You haven't demonstrated a disparity. Assault is assault regardless of whether some guy thinks it should be taken seriously or not.

Why?

Yep! Which is why I know that you're full of shit.

Then again, the fact that you used the words "nuclear apologists" in the very first sentence of your very first comment was also a dead giveaway; after that, even someone who isn't intimately familiar with those incidents would still know you're full of shit. You realize you're on Slashdot, right? Not NaturalNews?

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.

Something tells me you have no clue what "nuclear reactor" means. Hint: There is no "Boom!" in a reactor failure.

Yeah, or that shining example of progressive intellectuual integrity, John Edwards.

You are factually wrong on several counts.

SpaceX is not working on any version of the CST-100, and their only relation is that the CST-100 is supposedly designed to be compatible with the Falcon 9 launcher (I have reasonable doubt that will happen). They delivered the Dragon cargo capsule, and are working on the manned Dragon V2.

Boeing's CST-100 is orbital, not suborbital. Suborbital means it will not complete a single orbit, like a missile.

Sierra's Dream Chaser is also not suborbital. It also uses many non-NASA technologies, such as the hybrid rocket engines.

You further have many logical errors, the most persistent being the conflation of the launch vehicle with the crew vehicle. SLS, Falcon 9 and Atlas V are launch vehicles. Orion, Dragon, CST-100 and Dream Chaser are crew vehicles.

Orion is NASA's crew vehicle (actually, Lockheed Martin's, but I'll get to that in a bit). It is not suitable for missions beyond the Moon - it has a designed mission length of only three weeks (21 days), which is unsuitable for anything beyond Earth orbit. You are correct that manned deep-space missions will need a super-heavy launch vehicle such as SLS, but Orion itself will not be the crew vehicle.

You also make a mistake in your history. NASA did not produce the Apollo landers or the Saturn V (what I assume you refer to as "what nasa did 30 years ago" or "other NASA firsts"). They set the requirements, and solicited bids from private companies. Just as they're doing now - Orion is being made by Lockheed Martin, the SLS boosters are being made by ATK, Rocketdyne is making the core engines, Boeing is making the upper stage. Really, all NASA is doing is assembling the entire thing, and of course setting the specs and requirements.

Let's look at the Apollo command module, the closest equivalent to Orion/CST-100/Dragon. It was developed by North American Aviation. They merged with Rockwell-Standard during the 1967 to form North American Rockwell, later renamed to Rockwell International, under which name they produced the Space Shuttle orbiter. The Rockwell International space division was sold in 1996 to... Boeing.

Boeing isn't "ripping off from NASA firsts". They're building off work that they did for NASA in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. If anything "NASA" is ripping of them, but I remind you that Lockheed Martin is the one actually building the thing you want to attribute to NASA.

Sierra Nevada is building off SpaceShipOne technology, not any NASA programs. Just because it looks vaguely like the Space Shuttle, that does not mean it actually works the same way. The engines are completely and fundamentally different, as is the aerodynamic design.

And SpaceX is developing everything on their own. The only thing they used from another company is some software/control design from Tesla Motors, a company not coincidentally also owned by Elon Musk. I personally doubt much was even borrowed there except for the basic idea of a single big touchscreen, but I guess it makes for good brand advertising.

tl;dr you're wrong in your terminology, you're wrong in your facts, you're wrong in your logic, and you're wrong in your conclusions.

If I could get a job in France, I think I'd move. I'd have more vacation time and I can drink wine at lunch.

The phrase "deep space vehicle" is misleading - it's the payload, not the launcher, that has to be deep-space. However, the SLS is a heavy lift vehicle (70Mg to LEO for the Block I configuration, 130Mg in Block II), while Falcon 9 is a medium lift vehicle (10Mg to LEO). However, the planned Falcon 9 Heavy is also a heavy lift vehicle (53Mg to LEO), and seems much more likely to actually fly.

For comparison on those numbers, the Saturn V was 120Mg, the Space Shuttle was 25Mg, Proton is 20Mg, and Delta IV-H (the most powerful currently-flying launcher) is 23Mg. For a better perspective, to launch the entire ISS, you would need either seven SLS Block Is, four SLS Block IIs, nine Falcon 9 Heavies, or forty-five Falcon 9s.

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.

Indeed. In fact, they've not been enforceable for over 145 years per the Fourteenth Amendment and Marbury v. Madison (Anything repugnant to the Constitution is void from it's beginnings...)

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.