man-and-atom

[man-and-atom]

Just the idea of building a disposable version of the Space Shuttle Main Engine is so bizarre…

It definitely provides context for those “SLS sitting on Pad 39A while a SpaceX rocket launches a crew to the ISS from 39B” photos.

"NASA achieved a major milestone April 3 for production of new RS-25 engines to help power its Artemis campaign to the Moon and beyond with completion of a critical engine certification test series at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

The 12-test series represents a key step for lead engines contractor Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris Technologies company, to build new RS-25 engines, using modern processes and manufacturing techniques, for NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rockets that will power future lunar missions, beginning with Artemis V."

Date: April 3, 2024

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center: link

#national agency for space avoidance

[man-and-atom]

Satellites give us a perspective and understanding of the Earth we could get no other way.

Anybody who says “we need to fix our problems on this planet before we go out into space” could stand to spend some time looking a pictures like this.

Or this.

Or this.

Or this.

How can we see ourselves, know ourselves, unless we stand outside ourselves?

Guayaquil, Ecuador, sits on the upper stretches of the Guayas River estuary, adjacent to a 235-square-mile (608-sq.-km) network of tributaries and mangrove forests. Since the 1970s, commercial shrimp farms have become commonplace in the estuary, leading to mangrove deforestation. This presents a conflict for Guayaquil, which benefits from shrimp exporting but is the planet’s fourth-most vulnerable city to future flooding due to climate change.

-2.208180°, -79.942960°

Source imagery: Maxar

#looking back #the eye cannot see itself #looking at earth #the stars are ours #introspection

[man-and-atom]

Tim Curry speaks for all of us here.

As always, brought to you by the magic of the plutonium-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

Holy shit, they got Voyager 1 working again!

15 billion miles away and NASA was able to tweak code packages on one of the onboard computers and it worked and Voyager 1 is sending signals back to earth for the first time since November.

Incredible!

#deep space #voyager #rtg #plutonium beyond pluto #the stars are ours

[man-and-atom]

Space rocketry is very difficult. You have to deal with velocities of several kilometers per second, temperatures higher than the surface of the Sun, and crucially, a vehicle structure which may be something like three per cent of the total mass of the vehicle at lift-off.

There are two ways to get it right. One is to try a lot of things, over and over, and fail at most of them, until you find what works reliably. This was the approach taken in the early Space Age. It’s the approach being taken by SpaceX right now. It’s a very successful approach.

Problem is, those failures are often spectacular, and tend to drive away investors, and raise pointed questions in official circles which make government support difficult to obtain. So the established aerospace companies, and NASA, tend to take the alternative route, which is to spend many, many years of engineering time doing simulations and calculations and alternative studies, until every last uncertainty is eliminated, and only then fly. Unfortunately, as any good engineer will admit, that approach is only as good as the data you started with. Its limits are reflected in the loss of the Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia, and many other less-disastrous failures over the years. And those failures led to further delays.

The iterative approach is faster and more certain, and often less costly overall. But making it work requires either strong public support and a sense of national urgency ; a total news blackout, which is impossible to obtain in this day and age ; or a lead investor with a near-Messianic sense of purpose and a tendency to ignore critics. Mr Musk, for better and for worse, is the latter. As a result, SpaceX has achieved more in less time and for less expenditure than the aerospace establishment.

It should be emphasized that nothing SpaceX has done is anything that people in the industry didn’t think could be done. Rather, they are things the managers didn’t allow the engineers to try. For a rare occasion that the engineers got to make the decisions, see the DC-X project of the 1990s. A vertical-take-off-and-landing rocket vehicle was built using funds intended for a paper study, thanks almost entirely to the personal influence and connections of G Harry Stine and Pete Conrad.

Launch of SpaceX's Starship and rapid unplanned disassembly today.

Watched it live this morning and when I saw this.

I had a feeling it wasn't going to make it.

Date: April 20, 2023

source

#space is hard #space industry #the stars are ours #dc-x

[man-and-atom]

To go with this lovely silent film, here is my live narration of the recent eclipse :

A Max Fleischer newsreel item / educational film about the June 8, 1918 total eclipse. (Its totality track and other data are here at Fred Espenak's eclipse page.)

The film was reissued in 1923 for the September eclipse that year: that one's totality track and other data are here.

#audio content #astronomy #eclipse

[man-and-atom]

It would certainly be gratifying if Nuklearia were able to use this ruling to sue the German government over its policy of increasing the use of coal and shutting down zero-emissions nuclear power stations. Unfortunately, quite aside from the question of whether attempting policymaking through lawsuits has a better chance of assuring that facts and reason are employed than the ordinary legislative route, policies introduced in such a manner have a tendency to be weak and unstable. Without the support of legislature and executive, court decisions are largely symbolic — and if you have that support, you probably wouldn’t need to sue in the first place.

"Tuesday’s [April 9, 2024] definition-shifting court ruling means nearly 50 governments must now contend with a new era of climate litigation.

Governments be warned: You must protect your citizens from climate change — it’s their human right.

The prescient message was laced throughout a dense ruling Tuesday from Europe’s top human rights court. The court’s conclusion? Humans have a right to safety from climate catastrophes that is rooted in their right to life, privacy and family.

The definition-shifting decision from the European Court of Human Rights means nearly 50 governments representing almost 700 million people will now have to contend with a new era of litigation from climate-stricken communities alleging inaction. 

While the judgment itself doesn’t include any penalties — the case featured several women accusing Switzerland of failing to shield them from climate dangers — it does establish a potent precedent that people can use to sue governments in national courts.

The verdict will serve “as a blueprint for how to successfully sue your own government over climate failures,” said Ruth Delbaere, a legal specialist at Avaaz, a U.S.-based nonprofit that promotes climate activism...

Courting the courts on climate

The European Court of Human Rights was established in the decade following World War II but has grown in importance over the last generation. As the judicial arm of the Council of Europe, an international human rights organization, the court’s rulings are binding on the council’s 46 members, spanning all of Europe and numerous countries on its borders.

As a result, Tuesday’s [April 9, 2024] ruling will help elevate climate litigation from a country-by-country battle to one that stretches across continents.

Previously, climate activists had mostly found success in suing individual countries to force climate action. 

A 2019 Dutch Supreme Court verdict forced the Netherlands to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent, while in 2021 a French court ruled the government was responsible for environmental damage after it failed to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals. That same year, Germany’s Constitutional Court issued a sweeping judgment that the country’s 2019 climate law was partly “unconstitutional” because it put too much of the emissions-cutting burden on future generations.

Even in the U.S., young environmental activists won a local case last year against state agencies after arguing that the continued use of fossil fuels violated their right to a "clean and healthful environment."

But 2024 is shaping up to be a turning point for climate litigation, redefining who has a right to sue over climate issues, what arguments they can use, and whom they can target. 

To start, experts overwhelmingly expect that Tuesday’s ruling will reverberate across future lawsuits — both in Europe and globally. The judgment even includes specifics about what steps governments must take to comply with their new climate-related human rights obligations. The list includes things like a concrete deadline to reach climate neutrality, a pathway to getting there, and evidence the country is actually on that path...

Concretely, the verdict could also affect the outcomes of six other high-profile climate lawsuits pending before the human rights court, including a Greenpeace-backed suit questioning whether Norway's decision to grant new oil and gas licenses complies with its carbon-cutting strategy.

An emerging legal strategy

In the coming months, other international bodies are also expected to issue their own rulings on the same thorny legal issues, which could further solidify the evolving trend. 

The International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights all have similar cases working through the system.

"All these cases together will clarify the legal obligations of states to protect rights in the context of climate change — and will set the stage for decades to come," said Chowdhury, from the environmental law center."

-via Politico, April 9, 2024

#not a climate leader #science and politics #atomic power to the people

[man-and-atom]

Not the most focused show, but no prevaricating about the bush from me! The Conquest of Pestilence in New York City, LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) versus LCOLC (Levelized Cost of Load Carriage), intercontinental air travel versus atomic train travel, caloric value of food, its insufficiencies and excesses and its sources, and the problem of expectations generally.

Direct link to archive recording [192 kbps MP3, 40 MB]

There was a “Supplementary Show” this week, but it didn’t get recorded owing to technical problems.

#a step farther out #audio content

[man-and-atom]

It’s difficult to understand why anyone would ever say that small nuclear reactors would lead to the production of less waste, and yet we have seen the claim made, repeatedly. For a given reactor type, the smaller the core, the greater the loss of neutrons by leakage. This means that the initial fuel charge must have a greater proportion of fissile material, and less of it is consumed before the operating reactivity margin falls too low and it must be replaced.

This study, however, doesn’t make a great deal of sense. The authors concentrate on two factors which are both probably irrelevant. The first is neutron activation of steel — specifically the steel of the reactor pressure vessel. The first reason that this is surprising is that the main constitutents of steel, iron and carbon, do not generally become transformed into radioactive isotopes by interaction with neutrons, and especially not long-lived, energetic radioisotopes. About the only substance commonly found in steel that does become so activated is cobalt, and so that element is typically excluded from reactor construction. (There is also some possibility of neutron absorption in molybdenum to form technetium.) Since the half-life of cobalt-60 is less than 6 years, irradiated stainless steels and other nickel alloys containing traces of cobalt can, if necessary, be held for 60 years for the activity to decay, before being mixed with other scrap steel.

Now, neutron collisions move atoms out of their places in the crystal lattice of a solid material. This happens much more often than the absorption of neutrons to create new (and sometimes radioactive) nuclei. As a result, inside the typical reactor pressure vessel you will find something called a “thermal shield”. This is a steel liner, which is under no structural load, so that changes in its mechanical properties as a result of such displacements, known as “neutron embrittlement”, don’t hurt anything. In other words, its whole function is to stop neutrons from getting to the pressure vessel (which is frequently lined with stainless steel, which in turn may contain traces of cobalt). And since this thermal shield is constructed of materials which do not become strongly and long-lastingly radioactive under neutron bombardment, it can be treated as normal scrap steel after a moderate cooling-off period.

The second factor they consider is radiotoxicity of plutonium in the fuel wastes. This, it seems to us, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the small reactor. The large nuclear power reactor is very economical in meeting the energy needs of large cities. In the absence of anti-nuclear political pressure, the demand for such reactors tends to be strong. While there are many potential applications for small reactors, relatively few of them are so economically or technically compelling that they are likely to be pursued, absent a strong commitment to shifting the overall energy supply towards fission.

A heavily-nuclear energy economy requires a closed, regenerative nuclear fuel cycle. In other words, small reactors are not likely to account for more than a very small amount of the nuclear fuel consumed (and thus the fuel waste produced) unless discharged fuel is going to reprocessing plants and into breeder reactors, not to geological repositories for disposal. Therefore the question of “disposing of plutonium” from such small reactors is probably irrelevant.

#nuclear waste #atomic power to the people #small reactors #total nuclearization #deep decarbonization #closed fuel cycle #the plutonium economy

[man-and-atom]

Owing to a mishap, the actual show starts about 20 minutes into the recording. It’s just long enough for me to mention progress with blast, and compare the Coire Glas pumped storage scheme in Scotland, which will be the largest in the world with 30 GWh of capacity, to the daily output of one EPR nuclear generating unit, of which two are being built at Hinkley Point C, 38·4 GWh. The UK grid is already one of the best–provided in the world with storage, with 24 GWh. Since average electrical consumption of the UK (over the course of a year) is 36 GW, the total after this addition will be 90 minutes of average system load. A far cry from the 10 days or more that wind– and solar–heavy energy supply projections call for!

Direct link to archive recording [192 kbps MP3, 40 MB]

#a step farther out #audio content

[man-and-atom]

Direct link to archive recording [192 kbps MP3, 80 MB]

Listen to the Eclipse!

Despite predictions of overcast and even thunderstorms, the skies here have cleared sufficiently that I expect to be able to see the total solar eclipse from my back yard.

Totality here is at about 1840 UTC, which is during the aNONradio OpenVoIP hour, so I am going to run an extension telephone out to the porch, and dial in. If you have nothing better to do, you can listen to my commentary.

Also, all of my Patreon supporters will receive a letter written and mailed today, on stationery left over from SunCon, the 1977 World Science Fiction Convention (which was held in Miami Beach). It’s not too late to sign up and receive one for yourself.

[man-and-atom]

Listen to the Eclipse!

Despite predictions of overcast and even thunderstorms, the skies here have cleared sufficiently that I expect to be able to see the total solar eclipse from my back yard.

Totality here is at about 1840 UTC, which is during the aNONradio OpenVoIP hour, so I am going to run an extension telephone out to the porch, and dial in. If you have nothing better to do, you can listen to my commentary.

Also, all of my Patreon supporters will receive a letter written and mailed today, on stationery left over from SunCon, the 1977 World Science Fiction Convention (which was held in Miami Beach). It’s not too late to sign up and receive one for yourself.

#eclipse #astronomy #first person

[man-and-atom]

A “traditional” central-station electric power system works very much like a railroad. There is a dispatcher’s office, where people keep track of the power that’s being generated, the available generating capacity, the loads, and the paths that power flows along. They have the assistance of tabulated data showing load patterns for past weeks, months, and years, with variations for everything from weather conditions to sporting events. The dispatcher can do things like telephone the operator at a hydro plant and say “we are going to need full output from you in ten minutes”.

Wind and solar, however, are non-dispatchable : they become available or unavailable without any reference to when and where power is needed. The result is more like a freeway, where traffic jams are inevitable, than like a railway, where delays only occur when something goes wrong.

To balance generation against load, with a lot of non-dispatchable generation, the best you can do is to build (at corresponding expense) way more than a simple computation would say you need, so that something will be available most of the time, and then disconnect whatever’s in excess at a given moment. Of course, you can’t just go around disconnecting people’s homes from the grid! Promoters of wind and solar say that these problems will be solved by “smart grids”, time-of-use pricing, and similar fixes. This is bound to work just as well as computer-driven cars and congestion tolls work to straighten out city traffic.

All in all, it is a very good thing that we have a proven technology which gives us power in large, dispatchable, highly reliable blocks, with zero emissions and an unlimited fuel supply. It’s just too bad that people regard it with unwarranted suspicion, while wind and solar are glamorous (at least to people who don’t have to live with them).

#atomic power to the people #maxwell smart grid

[man-and-atom]

A fascinating application of both radioisotope and stable-isotope tracer techniques, with intriguing implications for managing water resources. Of course, lithium and even copper are less critical materials if we emphasize atomic power rather than wind and solar, not only because of a smaller requirement for storage batteries, but also because fission heat can be applied directly in many uses.

#extractive industries #water #isotopes

[man-and-atom]

Electricity is the only industrial commodity that must be consumed before it is produced — a koan for the modern age? Also, a warning against attempting to live in the world of signs, rather than of things signified ; and the case for a railway in Iceland.

Direct link to archive recording [192 kbps MP3, 40 MB]

#a step farther out #audio content

[man-and-atom]

Is the Fifth US Circuit Court out to give me an aneurysm? Also, once more with feeling, battery–electric cars will not make cities any easier to live in ; new large–format scans ; and blast №1 is close to being ready.

Direct link to archive recording [192 kbps MP3, 40 MB]

#a step farther out #audio content

[man-and-atom]

It’s a pity that this marvellous instrument, even at the top of a mountain, will still be under a heavy blanket of air, which stops many wavelengths of light, scatters the rest, and blurs and confuses the view of the stars by its constant motion.

Note that the lenses rely on work done by Lawrence Livermore — not stated is that this work was part of the laser-inertial-confinement fusion program.

#astronomy #pure science #the stars are ours

[man-and-atom]

We dare to suggest that the best way to assure that the region around the anti-terrestrial pole is reserved for observatories, is to start using it as soon as possible, even if only in a small way.

Since that would be a terrific place to out a radio telescope, this is something that should be given some consideration…

#luna city or bust #radio astronomy #the stars are ours