We need way, way, more women like her on TV.
Yes, let's over-represent a minority group on purpose.
Women are a majority in most developed countries. Where do you live, Afghanistan?
Pu-240 isn't used for nuclear weapons, though.
Oh, shit. You're quite correct. Please consider me appropriately chastised.
Aren't uranium (as opposed to plutonium) bombs pretty bulky?
Not really. The critical mass for U235 is 50 kg or so, while for PU240 it's about 40 kg. Moreover, a U235 bomb is way easier to make, because it doesn't have a predetonation problem like plutonium. Just take two hunks of U235 and drive one into the other with an explosive charge. Bang. City gone. This was the way Little Boy worked. It was so simple they didn't even bother to test it before dropping it on Hiroshima. You can't do that with PU240: the neutrons get so thick as it nears criticality that it blows the charge apart in a sub-critical burst. This is why you have to use very sophisticated shaped charges to assure a perfectly spherical implosion.
PU240 is easier to produce. U235 is easier to build a bomb with. It has proved very fortunate for the world that these two things are true.
When a stupid law says X, you follow it at your own risk
Which is exactly why we need driverless cars: dumb fucks who believe they're such exceptionally good drivers that the rules don't apply to them.
Erm, you are mixing up stuff.
The anti nuclear horde always pointed out that the current plants are not safe. (And on top of that they don't want new ones).
And now you try to use that as a stick against them?
The plants weren't unsafe when they were built. They are unsafe now because they are far beyond their design lifetime. We have better plant designs now. Why is this so hard to understand?
The ban on DDT, which you quote as a success story, is the main reason that malaria still kills millions today. Despite your defense of nuclear power, you still managed with that comment to jump onto the environmentalist propaganda bandwagon.
I am an environmentalist. Leftie as all hell, thank you very much.
With respect to DDT, I cited that deliberately, despite the fact that malaria does indeed take a huge human toll which could (in principle) be mitigated by widespread used of DDT. The problem is the tradeoff: Wholesale collapse of ecosystems is too high a price to pay for even millions of human lives, because the long-term result will be even more lives lost, and more suffering inflicted. The bacteria are going to win, eventually. Burning down our own house to prevent that is both futile and self-destructive.
If you see an obvious flaw in the full paper, please post it and I will publicize it.
I have a better idea: how about I ignore the whole sordid, over-hyped clusterfuck and go do something useful with my time? The Emfdrive company will go under like a submarine in short order, and we won't have to worry about them anyway.
In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong."
Yes you can: it's obviously wrong. Read the paper from the inventors on how the engine is supposed to work. It's a series of novice-level mistakes about physical principles and mechanisms. The entire idea is completely fucking batshit from the very beginning. The very fact that somebody actually got funding to build one of these absurd snake-oil devices indicates very little except that something is very, very wrong with the funding process. NASA is infamous for this kind of loony bullshit, and they really need to stop. It makes them look like morons.
Now people often find themselves having to take a 16 week course that's required for their program because a critical topic that the course talks about for one week
...because of a critical topic...
HTH.
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.