Sending Plutonium to Pluto?

[barefoot serpent]

a'int that like sending coal to Newcastle?

goldarn NASA! wastin' my hard earned money when we could be sending ice to Eskimos

[Happy Monkey]

You'd think the protestors would be happy to get as much of the stuff off the planet as possible.

[Kitsune]

Yipe!

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

You'd think the protestors would be happy to get as much of the stuff off the planet as possible.

I think their concern was it wouldn't get off the planet.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

I thought those guys were dicked up when they raised the same squawk about Cassini, and I haven't seen much to change that opinion. There are more immediate contamination concerns with the wrecks of the USS Thresher, USS Scorpion, and the Soviet November and Mike sinkings -- all in various parts of the Atlantic. For the Pacific, we have that sunken Golf SSB. I think there are still nuclear warheads down there, and guaranteed those still have plutonium. Any tritium would be mainly gone, as it's been through three or four half-lives.

The CNN.com article contains a couple of eyebrow-raising questionable statements. One is probably a typo: it'd be plutonium-239, not -238. 238 is regular uranium, the most stable/least unstable isotope, half life approximately the age of the Earth. That's right, this old world has about half the U-238 it started with down there in the core, and a lot more lead. The other is the 5000fps velocity figure for a "large-caliber rifle." No; large bore velocities are typically half that and even the fastest-stepping bullets around are small-bore critters of the .17 caliber type and are nearer 4000 fps than 5000, and then only at the muzzle -- lighter bullets slow down more swiftly from drag than heavier ones will.

This is politics, and they are banking on our ignorance -- not much to do with the reality of the matter.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

I think their concern was it wouldn't get off the planet.

I think the concern is more on the order of it getting only halfway off the planet.

[Undertoad]

Right UG. The first launch containing plutonium was questionned hard and made it into Project Censored's annual list of unreported stories. A large amount of alarm went up that NASA could poison the entire state of Florida if a Challenger-esque explosion happened. Someone finally did the math and said, no it wouldn't. But the math is rarely news-worthy. I think any panic over this is due to leftovers from the previous panic, where people heard the alarm but not the explanation. Although NASA is often a miserable failure, I'm thinkin' many engineers have anticipated the question and developed an answer and nobody much thinks to ask them. This happens often in news beacuse the general alarm is so much more interesting than the debunking.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

The CNN.com article contains a couple of eyebrow-raising questionable statements. One is probably a typo: it'd be plutonium-239, not -238. 238 is regular uranium, ....

For someone who claims in previous posts to be so intelligent, well then, UG intentionally posted lies. He posted lies because he is so intelligent as to know he was wrong. CNN was accurate. As usual, Urbane Guerilla uses partisan politics reasoning to criticize others.

Plutonium exists in many isotopes. 239 is weapons grade Plutonium. If Pu-239 was used as a battery for a New Horizon's satellite (as Urbane Guerilla so confidently proclaims), then Pu-239 would quickly degrade inside a warhead. Obviously, Pu-239 cannot be used as a spacecraft battery AND also be used in a nuclear weapon (such as Fat Boy). Urbane Guerilla - one with so much intelligence - would have obviously known that fact.

Pu-238 has long and often been used for batteries; being less stable and therefore producing energy in radiothermal generators. IOW CNN was correct. Therefore an 'always more intelligent' Urbane Guerilla lied. Something like 17 different known types of Plutonium exists including a most stable Pu-244.

Yes, there is Uranium 238 and there is Plutonium 238. A man intelligent enough to be officer material would have known that basic fact. Meanwhile UG would have you believe that all Plutonium was only 239.

Furthermore, an informed UG would have known that US Navy submarines use uranium for both propulsion and for nuclear missiles. Plutonium 239 was used for some Soviet missiles. But plutonium 239 is more difficult to isolate which is but one reason why uranium - not plutonium - is a preferred weapon grade material. UG claims that the Thresher (that had no weapons) and the Scorpion were sources of Plutonium contamination. Obviously a ship (Thresher) undergoing acceptance testing has no nuclear weapons on board. An intelligent UG - who claims decades of Naval service - knew this. Therefore, he intentionally lied. IOW either UG accuses without first thinking (due to a shortage of intelligence), or he knew he was lying to The Cellar. But then both are characteristics of people who blindly follow the political party line.

A plutonium 238 danger is the same reason why a dirty bomb is so feared. New Horizon launch has an estimated one in 350 chance of failure. This plutonium danger is why something like 18 special teams are at the Cape only for this launch. A risk undertaken because other New Horizon energy sources are just as dangerous or moreso.

But Urbane Guerilla proclaims CNN as wrong while never once proclaiming such errors from Fox News. Typical of a partisan brain that waits for instruction from a political party to know what to think.

And so we have a basic question. Is UG that dumb as to promote the party line? Or is he so corrupt as to intentionally lie to The Cellar? Maybe a partisan UG forgot how to think. He proclaimed something without instruction from his political party handlers.

[busterb]

Wonder if

'always more intelligent' Urbane Guerilla

Is smart enough to turn grass into milk?

[barefoot serpent]

What's an RTG?

a brief explanation of how spacecraft use Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators for power.

[wolf]

Scratches head ... U-235 is only extracted from Uranium ore after a long and difficult process. That's weapons grade uranium, and it's relatively scarce.

U-238, having an extra neutron thrown at it, instead of exploding, generates Plutonium-239, which is weapons grade Plutonium.

This is why only the Plutonium bomb was tested in WWII ... Plutonium was easier to make, they had enough for the test shot, and tested the less-straightforward assembly method of the Fat Man, crossing their fingers and hoping the Little Boy shotgun design would work the way the numbers said it would.

(I don't know a damn thing about physics, but I do know the history of the construction of the Bomb)

nice plutonium fact sheet for anyone who cares

[xoxoxoBruce]

Do we have an axe grinding smiley?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

So, tw, how about you consider, as I did, the contents of the reactors of the submarines I mentioned? Does or does not enriched-uranium nuclear reaction leave us with some plutonium, whether the reaction is a breeder-reactor reaction or no?

Some supporting info here, w/discussion of isotopes

Nine years' service isn't a decade, nor several decades. You are simply wrong on this point. You also may have convinced yourself that any who disagree with you are puppets of this or that political group, disapproved of by you in your obviously infinite/infinitesimal wisdom, but that makes the convinced a grand total of precisely one. Nobody's buying it, tw. Partisan politics -- well, that's all about you, kid. You're still a crank, and you still can't or won't copyedit for beans.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

And it looks like New Horizons is going to launch today... currently on a ten-minute hold(?) in its countdown, new launch time 13:50 EST, 10:50 PST, 18:50 GMT.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Wolf already posted that link, UG.