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According to the American Road and Transport Builders Association, milling and resurfacing a four lane road costs approximately $1.25 million dollars/mile, and that's just for labour, materials, etc. There are approximately four million miles of road in the USA, so (and I'm vastly oversimplifying here) simply renovating the public highways would cost $5e+12. I am going to guess that solar panels are slightly more expensive then 1.25 million dollars/mile.
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Sep 18, 2014 02:57
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KoRMaK posted:So it doesn't last for 1000 years or some nearly eternal bullshit amount of time? Law of conservation of energy. Emitting radiation is emitting energy: the more intensely it releases it, the shorter the half life. Radioactive material which is emitting energy for thousands of years does so quite slowly; the dangerous stuff eats itself up in a few years.
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Sep 18, 2014 03:12
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GROVER CURES HOUSE posted:
A plutonium bomb (and my information is a few years old so if I'm talking poo poo please correct me) would be an implosion type warhead. Plutonium only goes critical if it's compressed quite severely with a number of simultaneous explosive charges, and the timing being off by even the slightest amount would radically reduce effectiveness, if not completely fail to detonate. Plutonium is relatively easy to acquire, but the technology to make a bomb is "space is hard" complex. To contrast, you could probably make a gun type warhead using weaponized uranium using two cannons and a chunk of uranium 235, the compression requirements are much less strict. However, refining weaponized uranium is "space is hard" complex. Most of the Manhattan Project was just producing uranium 235, and we only wound up with enough for one weapon (fun fact: Hiroshima was a live beta). I highly recommend this lecture, Physics for Future Presidents if you would like to learn more about the mechanics of nuclear warheads.
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Sep 19, 2014 11:29
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