Informative take on gasoline

[mro]

regular practice and we change earth's mass

Not likely, even if we tried.
meteorites and meteor dust are falling into the planets gravity well 24/7, since.......well since the beginning
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(sorry, but it's not taxes)

Correct, it's "supply and demand" (and a oil cartel)

Our supply (or lack of) is directly related to taxes and regulations of our government.


mro

[JWSanders]

Originally posted by Crazcnuk Of course, the ONLY alternative is to leave it on the planet... where it would land if....

There is a huge difference between it being where it is now compared to a airburst several miles up of several tons of the stuff. The devastation would be unparalleled.

Think about it this way: It took less than a milligram of Polonium to kill that spy guy in Britain. 50 micrograms (!) of it is a lethal dose. We're talking tons of stuff that is far, far worse. What do you think would happen if a container failed and released just a relatively small amount (like say, a ton) into any ocean? That ocean (and everything that depends on it) would die. I don't see the benefit if the cost for one mistake is so high.

This stuff isn't reusable. It has already been broken down to it's simplest forms. It will still be as completely intact as it is now, 20,000 years from now (weather it's in the ocean or not! ). And still just as deadly.

With the rockets, you make the cargo portion like a sealed can. Launch in remote areas, and make the engine a separate piece, so that in the event of an accident, it simply falls into a large body of water, gets retrieved and you try again.

I kinda said that, just not in so many words.

But I think we have been launching rockets, all over the world, for quite some time now. It's not really NEW science.

It's not new at all, but it's not failure-free, and never has been.

In the last few years, in the countries that fire rockets (mainly for light satellites) there have been dozens of mid-launch failures. Even here. Hell, in 1999, we had six mid-launch failures in a 9 month period alone. Even the Space Shuttle failed eventually.

Seriously, while shooting something into space has been done many times, it is by no means perfected. You can easily expect to lose at least 1 a year. Every country that launches them does.

Don't get me wrong, I really do think that flinging it into the sun would be the best, most permanent way to deal with the worst of the worst of it, but I'm not a big fan of finding out if one wrong calculation somewhere led to a worldwide catastrophe. That stuff is nasty on a really BIG level. When technology can compensate for the crudeness of space travel now, then they can carry it up a lot more safely. It will, eventually. Despite all the people that "think like me"

[mro]

Polonium is a very rare element in nature because of the short half-life of all its isotopes. It is found in uranium ores at about 100 micrograms per metric ton (1 part in 1010), which is approximately 0.2% of the abundance of radium.

All of the country's nuclear power plants together produce about 2,000 metric tons of used fuel annually. To put this in perspective, all the used fuel produced to date by the U.S. nuclear energy industry in more than 40 years of operation—some 50,000 metric tons—would cover an area the size of a football field to a depth of about six yards, if the fuel assemblies were stacked side by side and laid end to end.

One uranium nuclear fuel pellet the size of the tip of your little finger is equivalent to the energy provided by 1,780 pounds of coal; or 149 gallons of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas.
(after being enriched to at least 4%)

Plutonium 238, or Pu238 has a half life of 87 years.
Can be enriched to 20+ percent to "weapons grade" (bomb dropped on Hiroshima), (an enriched uranium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki)

I've read several "theories" of the toxicity of Pu and a few had obvious ulterior motives. Click the link below if interested, but have not looked at it to any depth yet to be able to give an opinion as to it's validity.

http://russp.org/BLC-3.html


mro

[Crazcnuk]

Same here, we're paying $120.9/litre here or about $5/gallon. We have one of, if not the largest oil reserves in the world here.

As for rocket pollution, it depends on what your burning in your rockets.

I seriously doubt we would ever affect our orbit by launching used refined uranium off world. There isn't enough here to make a substantial drop in the overall mass of the planet.

Rail guns? I think you mean Electormagnetic Catapults. A rail gun shoots bullets... And I don't really care how you get it out of here, just do it.

The uranium does come out of the ground but isn't anwhere near as radioactive as it is AFTER it's used. It IS very hard, however, so if you can fiugre out a way to make it radio inert, it would be cool.

As for airburst, you put a crush zone between the cargo container and the engines. If the engine explodes it just, in effect jettisons the cargo pod, which falls into a large body of water, where it can be retrieved (don't pick really deep water!)

I mean you can sit there and think up problems all year. Unbtil you start thinking up solutions, your not doing anything.

We know we need the electricty. We know there is no other way to generate enough, at a reasonable cost. This is all just waiting for someone to crack a sustainable fusion reaction, the next major stepping stone in human evolution.

Without a cheap plentiful source of electricty, we have no combustible fuel, on earth, that we should be burning.