I was taught that E=(+-)MC2. (This implies antimatter)

I'm disappointed he wasn't totally clear that all he was doing was adding kinetic energy to the base equation. Of course that adds energy to the system, but the base equation is about mass/energy (how much total energy a certain resting mass contains) not all energy. Heat the mass, you need another equation. Make it radioactive, another.

Also, maybe it's been proven wrong by now, but I recall experiments showing photons do have at least a pseudo mass, proven by their ability to move objects (like the spinning black and white squares inside a vacuum toy and theoretical solar sails).

The way some people have written about "destroying" North Korea, it would make you think that we haven't been talking about a weapon of mass destruction which would indiscriminately incinerate women, children, pets, and leave swathes of radioactive land uninhabitable which would then leak mutation/radioactivity into the rest of the world's ecosystem.

Western civilisation has surely succumbed to some kind of mental sickness, turning us all into mindless clones repeating "the greater good" when we get promised large, colourful explosions. When war after war ends in disaster and further misery, we continue to talk about "bringing an end to suffering" everywhere in the world as though it's both a duty, and something we haven't catastrophically screwed up time after time. Worse is the underlying pride in that perceived duty; "We're gonna make their lives better whether they want it or not! OORAHH!"

The moralising about whether or not they deserve it is an exercise in narcissistic god complexes, covered with a veneer of regret, "oh no, we should have gone to war years ago, now it's too late, should we? shouldn't we?" Like it's great fun to discuss whether or not people should burn and rot to death over the course of weeks, from the comfort of your breakfast table back in good ole metropolis.

And if you decide to bomb? Ah well, it had to be done. Yes, it's a terrible burden, the kind of pain that people burning to death will never understand or thank us for. But we'll continue, because we're the hero they need not the one they want.

Trump's handling of the NK situation is a perfect marriage of the worst elements of the usual neoliberal approach (pro- profit & power orientated) and the thuggish exaggerated threat approach favoured by teenagers in playgrounds.

Our own countries are in an absolute SHIT state. With our indifference towards global warming, the developed nations are the most dangerous threat to life on Earth for *every* country. Why do we still have the arrogance to go around discussing how to improve countries that we've never even fucking been to?

How ironic that the part where they talk about misrepresenting studies that they reference Gary Taubes, who's made a living misrepresenting science.

It's a common thing to compare fat vs sugar to make carbs look bad. But when you actually eat proper carbs (not sugar) then carbs win every time.

These people who ate 80% carbs, and only 10% fat, and effortlessly lose weight without calorie restriction or exercise: https://www.drmcdougall.com/health/education/health-science/stars/stars-written/

Also the fat you eat really is the fat you wear. They can radioactively mark it and find it again in your body.

Despite sugar consumption going down, diabetes and heart-disease is rising too.

Regardless of any study. Try eating 80/10/10 for a few weeks, and you'll see the results for yourself. Stuff your face with this food https://www.forksoverknives.com/recipes/?recipe_type=wraps-and-burgers

There's no portion or calorie restriction. Eat yourself thin.

Edit: And yes fat does definitely contribute to weight gain and heart-disease, take it from the only cardiologist to ever reverse heart-disease https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_o4YBQPKtQ&feature=youtu.be&t=6

One of the things that makes me anti-nuclear is the radioactive and toxic waste. Weaponization, accidents and disasters all have a chance to happen, but are hypothetical. However, nuclear waste is created when things are running perfectly as planned, it's part of the plan.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-waste-management.aspx
"Direct disposal (after storage) to a geological repository. The material has very long-lived radioactivity, and will take about 300,000 years to reach the same level as the original ore.
Aqueous reprocessing to remove only uranium and plutonium. The material then only takes about 9000 years to reach the same level of radioactivity as the original ore."

I love how they say "only about 9000 years" like it's not a big deal hahah

Renewable green energy all the way :-)

Coal is responsible for many orders of magnitude more deaths and radioactive emissions than all nuclear incidents combined. But people don't care about simple things like facts or numbers. Talking about renewables when a significant portion of baseload power is still produced by coal is pointless. Let people have their feel good green tech (made in China, powered by a lot of coal of course ; ), but replace coal with modern nuke.

Denying the place of recent generation nuclear power as a viable strategy of supplying cleaner baseload power is much like denying man made climate change. Fucking moronic.

Thorium salt reactors do produce waste, but it's incredibly safe compared to breeder/lwr reactor byproducts. In fact, you can introduce older reactor waste in to the liquid mix in small amounts and the LFTR will break it down to less harmful components by accelerating decay in the core.

http://lftrnow.com/

"LFTRs can also burn radioactive “waste” we are currently storing, made from the LWR units of today. We could actually reduce our radioactive waste using LFTRs and other Molten-Salt Reactors (MSRs) (more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1fqB6p9pgM)."

So LFTR is a strategy for both power supply and cleaning up existing waste storage. Who'da thunk it??

Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To release all the energy you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you abuse it
Or use it for good?

They've armed the weapon
Countdown clock is set and
J. Robert Oppenheimer is sweatin'
Eyes are red and he's nervous
Cause on the surface this is armageddon
The shock bomb, but we're set upon and threatened
And with no sound the whole Alamogordo ground
Is glowing and cowed under one smouldering cloud
He's choked and wowed, everybody's open-mouthed
And over the ground the shock front blows, kapow!
Snap back to the alchemy
Hope before tragedy
Showed with bold math that we broke the whole atom
We choked; controlled action with poles of cold cadmium coat
To go capture neutrons and slow fracture
We broke, postponed that and we chose to go fashion
A most radioactive plutonium gadget then
Fat Man and Boy and Enola goes laughin'
As Nagasaki is blown and Hiroshima's blasted

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

Neutrons escaping from a source radiating
Merge and start atoms shaking; they begin
To unglue toward a decreased order
Entropic force distorts em
And supercharged with loads of protons they can only go farther
Cold war grows hotter--exothermal--Colorado to Joe Stalin
Coast to coast holes; silos but there's no farmer
Toe-to-toe drama
NATO and Warszawa in co-assured trauma
The globe groans everyone knows there's no calming
So show your foes and implode your core column
Quid pro quo Castle Bravo for Tsar Bomba
And move on and leave atolls exposed to gross doses of old fallout;
Slow-to-go toxins in shoals and so though we explode them no longer
Still the proof lives on in the blue lagoon water, father

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

When war games hit the stage of a gluon's rage
There's a military boot on the new doc's page
We were playing in the beginning, but grew up strange
Making radar and missiles, and new bombs blazed
And we kept grinding the lensed sights for the next sniper
Best believe son it'll pay to design fighters
All the gains of science analyzed by the
Man provide plans for sarin and cyanide
And our hands are blighted by crying
Eyes when dying lands are slammed if our grants expand the fire brighter
And there's no jury there's no sublime righter
This is our fight
And these minds are all ours so protect your pia mater
Try to feed and water good, seed trust, flee dishonour
Gotta be clean being Apollo stead of Vietnam and
Lay the armour down and be the one to stand up
And lead us on the trail of Spock
We'll elevate these motley progeny
To a future in a safer spot, an irrigated plot
Homicide a way forgot
Success is a lack of military options
Failure's not
Become a lover of a great and cosmic goal
We cannot condone these terror plots
So here we go it's our shot
Feel frail or not
This is the only world and humanity that we got

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

You gotta make your own mind up, man.

Hemp for victory!

First I've heard of it being used for toxic waste and radiation remediation, but the idea that you could take the radioactive/toxic hemp and make diesel seems scary, wouldn't the exhaust still be radioactive or toxic?

Here is the problem, Mr. Schlosser is a journalist, not a Nuclear Scientist. He does not understand, or has chosen to ignore for propaganda reasons, that an unarmed warhead is EXTREMELY unlikely to perform the exact sequence of events that need to take place to have a nuclear reaction happen.

Yes, he is fully correct in that we have had numerous 'butt-clenching' moments in which we could have started WW3 due to a malfunction or human error. But in the other cases he mentions, such as the bombs that landed on Spain, the lightning bolt on the tower, and the wrench on the rocket, the chance of the warhead going up while being unarmed is infinitesimal. They simply don't go 'boom' because of a collision or explosion. Now you could have a 'dirty bomb' type incident where the radioactive materials could be spread and come into contact with humans, but that is about it.

The cases that have been officially listed as Broken Arrows were because they involved an active bomb, like the one in Florida. Everything else he mentions in this video is his 'belief' and is conjecture.

Now, before I get unloaded on, I wish we didn't have nuclear weapons. I don't agree with Trump that we should renew the arms race, I think he is nuts since we have more than enough weapons to blanket the cities of the world more than a couple of times. If you add all the nukes from the Big 3 (USA/Russia/France...yes, France) there are enough to cover every single inch of the world.

The problem is, who bells the cat? If we give up all of our weapons, we are at risk. I wish we weren't, but we would be. If we bring down our numbers gradually, there are still other countries that may not, like North Korea. How do we trust the other country is actually following through? In a perfect world, we would all lay down our weapons and sing kumbaya, but as Heinlein wrote: "...Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."

PS...Yes, I know Starship Troopers is a controversial novel with overtones of Militarism and Fascism. However, there are quotes that ring true no matter what 'ism' people attach to the overall story. If you doubt that, look at the utter disbelief and depression that overcame liberals when Trump won. "He simply was supposed to, it was impossible, not like this, we have no hope, etc" were the feelings of the people who gave him no hope of winning. I, having lived and read enough to get a fair picture of how fucked up we are as a species, had little doubt he could pull it off. We elected a former Wrestler as governor, a former actor as governor, and a former actor as President. We overlook mass genocide in other countries. We ignore climate change. We spend hundreds of billions on defense and less than 10 on space exploration, all the while living on a planet that is already critically overpopulated (and is growing almost exponentially).

The primary goal of the NSC is to prevent the reactor complex from leaking radioactive material into the environment and the secondary goal is to allow a future partial demolition of the old structure.

I looked, and the mapping shown is incredibly idealize/generalized estimates, not actual mapping in detail that would give useful information. The only thing actually mapped is surface springs.

But this isn't radon. It's particulate contamination suspended in water. I'm pretty sure it doesn't act as you suggest, or the pond would not retain radioactivity, it would quickly release it to the environment. Since the pond was not 'capped', I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it's fairly stable, otherwise they would be contaminating the area with radioactive air constantly...which would never be allowed today.

To answer your question in the description, the waste water contains phosphogypsum which is a radioactive byproduct from the production of phosphate (sulphuric acid is reacted with phosphate rock to produce phosphoric acid used for fertilizer production).

The radioactivity comes from naturally occurring uranium and radium in the phosphate ore. Central Florida phosphogypsum averages 26 pCi/g radium, and the EPA prohibites its use, but further north in Florida the phosphogypsum has an average concentration of less than 10 pCi/g radium which can be used as an agricultural amendment, but for no other use.

Also, the European news that I saw reported 980 million litres of contaminated water which is only slightly higher than the 225 million u.s. gallons reported elsewhere.

Did some more digging.

We breath an average of 11,000 litres of air per day: https://www.sharecare.com/health/air-quality/oxygen-person-consume-a-day

That amounts to 11m^3 per day. So if you lived in a basement with the highest acceptable radon levels, you'd take in 11*150Bq worth per day, or 1650Bq per day. If the prior Idaho reference numbers follow, then living in a basement on the upper limits today is the same as drinking a kg of this undiluted waste water daily.

From that angle it looks like the 'radioactivity' problem is pretty tiny, given that even undiluted you have to drink a fair bit to match current standards for daily radon exposure.

Important to have an actual measure of radioactivity. There's a pretty wide spread between banana level and chernobyl level.

I haven't been able to find a number for this exact plant, but the same process in Idaho listed here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0734242X05800217

This article states the highest radioactivity concentration from at 1780 Bq/kg primarily from Radon.

For reference, the potassium in Bananas makes them radioactive with a concentration of 82 Bq/Kg. So from that perspective, it's 20 times more radioactive than that same amount of Banana pulp.

I'm not sure how to directly translate, but the American standard for Radon in basements is set as being lower than 150 Bq/m^3. So your typical basement already is deemed acceptable when every 10 m^3 of basement air holds as much radioactive radon as a kg of the waste being discussed. The acceptable basement standard unquestionably takes up a much larger space, but it's mass would drastically less. I'm not an expert, but from that it almost sounds like a coin toss to whether breathing air at the highest threshold or drinking this stuff undiluted is worse for you in the long haul.

Coal is massively dirty, but even if you do run it through clean burning plants, the main danger is not the smoke.

Coal contains trace amounts of radioactive materials. Depending on the 'dirtiness' of the coal, the true problem is that by mining it or burning it, you separate those trace amounts. Larger amounts of coal ash or coal tailing(s) from even your average coal will give a geiger counter fits.

Do you want to know the fun part? The coal industry has buried studies and lobbied for legislation that makes TENORMS (technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material) unable to be regulated the same as any other radioactive waste. So if you live in a coal producing or burning area that creates ash or tailing ponds, you can be sucking up the same amount of alpha particle radiation as if you were in the vicinity of a nice large pool of nuclear waste.

Ain't coal grand?

Optical lasers produce non-ionising radiation, and do not use any radioactive materials to produce the laser light, so he cannot get "radiation poisoning." Only burns from direct contact with the beam or eye damage from direct or reflected light are possible. Also as I think he mentions, at these power levels, even diffuse reflections are likely to cause eye damage, in other words it doesn't take a mirror, almost any surface will do.