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DDE

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    Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    10 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

    What an amusing sci-fi horror with blue flashes and suicide squad.

    Were E.T.s from Area 51 involved? This would be par the course for stories that began to gush forward when the Russian press gaine dthe freedom to pursue readers and sensations. And so Vasili Arkhipov went from merely executing a pre-set procedure to literally fighting all of the Kremlin to avert WWIII.

    18 hours ago, Codraroll said:

    Wasn't that pretty much the strategy they ran with for the decomissioning of nuclear reactors for the Arctic fleet as well? "Place spent fuel rods in barrels - place barrels in warehouse - forget warehouse exists".

    Actually this was the strategy they arrived to as part of the cleanup project.

    To recap: the Northern Fleet had a facility with above-ground spent fuel storage pools. It wasn't well-designed to begin with, e.g. the filtration system for water in the pool was never installed, and any further rectifications was impossible because responsibility for the facility's maintenance slipped through the cracks of an organizational shuffle. And so, at one point, the pools began to leak, forming that mythical icicle of death. The real scandal for you should be that the icicle of death was not an emergency - Soviet Navy SOP was to simply dump any and all liquid radioactive waste into the environment... at worst, Andreev Guba would double their usual annual output.

    Here's the twist, though - the Navy had been gradually becoming aware that their civilian contractors had overstated the thermal emissions by 100 times, and the pools had been unnecessary in the first place! And so the entire cleanup effort with all the "shoveling of fuel rods" involved an emergency transition to dry storage while slapping together filtration systems to limit the radioactivity of leaking water; the pool with piles of loose rod caskets was simply plated over with steel and lead, before, a few years later, its contents were fished out and shipped to Mayak for reprocessing. A 2011 survey found a mere six fuel fragments that escaped the cranes. Other, less problematic pools were  transitioned to concrete storage cells.

    Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    The Soviets, all the way back in 1930s, began harvesting mopedantte from river sand as a potential source of thorium/uranium-233. In 1953, Kurchatov made the final decision to drop this line of inquiry, but something had to be done about 82000 tons of refined material.

    This something was Mailbox №118 in Krasnoufimsk - a strategic stockpile area of 19 wooden grain barns (with four more added in the process). Starting 1960, the mopedantte was brought in by rail, packaged in sealed bags inside wooden boxes, and then largely forgotten.

    296424_original.jpg

    297813_original.jpg

    Surprisingly, the shoddy WWII-era buildings and the somewhat slapdash packaging approach worked well enough to contain the radiation hazard. Mopedantte isn't too mobile, so no environmental contamination whatsoever has been detected over 25 years of surveillance; the threat comes mostly from the all-penetrating gammas, and radon-220 gas. The barns ultimately had sheet-metal mini-Sarcophagi built around them in the 2000s. The only real problem was utterly indirect - locals near the harvesting sites used the still thorium-rich refuse sand dumps for construction materials, necessitating a cleanup effort.

    Starting around 2020, the mopedantte is being repackaged and sold to China for rare earth element harvesting.

    https://tnenergy.livejournal.com/147073.html

    Real Life "Kerbalisms"

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    39 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

     

    'Rock Island Auction Company'

    How long until Ian McCollum photobombs The Chieftain by sheer accident? At least we know Drach and Rex aren't going to show up. Hopefully.

    Unless someone decides to auction off USS Midway.

    For Questions That Don't Merit Their Own Thread

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    25 minutes ago, monophonic said:

    Probably more in the lines of "it's an industrial explosive for a civil engineering project, not a weapon." Also I believe the treaty does not prohibit use of nukes as weapons in space, just pre-placing them in orbit for use at an indeterminate later time. Haven't done myself the reading on that one to be sure though.

    This was definitely the rationale cited within the US when the decision was made not to raise a ruckus over the Soviet FOBS.

    AI—image/text/paperclip maximizer?

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    30 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

    Meanwhile, a program for detecting essays written using AI has been created, and is apparently causing false accusations from professors around the country. Source is Reddit.

    Reminds me of the type of guys who go around social media comment sections posting "incriminating" screenshots from add-ons that identify other users as bots.

    For Questions That Don't Merit Their Own Thread

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    A bit of an orphaned piece of junk here. According to Ukrainian authorities, NASA's RHESSI has reentered over Kiev tonight, right as Russian drone attacks pick up after a lull.

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22096665/meteor-explodes-kyiv-air-raid-nasa-satellite-crash-fears/

    Apparently this is physically impossible due to orbit's inclination (off by 12⁰), but this is an explanation multiple official sources are by now citing. And it looks like a legit reentry. Basically I see no reason why they would forego Occam's Razor and just say it was a Kinzhal - they had no trouble claiming half a dozen Kinzhals used on March 9 - but the variable flashes don't seem to be an indicator of a robust, man-made reentry vehicle.

    At the very least, we're looking at an amusing case of information contagion.

    Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    1 minute ago, magnemoe said:

    In Norwegian army an M-72 was an lightweight single use RPG, M-71 was an standard army field jacket.

    The US in WWII had a lot of various very different M1s.

    1 minute ago, magnemoe said:

    Now the M-72 has an 72 mm diameter, one alcoholic found he could fit an bottle inside his M-72.

    During WWII, Soviet lend-lease stevedores spread the myth that every Sherman came with a bottle of whiskey stuffed down its (plugged-up) barrel.

    Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    Most military buffs know that the Israelis made a Kalashnikov rifle derivative (twice removed, having studied the Finnish Valmet) called the Galil.

    8033507906_2847b1b4f4_b.jpg

    However, not everyone knows that the eponymous Yisrael Galil was born Yisrael Balashnikov, and only decided to change his surname midway through the rifle's development. His employers were reportedly relieved, having been rather cross to release a Kalashnikov-derived Balashnikov rifle.

    Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted · Edited by Vanamonde

    3 hours ago, darthgently said:

    What is that word where the state and private corporations work hand in hand in a centrally planned way?   There is a word for that, dang it.

    The French would call it dirigisme.

    It's a lot softer than German Gleichschaltung and privatization. Mussolini relied heavily on the trade unions (fascio) as the sources of 'social' control.

    [snip]

     

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