3rd hand info about airline operations, but you can imagine commonality is a huge priority. The infrastructure required to operate an airframe is significant; maintenance personal/training, documentation, spares, etc. To justify another set of that would require a huge offset in cost (fuel, reliability, range/payload). I'm sure every airline has an army of accountants running the numbers on these trade offs.
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Dec 22, 2012 22:51
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Phanatic posted:Then the MoD calls Boeing up and says "Hey, guys, can we have the source code for the FCS and such? We need that to be able to certify these things as airworthy by our own internal regulatory process." Boeing says "Um...well, here's the thing. Not only was it not in the contract that you'd receive source code, it's not our source code, it's our supplier's source code. And not only is it our supplier's source code, they can't even give it to you because of ITAR. Yes, that's right, you heard us, you can take delivery of an entire helicopter but you can't take delivery of the source code on which its systems operate. No, this doesn't make sense to us, either." See also, Henry Hyde and the F-35. He almost singlehandedly derailed the entire F-35 program by doing his Senatorial thing and putting a hold on all the efforts to share the source code with the U.K.
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Dec 23, 2012 02:41
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Phanatic posted:The whims of Congress. ITAR is loving retarded. For a few years strong encryption was on the list as a munition, so you couldn't even send a floppy disc containing a copy of PGP overseas without risking prosecution. It's one of those things where the law's so labyrinthine and arbitrary that is is for all intents and purposes impossible to comply with it, everybody's probably in violation to some extent, and everyone occasionally gets charged with violating it. What blows my mind about the PGP situation is that only the software was considered a munition, the source code printed on paper was not. So to export the first version of PGP outside the US they printed the source code out, mailed the source code hard copies in chunks to various people in Europe who OCR'd it back in, rebuilt it, and put it up for general international distribution.
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Dec 23, 2012 03:24
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ehnus posted:What blows my mind about the PGP situation is that only the software was considered a munition, the source code printed on paper was not. So to export the first version of PGP outside the US they printed the source code out, mailed the source code hard copies in chunks to various people in Europe who OCR'd it back in, rebuilt it, and put it up for general international distribution. I remember that.. and how everything that used SSLeay had to do so as an external package to be linked to. I honestly hadn't considered the non-software ramifications until I stumbled upon this thread..
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Dec 24, 2012 01:43
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In the issue after the report on the first Voyage of the Nautilus, 1950s Life has a speculative report on the next step in aviation: the atomic plane. Dreamed up as a plausible atomic plane using unclassified info, it has some, uh, interesting characteristic. For one, it has a removable atomic heart (which is what the door on top of the fuselage is for.) Because this spews lots of radiation (even by 1950s standards) everywhere, this requires some craftiness when refueling.  The whole airplane has to be dragged into a specially constructed hanger/hot room, where the reactor has to be removed by remote control, and placed in a pool. Meanwhile, the nose is on the other side of several feet of lead and concrete, and the squidgy organic bits can deplane in relative safety. The actual plane itself would have to have a 'massive' amount of shielding, which is just the thing aeronautical engineers like to hear. The people who made this design study still figured this would not be enough to protect the crew against significant radiation exposure, and figured that training flights would be kept to a minimum, and restricted to low power at that. The crew would undertake one actual mission on a full power profile - and then they would have received the maximum safe lifetime exposure to radiation, and would never fly the atomic hate needle ever again. 
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Dec 24, 2012 06:46
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Good grief, there'd have to be a magnificent payoff to justify such an absurdly elaborate and dangerous operational pattern. Though around that time they were putting reactors on B-36s just to see if they were light enough for the plane to fly so eh. Speaking of dangerous, when I first found this thread a very excellent discussion of Air Koryo had just happened. Seems they've got a new plane, guys! (Not my photo, obviously.) I thought I read somewhere that it was an NTU from somebody else but now I can't find that information again so it might well be incorrect. StandardVC10 fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Dec 24, 2012 |
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Dec 24, 2012 14:50
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I love how there's a plane shaped cutout in the concrete barrier. Also, wouldn't weight become much less of an issue if your plane was nuclear powered? With a pretty much infinite (compared to a normal jet at least) fuel supply, you could probably burn at full power and lift the thing by brute force. Although I guess it would cease to be defined as a plane by that point.
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Dec 25, 2012 01:35
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dpidz0r posted:I love how there's a plane shaped cutout in the concrete barrier. You're still limited by the air volume you can pump through, and I suspect that once you start pumping too much air through the heat exchanger, the reactor might have trouble safely keeping the heat exchanger hot.
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Dec 25, 2012 03:08
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Nuclear plane is one of the few ideas where Kelly Johnson sent the R&D money back to the US gov because it didn't even work in theorycrafting.
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Dec 25, 2012 05:17
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Ardeem posted:Nuclear plane is one of the few ideas where Kelly Johnson sent the R&D money back to the US gov because it didn't even work in theorycrafting. It WORKED as far as mechanically and engineering wise, it DIDN'T work as far as spreading radiation everywhere and making the aircraft more of a risk than the ordinance it would carry.
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Dec 25, 2012 05:22
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CommieGIR posted:It WORKED as far as mechanically and engineering wise, it DIDN'T work as far as spreading radiation everywhere and making the aircraft more of a risk than the ordinance it would carry. Solution: Make the aircraft the ordnance. (insert SLAM/Project Pluto/Flying Crowbar here) http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missile I wonder how safe it would be to use an Orion type craft that's already been pushed out of earth's orbit when it ignites. Probably reasonable for an unmanned probe, but would have to be so massive that it'd be impractical just to get the pieces up there.
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Dec 25, 2012 05:42
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NightGyr posted:Solution: Make the aircraft the ordnance. (insert SLAM/Project Pluto/Flying Crowbar here) The fundamental issue that killed these things is that just making an ICBM turned out to be a lot easier than expected. Just outside Atlanta there was a nuclear irradiation test facility. If you're going to put a reactor on board an aircraft you can't shield the reactor, the weight penalty's just too obscene; you can only shield the things you don't want irradiated, like the crew. So what does the radiation flux of an unshielded reactor do to things like tires and hydraulic fluid and stuff like that? That's what this test facility was for. Nuclear reactor, in a pit, on a big lift. Stick stuff you want to zap nearby, elevate the reactor, irradiate for a set period of time, lower the reactor. Get all the employees into underground shelters before you do this, because it's a completely unshielded 10 megawatt nuclear reactor. This thing irradiated the surrounding area with total doses well in excess of what it would have gotten from the fallout of a full-scale exchange.
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Dec 25, 2012 06:45
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NightGyr posted:Solution: Make the aircraft the ordnance. (insert SLAM/Project Pluto/Flying Crowbar here) Even launching from sea level, the radiation that would be released from an nuclear pulse propulsion spacecraft is vastly overestimated by most people. Most of these designs use individual explosives with yields in the low end of the sub-kiloton range (The Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons were roughly 16kt, and 21kt, respectively, for comparison,) yet these designs have launch masses in the hundreds to thousands of tons, with extraordinarily low fuel fractions. (ISS, just for comparison, is about 500 tons, spread over dozens of launches on chemical rockets.) Continued development of small, boosted fusion explosives, like those developed in the US for Operation Plowshare, and in the Soviet Unions amazingly-named "Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy," reduce the radiation hazard even further. (Long-term radioactive material released from a nuclear explosive is almost all from the fissile primary, and mixture with material at the blast site. Fusion explosions are much cleaner, from a long-term radioactive residue standpoint, and proper launch site preparation could reduce the hazard to nearly zero.) Not to say that there are no hazards to this propulsion technology, but they are only insurmountable if the populations standard response to the words "nuclear," and "radiation" is abject panic, instead of rational thought.
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Dec 25, 2012 13:21
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dpidz0r posted:I love how there's a plane shaped cutout in the concrete barrier. In a way weight is more of an issue. For a given design, runway length on landing can be more critical than takeoff. Since a normal jet consumes much of its weight while airborne, it weighs less on landing and has to shed a lot less energy to come to a halt, which means smaller braking systems.
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Dec 25, 2012 13:58
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NightGyr posted:I wonder how safe it would be to use an Orion type craft that's already been pushed out of earth's orbit when it ignites. Probably reasonable for an unmanned probe, but would have to be so massive that it'd be impractical just to get the pieces up there. Isn't the big concern people raise with nuclear spacecraft what happens if there's a failure of the traditional rockets that actually get it in to orbit? The idea being that if the launch craft was to explode it would basically be a dirty bomb? I don't think the actual real risk is all that much, but people hear nuclear and all rational thought goes out the window.
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Dec 25, 2012 16:38
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I think that is a risk...but a very mild one. In the 1950s, scientists actually studied the idea of a dirty bomb, and concluded that aside from elevating the cancer risk in the area effected, they would do nothing. As for atomic planes, I think we can be grateful they never appeared, if only to save the world from the horror that would have been the Soviet response. I mean, if western engineers were this far out there on the safety vs. performance compromise, Lenin only knows what the Soviets would have done. Although, maybe an up-sized Caspian Sea monster could be big enough for a properly shielded reactor...
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Dec 25, 2012 19:18
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Nebakenezzer posted:I think that is a risk...but a very mild one. In the 1950s, scientists actually studied the idea of a dirty bomb, and concluded that aside from elevating the cancer risk in the area effected, they would do nothing. Soviets tried the exact same things as the US wrt nuclear planes... Here's their equivalent of the NB-36, a nuclear reactor carrying Tu-95: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-119
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Dec 25, 2012 19:31
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 The last gunfighter!
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Dec 25, 2012 21:19
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Suicide Watch posted:
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Dec 25, 2012 23:00
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Nebakenezzer posted:In the 1950s, scientists actually studied the idea of a dirty bomb, and concluded that aside from elevating the cancer risk in the area effected, they would do nothing. People often say stuff like this, but please remember that science has come a very long way in 60 years.
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Dec 26, 2012 03:14
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Suicide Watch posted:The last gunfighter! There's something about the F8 that I love. I'm actually a little sad that they seem to be fading into relative obscurity compared to some of the other fighters of the era in terms popularity and the amount of information available on them. A little half-assed research I did a few months back on F8s in the states didn't turn up much, there's something like 1 or 2 airworthy examples and only a handful of static displays. I've always kind of wondered why the Crusader didn't really seem to catch with popular culture compared to its contemporaries but never found a solid answer. Anyway, continuing on this track a bit,  The XF8U-3 Crusader III which was designed from the ground-up to be the predecessor of the F8. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of information available on these since all of the prototypes were ultimately destroyed after they lost to the Phantom II, but before they were completely scrapped a few of the planes ended up in NASA's hands for awhile. Why? Well, in an effort to appear in the list of the  est fighter planes someone had decided to shoehorn a god drat liquid fuel rocket engine in the rear end end of the plane as an option.Wikipedia posted:Three aircraft flew during the test program, and, along with two other airframes, were transferred to NASA for atmospheric testing, as the Crusader III was capable of flying above 95% of the Earth's atmosphere. NASA pilots flying at NAS Patuxent River routinely intercepted and defeated U.S. Navy Phantom IIs in mock dogfights, until complaints from the Navy put an end to the harassment. The poo poo these guys must have gotten away with back in the day. 
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Dec 26, 2012 03:32
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Nebakenezzer posted:I think that is a risk...but a very mild one. In the 1950s, scientists actually studied the idea of a dirty bomb, and concluded that aside from elevating the cancer risk in the area effected, they would do nothing. Suicide Watch posted:
Is that on a rooftop?
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Dec 26, 2012 09:00
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Sorta, it's the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. http://goo.gl/maps/sxKLh Take a look.
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Dec 26, 2012 09:27
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wolrah posted:Isn't the big concern people raise with nuclear spacecraft what happens if there's a failure of the traditional rockets that actually get it in to orbit? The idea being that if the launch craft was to explode it would basically be a dirty bomb? I've got a bunch of documentation on Project Orion, and most of the plans call for the vessel to be launched into orbit whole. Yes, that means they were planning on using the nuclear drive from the surface. As MrYenko mentioned, they had plans to build "ultra-clean" fusion devices to propel Orion, so as to minimise the amount of radioactive material dumped into the atmosphere. SybilVimes posted:Soviets tried the exact same things as the US wrt nuclear planes... This might be of some interest to you guys, then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsCw0s0BJKY And if it isn't, have some pictures of a Gripen wearing 1970s/80s camouflage paint:  
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Dec 26, 2012 11:41
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Nerobro posted:Sorta, it's the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.
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Dec 26, 2012 16:19
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MrChips posted:I've got a bunch of documentation on Project Orion, and most of the plans call for the vessel to be launched into orbit whole. Yes, that means they were planning on using the nuclear drive from the surface. As MrYenko mentioned, they had plans to build "ultra-clean" fusion devices to propel Orion, so as to minimise the amount of radioactive material dumped into the atmosphere. I seem to have confused this with something else. What I was thinking about used a nuclear reactor in the spacecraft to run an ion thruster, but obviously due to the limits of ion propulsion would have to be traditionally launched. Reading about Orion now, this just makes me grin as another one of those wonderful "let's stick a nuke in this" ideas from the early nuclear era. It's just a fair bit more feasible than nuclear powered cars.
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Dec 26, 2012 16:36
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wolrah posted:I seem to have confused this with something else. What I was thinking about used a nuclear reactor in the spacecraft to run an ion thruster, but obviously due to the limits of ion propulsion would have to be traditionally launched. Somewhere way back in the TFR cold war thread, somebody posted a wonderful series of articles on space atomic propulsion.
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Dec 26, 2012 18:27
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Nukes for, and in, space are pretty awesome. If only people didn't have this near unnatural fear of reactors.
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Dec 26, 2012 18:30
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Nerobro posted:Nukes for, and in, space are pretty awesome. If only people didn't have this near unnatural fear of reactors. I grew up near Indian Point, so I think my fear is pretty rational.
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Dec 26, 2012 19:07
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Polymerized Cum posted:I grew up near Indian Point, so I think my fear is pretty rational. Only two things that happened there are "nuclear specific." Though that's a pretty crappy power plant. I live in Illinois, I'm surrounded by reactors. Both active and decommissioned. I still strongly suspect that the total radiation let out by that reactor is very small in comparison to the smoke belching coal plants that are around here... Edit: Throw indian point into google, see what comes up. But.. since I did the work earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center Nerobro fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Dec 26, 2012 |
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Dec 26, 2012 19:23
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Polymerized Cum posted:I grew up near Indian Point, so I think my fear is pretty rational. Ummm... What?
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Dec 26, 2012 20:57
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRF-0ZMwyWY The aeroscraft is pretty much complete now. I hope the test flight is successful, then I can finally go on an air cruise. Three-hundred fifty dollars for a half hour on a blimp just isn't good enough and is way too expensive.
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Dec 26, 2012 21:32
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Polymerized Cum posted:I grew up near Indian Point, so I think my fear is pretty rational.
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Dec 26, 2012 21:34
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Tekne posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRF-0ZMwyWY The aeroscraft is pretty much complete now. I hope the test flight is successful, then I can finally go on an air cruise. Three-hundred fifty dollars for a half hour on a blimp just isn't good enough and is way too expensive. The entire superstructure of that is carbon fiber. That makes me very excited. 
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Dec 26, 2012 21:36
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NightGyr posted:having grown up near Indian point, it's pretty much the focal point for every uninformed anti nuke scare tactic in the area. I've seen literature implying that NYC would be wiped out in a nuclear fireball if something went wrong. e: never mind, I read your post wrong. Yeah, that's stupid as hell. Sigh. People like that prevent us from developing reasonable new nuclear technologies that could actually supply us with the power we're going to need very soon. Hope they enjoy rolling brownouts and lots more stopgap coal plants! Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Dec 26, 2012 |
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Dec 26, 2012 23:09
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Tekne posted:Three-hundred fifty dollars for a half hour on a blimp just isn't good enough and is way too expensive. You've clearly never priced out helicopters. We chartered one for a little less than an hour in June and it cost almost $1500.
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Dec 26, 2012 23:11
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Advent Horizon posted:You've clearly never priced out helicopters. We chartered one for a little less than an hour in June and it cost almost $1500. That's a great rate, too. Robinson or something?
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Dec 26, 2012 23:38
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Polymerized Cum posted:I grew up near Indian Point, so I think my fear is pretty rational. No. No it is not. Fear of Chernobyl is rational, and even then, the operators had to intentionally bypass or disable nearly every single safety device on the unit in order to make bad things happen, on a design that the west said "HOLY poo poo gently caress NO WAY" to, because it isn't inherently safe, like many of our designs. Fear of US nuclear power generation is based almost entirely on ignorance and misinformation spread by people with an agenda. As mentioned above, a newish "clean coal" plant probably puts out more radiation in a year than a nuclear unit designed in the sixties, built in the seventies, and maintained by the lowest bidder for thirty years will, over its ENTIRE LIFETIME.
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Dec 26, 2012 23:39
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MrYenko posted:Fear of Chernobyl is rational, and even then, the operators had to intentionally bypass or disable nearly every single safety device on the unit in order to make bad things happen, on a design that the west said "HOLY poo poo gently caress NO WAY" to, because it isn't inherently safe, like many of our designs. Out of complete boredom, I spent most of last week consuming every pro/anti and various political propaganda about this I could find - along with some viable information. How it happened was a comedy of errors and ineptitude. The design of Chernobyl required the turbines running to keep the juice up to keep the water flowing that ran those turbines. Yes, the turbines' cooling system was self-powered. No power means no cooling. They were getting ready for the 'downtime' test which should have been done in the morning - but that would have caused power outages in Kiev, so they decided to do it at night - with less trained staff. The two workers (one who managed the control rods, the other who monitored the water pumps) were not very well versed in handling more than basic issues, and it ended up that the pump monitor added too much water, too fast, so the control rods guy raised all but 6 rods to get the steam flowing to get the power back in the turbines and handle the steam. With six rods in and the system rather unstable, the test began. Power was raised, with inadequate control rods to keep it at bay, and too much water, the turbines fumbled, reactor 4 got drat hot, and went kablooey.  However, the sarcophagus was rated to last nearly 30 years, and has already had minor repairs on it. Ukraine doesn't have mother Russia to foot the bill (or 600,000 people who worked on containment) anymore. They just started work on an idea that was agreed to globally in 1997 to build a NEW cover that should last 100 years, since we still don't know how to clean up the mess. We'll see how it goes.
Viggen fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Dec 26, 2012 |
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Dec 26, 2012 23:49
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