Cyberdyne's Journal: Clean nukes?!

ICBM Upgrades

As part of America's treaty obligations, the 23 remaining Peacekeeper ICBMs (which entered service in 1986) are to be retired, replaced by upgraded older Minuteman missiles. As part of the upgrades, the three existing warheads are being replaced by a single slightly larger one (per treaty requirements), and the motors are being replaced too.

Impressively, a 33-year-old Minuteman I motor still performed perfectly when test-fired. Bizarrely, however, the new motors have to comply with EPA regulations; given the nature of the payload being delivered, worrying about the emissions from the launch vehicle seems rather silly...

Launch is on the "good guy's" side

[TheConfusedOne]

The rocket fuel is all spent over the launch site, not the impact site.

Now since the original scenario was of a massive attack and retaliation that's a distrinction without a difference, but hey, that's the EPA in action. :-D

that's nothing

[js7a]

Bush's Department of Energy threatens no cleanup [yahoo.com] of some of the most dangerous radioactive waste from Cold War bomb-making, unless they are reclassified "low-level" to cut corners.

Re:that's nothing

[Cyberdyne]

Bush's Department of Energy threatens no cleanup of some of the most dangerous radioactive waste from Cold War bomb-making, unless they are reclassified "low-level" to cut corners.

Not "cut corners"; from a physics point of view, dividing the waste into high level and low level, treating each appropriately, makes sense. Vitrifying all the waste, regardless of its nature, just isn't sensible. That's why it was dumb for Congress to dictate that all the waste was to be in a single category, regardless of its

Re:that's nothing

[js7a]

IIRC, the DoE wants to reclassify some things that they don't have any basis to, other than it will save labor and equipment costs:

The waste, some in leaking tanks, has been described as a "witch's brew of radioactivity" left over from nuclear reprocessing.

Often only haphazard records were kept as to what actually was being poured into the tanks, according to cleanup engineers....

The high-level waste [comprises about 90 million gallons.]

"Historically we've taken a simplistic approach to managing (suc

Re:that's nothing

[Cyberdyne]

One way or another, the stuff is getting buried, as the US always does with almost anything "nuclear" - rather a simplistic approach, but it does usually work OK. (That strategy brought to you by largely the same bunch which thought paying off the Taleban to stop opium production in Afghanistan was a bright idea.) Personally, I'd rather at least have the stuff analyzed first: at the very least I like to know what I'm burying!

Apart from anything else, truly high-level waste decays rapidly, changing its nat

Re:that's nothing

[js7a]

I was aware that Soros was on trial in France. Acting on insider knowledge about a bank IPO is much different than the wholesale currency market manipulation to influence elections that he was accused of the last time the subject came up.

Re:that's nothing

[Cyberdyne]

I was aware that Soros was on trial in France.

And that he'd been convicted?

Acting on insider knowledge about a bank IPO is much different than the wholesale currency market manipulation to influence elections that he was accused of the last time the subject came up.

Not accused of; his track record of wholesale currency market manipulations for purely fiscal reasons is well-known. To quote the Stanford course case study [stanford.edu] on the subject, "Time and time again, when a nation is in a monetary crisis, Soros

Re:that's nothing

[js7a]

is it really hard to imagine him doing for political reasons precisely what he has done many times before for profit?

Yes and no. I'm sure he would love to profit from the kind of political change to which he is predisposed, but on the other hand while the $16 billion he controls might be enough to tip an already-teetering pound over, there's not a lot he can do against the dollar. The Bank of Japan is apparently prepared to leverage over 100 times Soros's assetts to maintain the health of Japan's expor

Re:that's nothing

[Cyberdyne]

I'm sure he would love to profit from the kind of political change to which he is predisposed,

The hypothesis is the other way round: not that he would manipulate the election to make himself richer, but that he would spend [some of] that vast fortune to manipulate the election as an end in itself - exactly as he said he would in an interview on the subject. Quite why Sore-ass feels this level of hatred is another question...

while the $16 billion he controls might be enough to tip an already-teetering