The US was a rich country once. We aren't anymore. Making decisions like "no more reactors" got us here.

The basic deal here is that each U-235 atom that splits yield 170 MeV of energy; 1.7 x 10^8. The average chemical reaction yields a few eV. (Source: Los Alamos Primer, Robert Serber)

As a country we can't afford to throw away fuel which is that much more powerful. It's not only stupid, it's cruel.

For example, we have people working in coal mines because we won't build nuclear reactors. Coal mines are not very safe at all.

About 20% of our electricity now comes from 1st generation nuclear reactors. They're being run past their design life. We need to build more just to replace the old ones, and they need to be 1000 Megawatt size. We really should ask the French, because they have had a lot of success in this area.

People are talking about "conservation". They've been talking about that since the first Earth Day, which I remember. When you add a lot more people, you still need more electricity. Without electricity, we go back a hundred years as a civilization.

It's time to make the tough choices instead of letting them go to the next generation by taking no action.

    -- Dave

Well of course the first thing that John Coster-Mullen would have to do is determine what microprocessor family was used on Little Boy. Is it an 8051, Z80, 68000, x386, PIC ? Generally even on OEM parts there's a basic part number. On DIP ROMS there has been a real effort to stay consistent.

John should bear in mind that the working timing of a nuclear bomb is 10 nanoseconds. This makes his microprocessor choices more limited; he'll need some speed here.

Then he needs to get to the code and examine it. If it's in a separate ROM chip this is much easier. For example, I was looking at a flashable EEPROM on a PCI card just yesterday evening and found it had a 29F001-TPC in a nice 32 pin DIP package. 128K x 8 bytes and nice little extras like auto-protection. It's a 120 ns part (from address setup to output enable* and the data pins settled.)

"Little Boy" was not a very efficient bomb at all. It was heavily overengineered. I can remember Ted Taylor calling it a "committee bomb" and a "stupid bomb" in McPhee's book. The committee wanted to make sure it went off and didn't just dig a hole, and hand the Japanese more than a hundred pounds of U-235. If I recall right, and this is just off the top of my head, it yielded only 12.5 kilotons or so.

Robert Serber's "Los Alamos Primer" is really useful here. It takes 10 nanoseconds (one "shake") for a fission to happen ("neutron multiplication time"). "The direct energy release per atom is 170 MeV".

"The energy release of TNT is ~~ 4 x 10^10 erg / gram, or ~~ 3.6 x 10^16 erg / ton.... Hence, 1 kg of U-235 completely fissioned yields about 20,000 tons of TNT equivalent, or ~~ 20 kilotons." [Serber is referring to tons as 2,000 lb tons.]

From this you can see that with a 12.5 kiloton yield, about two thirds of 1 kg of U-235 fissioned, so more or less, plus or minus, about a pound fissioned. Wikipedia says the bomb had 64 kg of uranium and only 600 mg. actually fissioned. I don't understand that number.

To which I can only say, see what happens when you use embedded Windows instead of Linux to drive your timing signals? I can just see it now. The bomb releases, starts falling, and in its microprocessor, it draws The Blue Screen Of Death and halts.

Thanks,

Dave Small

p.s. I really don't know why I wrote this. Maybe it was the coffee this morning.

The high altitude nuclear shots the U.S. did to study the effects (and try for an effective ABM) did indeed kill some early commercial satellites.

This was most embarrassing, even if it was an "effect" to study.

There was an informal understanding between the Soviet and U.S. space program that no one would fire off a megaton at high altitude when there was a spacecraft and crew up there.

I wasn't around for most of the 1950's, but I believe we also managed to EMP Hawaii dark, or at least kill a whole bunch of fuses. But in the 1950's we didn't use much transistor technology; we were busy learning about it and developing it. (Please, I know that some transistorized machines came out in this era; I'm saying we didn't use them to control main power switches.)

Thanks,

Dave

"Oh, please don't turn this into a zombie apocalypse survivalist fantasy! "

No! No! DO turn it into a Zombie Apocalypse Survivalist Fantasy!!! It'll be a heck of a lot more fun to read!

If I may put a vote in ... go find the movie "Fido". Easily the funniest Zombie movie I've ever seen. Stars Carrie-Ann Moss. Yep, that girl from the Matrix ... and she can actually smile! Set in 1950's America after a Zombie Apocalypse ... with a Zombie and a boy named Timmy ...

  -- David

This may look like a signature, but it's only yet another buffer overrun.

I've had very good luck with a couple 6 volt "lantern" batteries, a standard 4-pin disk drive power connector, and a few alligator clips. Connect the 6 V batteries + to -. On the "+" battery, connect its minus to the center two black "ground" leads. Connect the "+" of the "+" battery to the +5 line (red) going to the drive. Finally, connect the "+" of the other battery to the +12V (yellow) wire. So we're supplying ground, +6, and +12. Heck, it has a voltage regulator on +5 ... and it doesn't have long to live anyway.

Plug the drive in. Spin it up. IMPORTANT: Put it so the platters are at 90 degrees to you! In other words, put it so that if the platters explode, they won't hit you. You don't want it sitting on the ground with the platters parallel to the ground; you want them spinning at 90 degrees to the ground and to you.

Hike back a bit and shoot with a heavy slug. A slug from a 12 gauge works fine. All the rotational (angular) momentum is transferred to the frame as the platters stop almost instantly. The drive goes whirl-whirl-whirl, sometimes up in the air!

    I found that the .223 round from an M16A1 was strangely ineffective, but going to full auto made me feel better, and that's the point of all this. [ Yes it's legal to own an M16A1 here if you hop through the paperwork hoops]. Alas, the M16 was a toy I got rid of later ...

9 mm works very well at disassembling the drives, as does .45 cal.

  By the way, there are **absolutely terrific** magnets inside modern drives. Open 'em up and use a little acetone to unglue the magnets. They're the "supermagnets". And if you disassemble the drive with shooting, it is commonly opened FOR you!

          Shooting a disk drive that crashed and lost you a bunch of work is terrific stuff. In Las Vegas there are a couple places that let you bring in your computer or whatever and shoot it with automatic weapons. Hmmmm, maybe I should try an AK-47 someday, that's a .30 cal round...

      *grin*

David Small

Think big.

Take a million car batteries. Yup, lead acid. Why a million car batteries? Because they're so cheap -- we made a hundred million of them last year, and they're one of the best recycling stories out there). Don't be clever. New tech means R&D, and that means unexpected surprises.

Store them in buildings which are above 50 degrees F so that they last a very long time (and certainly not conditions under a hood). Some place near a large interconnect.

Use an inverter, or, just hook the batteries up with IGBT switches to "thermometer" up the voltage, and then back down, making AC.

I'm aware that this is limited storage; the batteries don't like to run at load capacity for long. But also note that Fairbanks has, I believe, 25 megawatts of battery backup.

I'll throw this into the "fresh meat" bowl here ...

  -- Dave Small