You have to be more even more patient than they are for a probe. To accelerate from low earth orbit to escape velocity the 1e-7 m/s^2 will take 1080 years. Enough for orbit maintenance, probably. Enough for probes, no not really -- No one plans for missions spanning thousands of years.

Oops, off by a factor of 10. 1 year give 3.15 m/sec 7.05 m[h

No, the question is how fast can it accelerate the average potato. NASA reported 30-50 mN of thrust., call it 40. The average potato is about 375 grams, call is 400 even so math is real east. F=m*a or a = F / M or 1e-7 m/sec^2. So, accelerate for 1 year and you reach the break-neck speed of 31.5 meters per second or 70.5 mph

It is going to take a long time to get that potato to Alpha Centauri. Especially considering that you have to also accelerate the mass of the Q-drive unit itself and the energy source to supply the Q-drive.

Now if the effect is real and the efficiency and can be improved you still have something potentially useful in-deed for satellites. You could even maneuver asteroids if you had lots of patience.

I must be one of those grammar Nazi's too, because I laughed at this joke.

TMI safety both failed and succeeded depending upon how you look at things.

It failed to prevent a partial meltdown of the reactor core.

It failed to prevent a significant release of radiation to the general environment as 15 curies (560 GBq) of iodine-131 (the most concering portion due to biological uptake to the thyroid)

It succeeded in terms of avoiding the wide-scale problems of Fukushima or Chernobyl

It failed in terms of public opinion of nuclear power being a reasonably source of energy production. Nuclear plant construction in US was virtually shut down after this, no new licenses till 2012.

Let's see, Pacific, Indian, Atlantic, Arctic. You mean there are 76 more oceans out there. And if you count the southern there is another 95 of those suckers.

Holy cow, wait till Exxon finds out!

On the contrary, the mammoth was a work animal. Work animals and food animals are very well preserved in terms of extinction rates.All you have to do it visit the lot of Bedrock Mammoth and you would see the wide selection of available animals.

Cs-237 is pretty hot, half life of about 30 yrs. How about

Pu-239 .435 kg
U-235 12500 kg
U-238 80,400 kg.

I am sure these sound scary to most people, though Cs-237 is presumably a significant component of the nuclear release in question.

Of course they sound much worse because you can make nukes out of these and that increases the radiation release rate by many orders of magnitude and that mushroom cloud, etc.

To Americans it's Cesium not Caesium, then again most American don't really know what that it is. And most don't understand radiation either.

Conveniently, there is an even better comparison. You have to disperse all of the radioactive soil into the air to make a similar comparison. We don't actually pump soil into the air though. We do however burn coal.

Webpage According to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), the average radioactivity per short ton of coal is 17,100 millicuries/4,000,000 tons, or 0.00427 millicuries/ton. This figure can be used to calculate the average expected radioactivity release from coal combustion.

Converting this to metric equates to about 0.174 MBq/ton (metric ton).

WebpageLargest coal plant in America burns 11 millions tons of coal per year.

Now 11,000,000 tons * 0.174 MBq / ton is 1.914e6 MBq -- a bit less than the twice the totally scary 1 trillion Bq

The average coal plant burns coal with around 0.5 trillion Bq / year

Now, not all of the radiation get released into the atmosphere, a lot of it ends up in the ash. But the ash is stored in ponds and left in piles on the ground, so its not a terrible improvement in terms of safe radioactive containment.

I would settle for nice modular neighborhood-scale TFTR reactors for now. I don't expect to see Mr. Fusion in the years I have left. I don't expect Congress to contribute to either of these either. I might wish they get rid of some unneeded regulations, but I have little hope of this happening either.

In actual fact, the ComCast internet service is not too bad. It is just their customer support, pricing, monopoly status and general arrogance that make them among the most hated company in existence.

The other interesting thing in the article was Google showing their IPv6 traffic was now around 4% up looked the perhaps the upward bend at the beginning of an s-Curve.

According to scientist, the common view is that the linear no-threshold model is actually the flawed viewpoint. See this article for a pro-radiation view that is not commonly reported. Although most people will scoff, there is actual evidence that a little ionizing radiation is good for you.

Yes, I would participate in the study that installs a radioactive source in your house (at reasonably low levels) because I believe the data that I have been able to find in the past.

Under the proposed terms of the merger, the combined Comcast / Time Warner will divest themselves of some of their users due to anti trust concerns. I am in that group to be divested.

But if the merger goes through, I get divested out of ComCast.

On the one hand, expletive of choice Comcast

On the other hand, expletive of choice, no more Comcast, woot!

Clearly my loyalties are divided on this issue.

True I think Acme was first, but don't put your portable hole in your bag of holding.