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This might be a good time to review the number of failed rocket launches we've seen in the last few years. Now, imagine them with nuclear materials aboard.
by dtagames 3y ago
This might be a good time to review the number of failed rocket launches we've seen in the last few years.
Now, imagine them with nuclear materials aboard.
- Tuna-Fish 3y agoUranium that has not been in a reactor is almost nonradioactive and inert. It only gets spicy after you let it go critical for a while, and fission products accumulate. Any reasonable nuclear-powered craft would not start up the reactor until it's already in a nice, safe, high orbit.
- valine 3y agoReusability helps with long term reliability. You would probably want to avoid launching nuclear material on a new rocket, but a human rated rocket like Falcon 9 would be totally fine.
- ben_w 3y agoDepending on the design, failure during launch can be anywhere from "meh" to "basically high-altitude Chernobyl" — random actinide decay products (and plutonium fuel) are bad, unreacted uranium fuel is mostly a heavy metal hazard rather than a radiation hazard. (Could be worse, but the Orion drive is currently illegal by treaty and hopefully nobody is dumb enough to use that in Earth's ionosphere anyway).
- aio2 3y agoI remember learning that when they started testing atomic bombs (I think?) the nuclear debris in the air spread basically throughout the whole united states and the government tried to keep quiet about it. Something similar will probably happen here if they mess up with the launch. Btw, the video I saw was on Veritasium.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoI remember that video; the long story short was that a manufacturer of films for photography noticed that their films had spots on them, they initially thought it was defects, but because they had samples prior to testing, they saw an uptick. But maybe I remember wrong. Edit: the video in question is [1] and the conpany was Kodak. [1] https://youtu.be/7pSqk-XV2QM https://youtu.be/7pSqk-XV2QM
- 23B1 3y agoNot sure about camera film, but there's certainly a need for 'low-background steel' for several applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoSpeaking of, one way we verify old wine is through background radiation!
- philistine 3y agoSounds like the way Columbo would have caught one of the killers on the show.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoIt was used in "White-Collar" to create a scam!
- db48x 3y agoThe thing to remember about that is that we can measure tiny amounts of radiation very cheaply, and tiny amounts are harmless. In fact we are bathed in a constant, but tiny, background level of radiation all the time. Thousands of nuclear weapons were tested all across the world, in the United States, in the Soviet Union, on Pacific Islands, etc, etc. The radiation from that certainly caused a small uptick in the background level of radiation, but it hasn’t actually harmed people. The main reason that the US was secretive about it was that nuclear weapons were a secret, not because there was a shameful health problem to hide. Incidentally, the best way to reduce your exposure to radiation is to move away from the mountains and go live at the beach. Mountains are mostly made of granite, and granite always contains small amounts of uranium and thorium which decay to radon gas. Also, live as far away from coal power plants as possible, those things are horrifying.
- 7952 3y agoBackground radiation may be unlikely to give an individual cancer whilst still causing cancer across a population. It just isn't possible to attribute the cause. Surely the same is true of fallout from testing and estimates would back that up. It may not be something we worry about as individuals. But it is something that nasa should worry about.
- Loquebantur 3y agoBackground radiation is categorically different than ingesting/inhaling radioactive substances with the latter many orders of magnitude more dangerous. The claim, nuclear testing related increases in radiation exposure not being relevant for public health is probably false. There are only very few studies with dubious reliability. The lifetime increase due to that nuclear testing is estimated to be 4.4 Millisieverts. It would have risen continuously with more surface tests, which got abolished accordingly. The idea, beaches were a sanctum against radiation is wrong again. Sand is ground down mountains in case you wondered. Some are highly radioactive. But of course, UV light is harmful radiation as well.
- db48x 3y agoWe eat bananas all of the time. Bananas are delicious and nutritious, and they are known for containing lots of potassium. Well, some of that potassium is radioactive! It’s not very much radioactivity though. It is an amount which is easily measured, but which is not harmful enough to make eating bananas dangerous. This is true even though the potassium will be used to strengthen your bones and teeth. It will also be distributed to your muscles, red blood cells, skin, etc, etc.
- WalterBright 3y agoThere's a difference between a lump of uranium metal falling back to earth and a lump of uranium that's been turned into plasma.
- gibolt 3y agoThe nuclear payload could be treated similar to humans, with eject systems and soft landing built in. The fuel will only be needed for a lighter craft in deep space. Getting it up with a high reliability rocket (like Falcon 9) significantly decreases risk.
- ben_w 3y ago> The nuclear payload could be treated similar to humans, with eject systems and soft landing built in. In principle yes — even just on the grounds that enriched fuel is expensive — but it's a hard thing to prove in advance, hence all the times humans died in a space mission one way or another.
- gibolt 3y agoThere have only been 5 instances resulting in 19 fatalities. None were when exiting the atmosphere. 2 were the flawed Space Shuttle on return. Only one other was a flight system, on an experimental craft. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents#:~:text=%2Fcosmonaut%22).-,During%20spaceflight,the%20entire%20crew%20was%20killed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_.... Today's rockets are far more reliable, and anything holding nuclear fuel should be the best of the best.
- WalterBright 3y ago> None were when exiting the atmosphere Er, Challenger?
- asu_thomas 3y agoWhat does "meh" mean? Is that english?
- sircastor 3y ago"Meh" is a casual response that means "this does not matter much". I don't know that it's proper English by any means, but it is certainly a common colloquialism. A cursory search suggests that it's imported from yiddish. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meh
- asu_thomas 3y agoI have never seen it used outside of Hacker News.
- speff 3y agoIt's not an uncommon expression. I searched the term in a chat room my friends (of varying professional backgrounds) have used over the past 5 years. There were about 200 instances of us using the word.
- asu_thomas 3y ago[flagged]
- maxbond 3y agoPlease refrain from being nasty to people going out of their way to answer your question. Any longtime English speaker is qualified to make observations about what is happening in their linguistic community. They went the extra mile to quantify it for you (in a community other than HN, in direct response to your question). You are free to choose how much weight you assign to their observation, and it's fine if it differs from your experience, but it's uncalled for to ask "what they're smoking."
- deleted 3y ago
- dzhiurgis 3y agoFalcon9 hadn’t had a failure for nearly a decade
- gibolt 3y agoFalcon 9 has had more than 200 consecutive successful flights in a row. That is more than double the next most successful, Delta II with 100 in a row. It also has well over 100 successful landings in a row, while the next closest rocket has 0. (Rocket, not capsule or shuttle, which are all still far lower)
- avmich 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz-U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz-U "The rocket had a streak of 112 consecutive successful launches between 11 July 1990 and 5 May 1996"
- joelwilliamson 3y agoThere is another rocket that has had a few successful landings: Falcon Heavy.
- 23B1 3y agoI'm no engineer, but it sure seems to me like you could either split things up into multiple launches, or potentially manufacture the fuel in orbit, no?
- moffkalast 3y agoWell look at the number of missions with RTGs on board and you don't have to imagine, nuclear powered probes and satelites are not unheard of. The soviets also had an entire series of fission powered spy sats way back.
- dotnet00 3y agoWell that's the most obvious way to put FUD out there. It might be a good time to review the number of failed launches on crew rated rockets (the safety requirements on which are roughly equivalent to the requirements for carrying nuclear material). Particularly ones which led to a loss of crew, as those would correspond most closely to a possible nuclear material release. It's far less scary, but alas not as convenient for FUD.
- Consultant32452 3y agoI would add it's much easier to protect a small amount of nuclear material from a rocket exploding than to protect a human from a rocket exploding.
- fastneutron 3y ago> Once it reaches a safe orbit, the reactor will be turned on. Fission reactors aren't appreciably more radioactive than rocks you can dig out of the ground until you turn them on. This is something that wouldn't be brought online until the riskiest part of the launch has past.
- adastra22 3y agoWhat failed rocket launches? That hasn’t happened in a long while. SpaceX just surpassed their 100th consecutive first-stage launch without any failure. Boosters are super reliable these days.