Re: metaTHAAD was: Son of Star Wars

KPJ (kpj@sics.se)
Fri, 15 Oct 1999 11:15:16 +0200

It appears as if Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net> spake to the congregation:
|
|Ye of little faith! We already *have* clean fission reactors,
|in a sense: nuclear subs. As antimissile missiles make the
|sub's payloads irrelevant, we convert them to great undersea
|fission reactors [waaay undersea], uninhabited, turning former
|bomb material into power, which it delivers to the surface via long
|cables [verrry long cables].

Verily, ye need a _very_ long spoon when dining with the Devil. !-D

|When the whole mess gets too radioactive, you sail it to
|the Marianas Trench and down it goes, 12 km down, at
|a velocity of over 30 horseturds per fortnight. {8^D
|
|If any kind of accident occurs, like the ones at TMI,
|Chernobyl or the recent one in Japan, a few hundred
|meters of water protects the environment, and should
|a really bad meltdown happen, everthing goes to the
|bottom of the sea. The water solubility of plutonium is low
|enough, there should be no three eyed fish born.

Those who dump radioactive waste in the high seas make a huge mistake in equating the seas with a magical black hole. The seas contain _currents_ you know, and what you dump at sea in one part of the planet will, sooner or later, inevitably surface somewhere else after a few decades or centuries.

So dumping radioactive waste at sea simply equals dumping the radioactive waste at the doorstep of one's offspring, as it were.

In short: Baaaad idea!

Hmm. It almost appears as if you do not plan to live on this planet in the next few centuries.