From: Gary Miller (garymiller@starband.net)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 22:45:49 MDT
I'd prefer not nuclear. Because then you'd need an army to protect the
vessel from terrorists turned plutonium pirates. Also a sudden nuclear
accident at sea doesn't leave many options for evacuation.
And we'd be enough problems without GreenPeace trying to board us every
five minutes for being a potential nuclear threat to the dolphins.
What about an oil converter to reprocess waste into oil and a couple
wind turbines to make up the 15% lost efficiency. Surely that'd be
enough to power the carrier. Or fishing nets to provide fresh seafood
and make up for the 15% loss with additional oceanic biomass.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-extropians@extropy.org [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]
On Behalf Of Robert J. Bradbury
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2003 11:24 PM
To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: Re: The good ship Extro 1
On Mon, 2 Jun 2003, Adrian Tymes wrote:
> (I'd suggest nuclear, but I don't think that could be done cheaply
> enough. No question that it could be done for enough money - civilian
> nuclear plants get their fuel from somewhere - just on the amount of
> mone when this is supposed to be cheap.)
Ah but the question is whether the cost of a nuclear reactor
is in the fuel or the shielding? [I actually suspect that ship/sub
based nuclear reactors are probably much cheaper than the civilian power
plant equivalents due to the lack of a very large "containment"
facility.]
Now if we need shielding one probably wants something with
a high hydrogen content. Hmmmm.... Humans are mostly water. Water is
2/3 hydrogen. Wouldn't a selection of luddites (Rifken, Bill Joy,
select members of the ETC group, a number of European officials opposed
to GMO, etc.) do the job? The only thing I'm worried about is that there
may not be enough true luddites to provide sufficient shielding.
Damn.
Robert
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