A Korean comics artist name of Anyan does a web manga with anthropomorphic representations of military aircraft as high school girls. Tu-95 is very inquisitive, always sticking her nose in other people's business and always surprised that folks notice her doing it because of the racket she makes.

http://www.batoto.net/read/_/1...

A couple of Tu-95 Bears flew down towards the north of Scotland a few weeks back, the RAF went up to welcome them outside the national limit and got some nice pictures. I grabbed them off the MoD website and bundled them up since most of my friends are Apple fans and don't do Flash.

https://www.mediafire.com/?fs5...

Runs to about 12MB or so as a zip download.

Actually the Japanese are burning more LNG with some extra coal to replace some of their nuclear generating capacity. In the 12 months up to March 2013 TEPCO burned 23 million tonnes of LNG and 7 million tonnes of coal to generate electricity, in comparison in the same period ending March 2011, just after the earthquake and tsunami they burned 19.5 million tonnes of LNG and 3.5 million tonnes of coal. LNG has twice the energy of coal tonne for tonne.

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news...

As for coal as a long-term solution the Germans plan to be still generating at least 40% of their electricity from coal and lignite by 2050. That seems quite long-term to me. I doubt very much the US will have stopped mining coal in South Dakota and West Virginia to burn in power stations by then either. The Japanese don't have any significant amounts of native coal left to burn, no oil and no gas so they have to import it. Uranium is cheap, their nuclear generating plants are still in place ready to restart and their balance of payments are in the crapper for the 22nd month in a row mostly due to buying carbon instead.

Which refineries in the north? The Texas and Gulf refineries have underutilised capacity especially for the heavy form of oil that is the end product of the Athabasca tarsands production. That's why the producers want to pipe it across America north to south, it's cheaper than building new refineries in Canada and it guarantees jobs and profits for US-based operations.

As for shipping the refinery product to Europe or China, if the US consumers are willing to pay the going price for the refinery output then it will sell in America. If other folks abroad are willing to pay more even with the shipping costs well that's capitalism for you, you know, free movement of goods and materials, one of the lynchpins of an unregulated market.

Of course you do realise that the Athabasca reserves are not American property but in fact the product of a foreign country being imported to the US, that free market capitalism at work? Why should the end result of processing foreign oil be reserved to subsidise US consumers when the source material is imported?

you're lying, or maybe you're just ignorant or you got your "information" from bullshit anti-nuclear blogs and such, but...

a) nuclear power reactors are decommissioned to "greenfield" status, that is the land is fit to grow crops on afterwards. It's a lot more work than brownfield where the ground will be repurposed for industry but it's a cost the nuclear industry has to bear unlike, say, coal mining.

No a nuclear site doesn't need to be quarantined for "hundreds of years". Heck, even after Chernobyl burned its core to the atmosphere the other three reactors on the site were kept in operation. No quarantine.

Storm surges affect ex-nuclear sites in the same way they affect farmland since they present the same levels of threats of toxicity. If you're really worried about flooding then look to coal mines and coal power stations which regularly dump millions of tonnes of poisonous effluent into streams and drinking water after flooding takes out their inadequate levees and dykes. Nobody cares much though because it's not scary radioactivity.

As for the British SafeStor decommissioning system, it's an alternative method to prompt disassembly of a power reactor -- tear down everything around the containment since it's not radioactive and then wait about 60 to 80 years for the remaining radioactivity in the pressure vessel and surrounding structures to decay to the point where it can be dismantled with minimal precautions. Other countries deal with this differently, in the US the reactor vessel is usually extracted promptly and put in a pit to "cool down" for about the same length of time so the entire site can be cleared more quickly.

They're not using any pesticides or herbicides as they would have to in the "wild". There are no caterpillars, no fungus or microbial antagonists or weed seeds that could destroy or deplete the crop, they're kept at bay because the facility is a clean-room setup with filtered air and water. That's the big "no chemicals" deal with this greenhouse.

Chris Foss is still around, in fact he's Artist Guest of Honour at this year's Worldcon in London.

Plenty of countries don't offer automatic citizenship to people who marry one of their citizens. The US doesn't, for example. They don't offer green cards or right of residence automatically either. Friends of mine who got married in the UK tried to move to the US where the wife was a natural-born citizen but her British husband was refused leave to stay. They lived in the UK for several years and finally after many appeals her husband managed to get a green card and they moved to the US. As far as I know he still hasn't got citizenship, I don't know if he's applied for it.

I know a few non-Japanese who are long-stay residents of Tokyo and environs. One is married to a Japanese woman and another has been engaged to a Japanese woman in the past but as far as I know neither wants citizenship.

Works for me though. The RD-171 mounts to the bottom of the Zenit launcher as a single unit and gimbals as a single unit so I'd call it a single motor. The derivative RD-180 (half the number of combustion chambers, powers the Altas V series of boosters) is again a single motor. Like I said, some folks and especially Americans don't like the idea that the Rockwell F-1 wasn't the most powerful motor ever to fly and will attempt to weasel out of the facts.

And "beloved"? Uh, no. I may be strange but I'm not that strange. I do know people who have rocket engines in their garage though. The only bits I've got even remotely like that are some solar cells that fell off the back of a satellite.

They've still got the cheapest launcher on the market,

The cheapest commercial launcher in the Falcon 9 capability range is the Indian GSLV but it has a poor track record. The ESA's Vega is cheaper per launch to orbit but with smaller payloads, as is the JAXA Epsilon. SpaceX has a bigger promotional budget though.

One fuel and oxidiser inlet into one turbo pump equals one engine. It had four combustion chambers but no redundancy or any way of shutting off a single chamber if something failed upstream. More thrust than the F-1 even in its later form and a lot more efficient in terms of Isp. It's a great bar bet, "what's the most powerful rocket motor ever flown?" but getting Americans to admit the F-1 was number 2 in the list is always a pain as they try to weasel out of it.

There have been several new launcher motors developed over the past decade (Vega and Epsilon, for example)

I thought both of these were simple solid-fuel designs?

Simple and cheap, both costing less to put a small payload into orbit than SpaceX charges and with lower overheads. The first Epsilon flew with only eight people controlling the launch and there was no launchpad fuel handling etc. needed. I don't know how much a Falcon-9-scale solid fuel launcher would cost to develop and produce though.

Another modern engine design I forgot to mention is the Japanese LE-7 LH2/LOX motor used on the H-2 series launchers. Very good Isp figures, significantly better than Merlin but a lot more expensive and non-recoverable.

The problem is that if they launch over the sea and then try to recover a first stage back to land it is going to burn a lot of fuel reversing course before it falls out of the sky. That extra fuel will eat into payload-to-orbit, as will the landing leg system and all the other gubbins needed to soft-land it meaning that it can only be realistically used on small-payload launches which means less financial return on such flights. It would be a lot easier just to buy off some local Texas politicians and get permission to launch-to-land across Texas without having to reverse course in mid-air. My alternate suggestion was that Elon should buy a surplus aircraft carrier and soft-land the first stages on that mid-Atlantic instead. It would piss off Mr. "Americas Cup" Larry Ellison into the bargain as well as ticking off another entry in the Bond megavillain bucket list.

The SpaceX Raptor engine as specified in the Wikipedia article will produce about 60% of the thrust of the Soviet-era RD-170/171, the most powerful rocket engines ever flown with 1.8 million lbs of thrust (using those weird American Imperialist units) and still in service for Zenit launches. The methane-burning Raptor will have, assuming they get all the bugs out, about 5% better Isp than the RD-171 which burns RP-1/LOX like the existing Merlin series engines.

There have been several new launcher motors developed over the past decade (Vega and Epsilon, for example) as well as new revamped versions of older designs like the Vulcain 2 used on the Ariane V. The Merlin series has improved immensely since the first crude version of a few years back with the latest, the 1D having significantly better Isp characteristics although it still lags behind the much older RD-180 design in both in fuel efficiency and in terms of thrust.

As for not pushing the envelope SpaceX is starting development work on methane-LOX rockets which promise some benefits in terms of throw weight over RP-1/LOX but it's something other folks have investigated before without that fuel combo making an impact on the launch market. It does mean they will have to go fully-cryogenic but with less hassle than LH2 involves. It could still turn out to be a costly dead end for them.

The recoverable first-stage flight system SpaceX is proposing is meant to launch from a purpose-built launch facility in western Texas with the landing spot for the first stage somewhere to the east of there. This involves flying over populated areas during the first part of the flight profile and that is going to raise some eyebrows. It's Texas though where killing people in industrial accidents is regarded as a cost of doing business without pesky Federal government regulations getting in the way of making money.

The Saudis are planning to build out a lot of nuclear power stations over the next couple of decades which along with solar thermal power plants will be used to power desalination plants currently fuelled by oil and gas. Other Middle eastern nations are planning similar facilities, some of them combined nuclear power generation and desalination systems utilising the "waste" heat from the reactors.