Once and for all...are humans or robots better for Mars?

On Feb 4, 9:10*pm, Fred J. McCall wrote:
Walter Bushell wrote:

or a train.

And just what do you think a 2.5 pound warhead does to a TRAIN, for
God's sake?

They're much better off using something like a TBG-7V. *Shorter range
but a better warhead. *They also weigh much less, so more of them can
be hauled around.

Or just plant a couple of hundred pounds of explosives under the
tracks and wait for the train, Hogan's Heroes style. Why use a
missile at all on a train? No one's guarding all the miles of tracks.

On Feb 5, 4:47*pm, Quadibloc wrote:
On Feb 5, 2:26*pm, Pat Flannery wrote:

Hey, wait a second here...we can put the reactors into the reservoirs
behind the dams and use the water as radiation shielding, like a giant
swimming pool reactor!
Soon, the reservoirs will be so warm that you could go swimming in them
in them, and new and exciting species of fish will begin to evolve in them.
(Cut to scene of 20-foot-long Northern Pike with legs where the fins
should be crawling out of water and attacking people on the beach.) ;-)

Well, nuclear energy is expensive, while hydroelectricity is cheap, so
places with hydroelectric dams don't need nuclear power plants.

Actually, after the plant is built, nuclear energy is cheap too.
Which is exactly the case for hydroelectric. They are very similar
in that the bulk of the expense is a huge capital expenditure at the
beginning and financing for that expenditure.

Operating costs for nuclear power plants are tiny comparatively
speaking.

On Feb 6, 10:38*pm, (William December Starr) wrote:
In article ,
"Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" said:

Walter Bushell wrote:
"Sea Wasp (Ryk E. *wrote:

Yep. There's a fair number of things like that; you absolutely
need it to survive, and if you get too much, it kills you ugly.

Oxygen for one. In fact hydrogen hydroxide is one of the leading
causes of death among humans.

You mean dihydrogen monoxide? DHMO is not even REGULATED!

Man, if ever there was a perfect exemplar of Heinlein's concept
of the "funny-once joke," it's the "dihydrogen monoxide" gag.

(Yes, I said "Man" in the context of a THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS
reference. *No, I didn't even realize the potential double-meaning
until I was proof-reading the post.)

I've found that meme extremely useful when talking to my son. He
reached an age where he would repeat the same thing over and over and
over. I calmly explained that some jokes are only funny once or twice
and now I just have to say "funny once" and he stops reusing a joke on
me.

On Mon, 07 Feb 2011 08:03:01 -0700, Howard Brazee
wrote:

On Mon, 07 Feb 2011 07:04:12 -0700, Fred J. McCall
wrote:

I wonder how many people don't fly anymore because of 9/11 versus how
many people don't fly anymore because of the TSA's heavy handed search
tactics. I know of a few people who are refusing to travel on airlines
(even for business) because of TSA searches. These same people have
flown after 9/11.


Yep. People are likely to elect to drive longer distances. Not
because of 9/11, but because it takes longer to get through airports
so driving time that is acceptable goes up.

I'm in your 2nd group - but there are significant numbers who claim
that 9/11 is whey they don't fly.

It is possible that they are conflating and mean the security
measures that have gone into effect post-9/11.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

On Feb 7, 2:35*pm, trag wrote:
On Feb 5, 4:47*pm, Quadibloc wrote:

On Feb 5, 2:26*pm, Pat Flannery wrote:

Hey, wait a second here...we can put the reactors into the reservoirs
behind the dams and use the water as radiation shielding, like a giant
swimming pool reactor!
Soon, the reservoirs will be so warm that you could go swimming in them
in them, and new and exciting species of fish will begin to evolve in them.
(Cut to scene of 20-foot-long Northern Pike with legs where the fins
should be crawling out of water and attacking people on the beach.) ;-)

Well, nuclear energy is expensive, while hydroelectricity is cheap, so
places with hydroelectric dams don't need nuclear power plants.

Actually, after the plant is built, nuclear energy is cheap too.
Which is exactly the case for hydroelectric. * They are very similar
in that the bulk of the expense is a huge capital expenditure at the
beginning and financing for that expenditure.

Operating costs for nuclear power plants are tiny comparatively
speaking.

except for waste disposal, the elephant in the room that nuclear
suppoters always try to ignore

On Mon, 07 Feb 2011 07:49:12 -0700, Fred J. McCall
wrote:

Yep. People are likely to elect to drive longer distances. Not
because of 9/11, but because it takes longer to get through airports
so driving time that is acceptable goes up.

I'm in your 2nd group - but there are significant numbers who claim
that 9/11 is whey they don't fly.


Most of those people didn't fly before and are just making excuses.

It could be. But not that's not evident in the small sample of
people I know.

--
"In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found,
than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace
to the legislature, and not to the executive department."

- James Madison

Are nuclear power plants adequately protected?
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon illustrated the deadly intentions and abilities of modern
terrorist groups. These attacks also brought to surface long-standing
concerns about the vulnerability of U.S. nuclear installations to
possible terrorist attacks. The United States is home to 103 nuclear
power plants located in 31 states, generating about 20% the nation's
electricity. There are an additional 14 decommissioned plants, some of
which still contain radioactive material. Some of these plants are
located near large urban population centers. Experts consider U.S.
nuclear reactors to be “high-value targets” for a terrorist determined
to inflict large-scale death and destruction in the country.



Since the September 11 attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and other federal and
state offices have received a number of threats or scares concerning
U.S. nuclear power plants. The Air National Guard has been scrambled
at least a couple of times to keep low-flying aircraft away from
nuclear power plants, including the Vermont Yankee plant in Vermont
and the Oconee plant in South Carolina. On October 17, according to
plant officials, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in
Pennsylvania was put on the highest alert after receiving, as
described by the plant officials, a “credible threat” against the
installation. A day earlier, the city of Baltimore, MD, was put on
high alert due to a threat received against a nearby nuclear power
plant. The NRC, which is the agency responsible for monitoring the
safety of U.S. nuclear installations, has acknowledged receiving
serious threats against U.S. nuclear power plants even before
September 11. In 1999, for example, the NRC admitted to Congress that
it had received a credible threat of a terrorist attack against a
nuclear power facility.


How Safe are U.S. Nuclear Power Plants?
Despite the recent media and public interest in the topic, concerns
about the vulnerability of nuclear power plants against terrorist
attack or sabotage are not new. As early as 1982, the Argonne National
Laboratory, a Department of Energy (DOE) facility, conducted a study
detailing the likely damage that a jetliner could inflict on the
concrete containment walls protecting nuclear reactors. The study
described possible scenarios where an accidental jetliner crash could
compromise the safety of a nuclear power plant’s primary containment
wall and interior structure. The report estimated that even if just 1%
of a jetliner's fuel ignited after impact, it would create an
explosion equivalent to 1,000 pounds of dynamite inside a reactor
building. An explosion of this magnitude impacting on a containment
structure that has already been weakened by the crash of a high-speed
jetliner crash could potentially compromise the integrity of the power
plant. While the report refrained from providing detail, in these
accident scenarios, about how and when radioactivity might be
released, it stated that “the breaching of some of the plant's
concrete barriers may often be tantamount to a release of
radioactivity.” The report further stressed that U.S. nuclear
regulators might have underestimated the potential damage from such
explosions.



Following the 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing and revelations
that Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of this event, had also
plotted similar attacks against nuclear power plants, the NRC put in
place measures to protect the country’s nuclear reactors from attack
scenarios using land vehicles filled with explosives. Under enhanced
security provisions, which according to the NRC have been in place
since 1996, nuclear power plant security personnel received advanced
training, anti-sabotage procedures were implemented, and new plant-
monitoring devices were installed at many of the country’s reactors.
In 1998, the NRC completed enhanced security mechanisms for spent fuel
rod storage facilities.


Most of the existing NRC security regulations, critics claim, are
intended to protect against internal fuel damage from a small group of
well-armed intruders aided by one insider; a lone insider; or a 4-
wheel-drive land vehicle bomb. Despite the enhanced safety mechanisms
imposed by the NRC under the Operational Safeguards Response
Evaluation program, U.S. nuclear reactors remain vulnerable to
terrorist attack or insider sabotage. The NRC’s own tests have
illustrated that safety firewalls at many U.S. nuclear power plants
are penetrable by outside intruders as well as disgruntled employees
on the inside. Since 1991, despite months of advanced warning and
beefed up security, some 47% of U.S. nuclear power plants failed to
repel small mock terrorist attacks conducted by the NRC.


Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the NRC stated that
American nuclear power plants could withstand the crash of a
commercial jetliner like those used against the WTC and the Pentagon.
Within days of this assertion, however, the agency spokesmen found
themselves backpedaling and stating that before Sept. 11 the NRC had
not considered and prepared for the danger of an aerial attack on U.S.
nuclear reactors involving large commercial planes loaded with jet
fuel. The agency had no serious contingency plans for such attack
because, as the NRC spokesman Victor Dricks stated, “it was never
considered credible that suicidal terrorists would hijack a large
commercial airliner and deliberately crash it into a nuclear power
plant.”


The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has also confirmed that
current nuclear power plants are structurally vulnerable against the
September 11 attack scenario that destroyed the World Trade Center
Buildings. According to IAEA Spokesman David Kyd, "[Nuclear] Reactors
have the most robust engineering of any buildings in the civil sector
— only missile silos and nuclear bunkers are built to be tougher. They
are designed to be earthquake-proof, and our experiences in California
and Japan have shown them to be so. They are also built to withstand
impacts, but not that of a wide-bodied passenger jet full of fuel. A
deliberate hit of that sort is something that was never in any
scenario at the design stage. These are vulnerable targets and the
consequences of a direct hit could be catastrophic." In an interview
with CNN’s Moneyline program, Kyd asserted that successful use of a
large passenger airliner to attack a nuclear power plant is a rather
unlikely scenario. In the course of the same interview however, Kyd
acknowledged that, if such an attack were successfully conducted, “the
containment could be breached and the cooling system of the reactor
could be impaired to the point where radioactivity might well be set
free.”


According to experts, if a large airliner were to hit a nuclear power
plant’s containment structure, the jet engines could penetrate the
structure, leading to the introduction within the building of jet fuel
and most likely a severe explosion and fire similar to those witnessed
at the WTC and the Pentagon on September 11. Nuclear power plants are
not well equipped to deal with severe fires, known as “common-mode
failures.” Such accidents could actually cause various safety systems
to fail simultaneously, leading to a loss of coolant that cannot be
mitigated and ultimately resulting in a meltdown of the nuclear fuel.



According to Robert Alvarez, a Senior Policy Adviser to the Energy
Secretary between 1993 and 1999, while an attack or internal sabotage
in any part of a nuclear reactor could pose significant danger to
human health and the environment, perhaps the most significant
radiological consequences from acts of malice would come from
commercial reactor spent fuel pools. Spent fuel pools at many U.S.
nuclear reactors contain, on the average, about five times more
radioactivity than in the reactor core and constitute collectively the
largest concentration of radioactivity on the planet. With the
exception of a handful of nuclear power stations where the spent fuel
is stored in dry-casks, the vast preponderance of commercial spent
fuel is stored in water. In these pools, there are some 40,000 tons
of highly radioactive spent fuel in about 137,000 spent fuel rods.
Many rods, in compacted storage, are only about 9 inches apart -- one
inch more than fuel rod spacing in a reactor core. For safety
reasons, most of the spent fuel pools at commercial nuclear reactors
were never meant to hold this much-spent fuel. To get around this
problem, the NRC has required many plant operators to install
complicated equipment to maintain water chemistry and temperature and
to prevent criticalities. All of these "engineering work-arounds,"
argues Dr. Alvarez, add to the fragility of the storage system at the
country’s nuclear power plants.


The spent fuel pools at commercial reactors are mostly encased in what
the nuclear industry describes as "steel super-structures," otherwise
known as corrugated buildings. The structures protecting commercial
spent fuel pools are not as well built as primary containment
structures designed to protect reactor cores and are unlikely to
withstand a plane crash or a ground-launched missile. If a pool and
its equipment are damaged and develop leaks as a result of an attack
or internal sabotage, the fuel-cladding could undergo an exothermic
reaction and spontaneously catch fire when the water level in the pool
drops half-way, exposing the rods. This is a scenario roughly
comparable to what took place after the explosion at the Chernobyl
nuclear power plant in Ukraine on 26 April 1986, the worst nuclear
reactor accident ever recorded.

The human, environmental, and economic cost of a successful terrorist
attack or internal sabotage could potentially be as devastating as, if
not worse than, the nuclear nightmare witnessed at Chernobyl in 1986.
While the true extent of the human and environmental damage caused by
the accidental meltdown of the Chernobyl plant’s core in Ukraine is
yet to be assessed, the initial experience provides a glimpse of what
is at stake. According to one report:


“The accident at the Chernobyl plant led to the deaths of 30 power
plant employees and firemen within a few weeks, mostly from acute
radiation effects, and to the evacuation of over 100 000 people from
surrounding areas. Large parts of Belarus and Ukraine, plus parts of
the Russian Federation, were contaminated and approximately five
million people still live in areas of these countries with levels of
Cs ground deposition of more than 37 kBq/[m.sup.2]. Other countries in
the Northern Hemisphere –principally in northern and eastern Europe –
were also affected by radioactive releases from the plant, although
generally to a much lower extent than in the former Soviet Union. The
most notable finding from health studies following the Chernobyl
accident has been the excess of thyroid cancer among those exposed in
childhood in the severely contaminated areas of Belarus, Ukraine, and
the Russian Federation. About 1800 cases were reported during 1990 to
1998, with the risk appearing to be greatest for those exposed at very
young ages.”



The task of shutting down and sealing off the contaminated Chernobyl
plant in the aftermath of the 1986 accident took two years, more than
5,000 tons of material and a workforce of over 600,000. In the United
States, the destruction of the nuclear core at Three Mile Island Unit
2 on March 28, 1979, cost $1 billion to clean up, although little
radiation leaked. Huge areas of contaminated land become unsuitable
for crops, factories, and habitation.



Nuclear facilities are often located near large bodies of water, to
support water consumption or tailing ponds; they are therefore also
vulnerable to threats that could come in the form of a boat landing or
missiles or explosives lobbed from a ship.



In addition to terrorist attacks, nuclear reactors are vulnerable to
internal sabotage, which could result in devastating accidents. The
Union of Concerned Scientists has documented over 120 acts of sabotage
at US nuclear plants. In 1993, in one of these incidents, a deranged
person drove his car through the gate and crashed it into the turbine
building of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The person left his
car and disappeared for four hours while the panicked plant officials,
worried that the car contained explosive, evacuated the building.
Perpetrated mostly by disgruntled workers at every level of
employment, including control room operators and security guards,
internal sabotage is a matter of serious concern for the security of
U.S. nuclear power plants. Studies conducted by the Sandia National
Laboratories have concluded "there is still virtually no protection
from the sabotage acts of an insider.”


Existing safeguards at U.S. nuclear power plants are based on a number
of false assumptions. U.S. nuclear regulators have thus far operated
under the assumption that an attack against a U.S. nuclear power
plant, however unlikely, would be on the ground and involve a small
number of low skilled, uncoordinated people (who would not be capable
of disrupting complicated safety system at a nuclear power plant)
unwilling to take a large number of casualties. The events of
September 11 have, quite tragically, demonstrated that today’s
terrorists could be highly skilled, well coordinated, suicidal, and
determined to inflict immense death and destruction. The U.S.
government will thus be prudent to prepare for all possible attack
scenarios against the country’s 103 nuclear power plants.


Preventing a nuclear nightmare will require comprehensive short-term
and long-term solutions. In the short-term, state and federal
government officials, the NRC, and the nuclear industry must work
together to assure the security of all nuclear reactors in the country
against any possible threat. Current ad hoc security measures, such as
the stationing of U.S. National Guard members at nuclear reactors,
should be replaced by a more permanent, nuclear industry-funded and
NRC monitored security system.



The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) must require the same or
comparable security for general and commercial aviation and determine
the practicality of instituting effective no-fly-zones over commercial
nuclear power plants. The NRC should also require every nuclear power
plant currently operating under NRC license to provide a comprehensive
risk assessment of its survivability from a terrorist attack on
radiation containment and critical safety systems. The NRC must
conduct Operational Safeguards Response Evaluation (OSRE) programs at
all nuclear power plants in the country. This should include currently
operating reactors as well as the reactors that have been shutdown but
have onsite spent fuel pools that could be just as deadly weapons in
terrorists’ hands as an operating nuclear reactor. Federal officials
should conduct OSRE tests with regular frequency and any plant that
fails to meet NRC’s OSRE test criteria should be immediately shutdown.
The government should also consider stockpiling Potassium iodide, at
least in the public health care facilities located near nuclear
reactors. Although not a panacea, wide distribution of Potassium
iodide in Poland in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident is
believed to have protected thousands of people from illness. On the
other hand, an epidemic of preventable childhood thyroid cancer has
ravaged children in the Chernobyl-affected regions of Ukraine, Belarus
and western Russia where potassium iodide pills were not widely
available

On Feb 7, 4:50*pm, Howard Brazee wrote:
On Mon, 07 Feb 2011 07:49:12 -0700, Fred J. McCall

wrote:
Yep. *People are likely to elect to drive longer distances. *Not
because of 9/11, but because it takes longer to get through airports
so driving time that is acceptable goes up.

I'm in your 2nd group - but there are significant numbers who claim
that 9/11 is whey they don't fly.

Most of those people didn't fly before and are just making excuses.

It could be. * But not that's not evident in the small sample of
people I know.


well airtravel is way down since 9 11, it fell a lot then began to
recover, then the economic dump hurt air travel futher......

Yeah robotic exploration just is well impossible, and certinally not
worth even attempting. just like auto drive vehicles its
impossible.......

except for this

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=32670

In article
,
" wrote:

if your unlucky enough to need a connecting flight, the added TSA fees
get to be expensive

Huh? If you connect, you don't go through security again (except when
connecting internationally, and at rare airports that are really poorly
designed). It can actually be cheaper to get a connecting flight to
another flight rather than simply buying a ticket for that second flight
alone, as smaller airports often charge less for processing passengers.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon