lajoswinkler

First of all, Yellowstone is a national park and thus protected from industrialization. Second, it is a highly unstable part of land. Geothermal power plants are to be built in stable layers, otherwise we could just use any mellow volcano out there. Sadly, we can't. The ground shifts, pipes break, acidic gases corrode them and you can't expect to place pipes made of noble metals. There are very few places in the world where geothermal energy can be tapped as a serious source. Mostly it's just for heating water in smaller communities which is ok for the community, but negligible for a production of energy in one country.

Of course, it's not just the climate, but it's a great factor.

Uranium fission is "so 50s"? LOL France is building gen 3+ reactors, and gen 4 are already viable and ready. When will you people learn that sunlight and wind can't replace uranium and coal? Those are two different types of sources. Energy management is a bit more than just stacking enough power plants like in SimCity.

You are joking, right? Chernobyl released 5200 petabecquerels of radioactive material and there was a HUGE dump of it on Belarus. No noticeable difference outside 10 mile radius? Where did you pick up that crappy "data"? There were bans on milk throughout Europe because of Sr-90. It's true that only several thousand people had noticeable effects on their health, but there was a lot of contamination way outside country borders.

Graphite does not burn in air unless it is close or at temperature of sublimation. It does slowly oxidize, though, but that's not burning. It can't sustain the fire because the released energy is not sufficiently large to keep the temperature at the needed levels (as for example wood or wax). At first, there had to be some burning graphite because the temperatures were insane, but they quickly subsided and were replaced by ordinary fires. The materials were contaminated with fission products, so highly radioactive fumes and aerosols were seeping out all around Europe, including my home.

Actually, we can extract fissile material and it's routinely done in some countries. Plutonium and uranium aren't even separated because they don't have to be. The new fuel is called MOX (mixed oxides). You can do that on and on, every time enriching the product a bit with fresh uranium.

Just to clarify a bit - ionizing radiation rarely strikes important molecules in the body. The odds of a particle hitting exactly in the atom or even nucleus of something important, are negligible, basically zero. Most of the cell matter is water. If they collide at all (most of them, especially gamma, passes through us like we're nothing), it will be with water. Energized molecule of water will decompose into energized radicals which rip apart other water molecules and it goes on. The "wave" of ripping is spreading until the energy is lost. It can be lost by dissipation, but most often a great deal of it is spent on reactions with organic molecules. We do have specialized enzymes which deal with radicals, but sometimes they aren't nearby or the energy is too concentrated, so some of the radicals rip apart the enzyme, or even DNA. If the cell doesn't fix the damage, it either says "I'm crap, imma gona kill myself now" (apoptosis) or errors get shown as various mutations. Maybe silent mutations, maybe aggressive cancer which can be faster than your immune system and spread around.

Shock waves are disturbances in matter. Vacuum is absence of matter, therefore no shockwaves. That's why bombs in vacuum are pretty pathetic.

27.8 km away, hi-res Look closely at the noted spot. Is that a crater? I don't recall seeing any so far.

Ionizing radiation would increase slightly if a large portion of magma is gouged out because of the radioactive elements in the ground. Nonionizing radiation would fry everything and everyone.

LOL, it is an old mat, isn't it? The guy in the photo was playing with his life. Half a minute longer and he would probably be a goner. I've heard they were taking such photos at extreme hurry. Few centimetres closer and the dose is already stupendous. Approaching it at 10 cm would kill in minutes. Good thing about uranium, which is mildly radioactive, is that it is itself a great shield, better than lead, so all the fission products inside can't deliver their maximum potential. If there was just a pile of compounds of fission products, no one would be able to approach it at 10 m or more, and the air close to the surface of the pile and the compounds themselves would probably have a radioluminescent glow. The problem is that in hot and humid environments of the flooded basement the mixture of UO2, steel and other crap will react and form various salts. That's why the "foot" turned yellow. The yellow stuff is flaky and that's not something anyone wants...

Let me put this here... -snip- And we're taking a crapload of species with us, too.

Search for chernobyl model. It's a model in the lobby of the Chernobyl power plant. It's meticulously accurate, for what I've noticed while looking at the actual photos.

Nah. These things shine upon us every now and then. GPS might start working funny, that's about it.

This is the current state of the reactor building. (the two white things on the tilted Upper Biological Shield are neutron counters) The orange stuff is the solidified mass that, once molten and glowing incadescently and now pretty cool, oozed from the reactor and flowed through pipes to the basement. It is impossible to get near them without getting a lethal dose of ionizing rays. Power output of those masses probably isn't enough to power a large household, but it's enough that, when such energy is given to subatomic particles and photons, they become like little knives that wreck our cells, mostly by ionizing water inside them (ions and radicals then destroy cellular machines). Compare it to Large Hadron Collider. A single proton in the proton ray has almost the power of a small mosquito. That's ok for a mosquito, pathetic for a cat, but insane for a proton. Basically, we can do nothing with that solidified mass except entomb it. It's not radioactive as it used to be (radioiodine is gone), but it's probably still potent enough to wreck even rad-hardened electronics in robots that would have to work with it. It would have to be cut with diamond blades, and the resulting radioactive dust would coat everything and wreck the electronics.

Just to add that, contrary to the popular opinion, the average sea level doesn't have to increase dramatically in order to cause huge problems. Few centimetres, combined with extreme weather, will for example require erecting dikes around Manhattan. Otherwise the subway system will be gone, roads will be under water. Add tides to all of this, and you're in for a treat.

Atmosphere+biosphere+hydrosphere can manage natural processes because there are numerous negative feedback loops in it. Digging out coal and oil and burning enormous amounts of it in only 200 years is not something this system can manage without huge changes. It's something which doesn't happen naturally. Fossil fuels stay in the ground. There isn't a significant possibility of total destruction by positive feedback loop (like on Venus) because we're far too away from the Sun. One of the basic negative feedback loops (high albedo of water clouds) can protect us from getting too much heat. However, between climate 200 years ago and Venus there is a wide area of all kinds of climates humans can't tolerate or simply have trouble with. Just look at the climate in some African countries. It's dreadful and has been stopping certain societies to evolve socially and economically. It's too damn hot and sultry so people can't do anything. Now imagine a world where such dreadful climate exists in Europe and USA. World economy would be in huge trouble. That's where we're probably heading. Luckily for us, no one on this forum will live to see it because it takes a while to develop.

That's the highest resolution. Just open it in another tab and you'll get the original file. The forum code resized it, although only visually.

This is a truly stunning photo. It's a combination of short and longer exposure photos from CIVA system, taken on September 7th, 50 km away from the nucleus.

I've never seen something so grossly big on Gilly. LOL

This might be totally offtopic, but I didn't want to open a new thread just to post this new video. Hopefully, one day KSP will also look like this. It's Cygnus vehicle.

There must be liquid at least somewhere, on some depths. At the pressures involved, solid water ice simply won't exist.

That hole doesn't look as it has been caused by this fragment. It looks like a scaled down version of something more serious. Small fragments bursting above ground would leave wide, shallow craters, if any. Probably no crater at all, just burned area. This looks like someone has put few sticks of dinamite in the ground.

Are you implying that life is violating thermodynamics? Because it's not. It behaves 100% according to its laws. "All life is pollution" - that's a meaningless statement. It's ill-advised pseudophilosphy. Lifeforms are one of the ways matter aggregates in universe and they're in constant interaction with other lifeforms and inanimate nature. Some die, some survive, then die, too.

Just imagine the pressures on the top of those oceans. Kilometres and kilometres of ice pushing on it. Bottom of the ocean should be rich in varieties of clathrates and forms of ices. I can imagine containing stuff that looks similar to this (Mexico).