NASA's Plutonium Supply Dwindling; ESA To Help 173
astroengine writes "NASA's stockpile of the plutonium isotope Pu-238 is at a critical level, causing concern that there won't be enough fuel for future deep space missions. Pellets of Pu-238 are used inside radioisotope thermoelectric generators (or RTGs) to generate electricity for space probes traveling beyond the orbit of Mars — solar energy is too weak for solar arrays at these distances. Blocked by a contract dispute with Russia to supply Pu-238 and the US Department of Energy that has not been granted funds to produce more of the isotope, NASA lacks enough of the radioisotope to fuel the future joint NASA-ESA mission to Europa. However, the head of the European Space Agency has announced that they have plans to commence a new nuclear energy program to alleviate the situation."
Recycle Nukes? (Score:2)
Pardon my ignorance and possible first post - but couldn't NASA just recycle some retiring nuke warheads for plutonium?
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:5, Informative)
Pardon my ignorance and possible first post - but couldn't NASA just recycle some retiring nuke warheads for plutonium?
Oh, yes, any moron in Slashdot is a rocket scientist.
No, they can't. Nukes have Pu-239 (the fissile isotope), and they need Pu-238 (the alpha emmiter).
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Isn't there Pu around Uranus?
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pardon my ignorance and possible first post - but couldn't NASA just recycle some retiring nuke warheads for plutonium?
Oh, yes, any moron in Slashdot is a rocket scientist.
No, they can't. Nukes have Pu-239 (the fissile isotope), and they need Pu-238 (the alpha emmiter).
Apparently actual Slashdot rocket scientists are also assholes.
- Not GP, but a rocket scientist who thought it was a reasonable question.
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Luckily another contaminant, U-236, is also formed when the small amount of contaminant U-235 present in the initial yel
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Troll? It's a fact. And the dick part? AC was being a dick. Another fact.
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:4, Interesting)
A more pressing question in my mind is why aren't there any private companies making it for NASA? Does the NRC prohibit private companies from producing it?
I'm sure somewhere in the US exists a company with the technical expertise and equipment to make it. And when I'm pretty sure companies are still willing to cash government checks... I guess I don't understand "shortages" in synthesized isotopes. I heard a while back there is another isotope synthesized in Canada that we have to buy because there isn't enough in the US or something like that. I don't get it.
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And when I'm pretty sure companies are still willing to cash government checks... I guess I don't understand "shortages" in synthesized isotopes. I heard a while back there is another isotope synthesized in Canada that we have to buy because there isn't enough in the US or something like that. I don't get it.
There are several situations like that in the US. Sure, private companies could make synthesized isotopes. We have the brainpower and tools to do it. Unfortunately we have ming-numbingly huge government red tape that gets in the way. Fines, fees, inspections, reports, surveys, permits, clearences, investigations, and on and on and on. I mean--you don't really expect the government would just /let/ someone start manufacturing nuclear anything for any reason, do you?
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Uh, Bechtel makes Nucular reactors [bmpc.com]
Yeah--and they have legions of people devoted to dealing with the bureaucratic red tape required by the DoE and other federal agencies. And yeah, that includes lobbyists too.
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what a load of crap. do people actually believe your nonsense????
What crap? Are you saying the government doesn't have volumes of regulations, requirements, and permits to obtain, produce, handle, sell, and/or export nuclear material?
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:5, Informative)
We only made it in the US at Hanford and Savannah River, both of those are shut down now.
It's very toxic, very hard to work with and very flammable and very much controlled, so thats why no private companies are in the market to produce it.
To produce Pu-238 you produce a ton of weapons grade plutonium, do we really need more of that crap churned out?
http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/plutonium.htm [fas.org]
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Can the weapons-grade plutonium be refined into something safer or less... weapons-grade?
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Yes, it can be used as Pu-239 in a reactor.
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To produce Pu-238 you produce a ton of weapons grade plutonium, do we really need more of that crap churned out?
In a word, yes.
The US is the only major nuclear power which can't produce new plutonium pits for nuclear weapons. Further, the breeder reactors that produce plutonium could also recycle spent fuel from conventional plants into new, useful fuel.
At some point sanity will prevail and we'll vastly expand our use of nuclear energy for both power generation and space travel. At the moment though, we're stuck in enviro-Luddite hell.
This November may mark a turning point towards rationality on a lot of levels.
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Umm, because the production and manufacturing processes for Plutonium are really expensive and are really toxic?
Do you know anything about Plutonium?
Some tidbits about the most toxic metal on the planet.
"It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen and silicon. When exposed to moist air, it forms oxides and hydrides that expand the sample up to 70% in volume, which in turn flake off as a powder that can spontaneously ignite."
"Reactor-grade plutonium from spent nuclear fuel contains various isotopes of plutoniu
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Some tidbits about the most toxic metal on the planet.
I would suspect that Polonium (you know, what the Russians used to kill Litvinenko) is a mite more toxic.
As far as ingestion in particular is concerned, there is also the caffeine challenge [atomicinsights.com]. Granted, caffeine is not a metal, but one wouldn't usually consider it very toxic.
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The simple fact is that we used to handle this FAIRLY safely. Yes, there were accidents and pollution. But, we know better now and how to deal with it.
At the least, we need a small reactor for NASA. In reality, we need a small reactor to make certain that we never lose the capability and can improve the process.
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Recycle Nukes? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fucking plutonium. You can't just make it. Hippies freak shit when we try to build an oil refinery, much less refine nuclear material.
But for some reason they don't mind turning on the lights in their home with electricity provided by coal fired generators that put more radioactive particulates in the air than any nuclear plant could.
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The coal plants are far away, like the coal which powers them. Coal-fired power plants have no place in the popular imagination (any more), so public awareness is low.
They don't bother the hippies any more than mountaintop removal mining, which only displaces Red State hicks they despise anyway.
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Hippiecrits.
Brilliant!
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Where's the "Thumbs Up" button when you need it?
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A more pressing question in my mind is why aren't there any private companies making it for NASA?
Maybe the Boy Scouts can help out . . . ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn [wikipedia.org]
I mean, they help old ladies over the street, and good stuff like that . . . maybe there is a merit badge for producing Pu-238 for NASA . . . ?
There is no "market" for it (Score:2)
You can't buy it on the private market because there is no market for it. This shit's only useful when you don't risk poisoning anyone, and when you can't use solar panels or any form of fossil fuel. In other words, it's only useful when you're as far away as Mars, and there isn't much commercing done about there.
That's what I'd call "synthetized" (Score:2)
It's created as a result of deliberate human intervention instead of being found as-is in nature. It's synthetic.
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Pu-238 is the isotope used for RTGs. 239 is the isotope used for weapons. Different type, so that wouldn't work, as much as it would be neat if it would.
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Your ignorance is pardonable. Your failure to Google and remedy it is not. :)
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What I can't find, and might be somewhat useful for a debate on the matter, is a table of the various isotopes of the elements and the decay heat of each.
You may have heard of that newfangled thingee called "google". When I send the words "table of nuclides" into it and hit the button "I feel lucky", it ports me to http://atom.kaeri.re.kr/ [kaeri.re.kr] , which appears to have all the data you're asking for.
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What I can't find, and might be somewhat useful for a debate on the matter, is a table of the various isotopes of the elements and the decay heat of each.
this book you seek is published by CRC. It is a big thick book which you will find in many larger university libraries.
Solution Right Here (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Solution Right Here (Score:5, Funny)
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It's considerably safer to put plutonium in orbit than your chili.
It's really *not* the chili, it's the resulting output.
Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
NASA is launching quite soon a spacecraft to Jupiter [wikipedia.org] relying on solar panels. And the ESA spacecraft part of mentioned joint mission will also rely on solar panels [wikipedia.org]. Seems they have improved quite a bit / I wouldn't be too surprised at seeing, eventually, some mission to Saturn relying on them.
Not saying that we don't need RTGs, we do of course (for further missions or more complex ones; using solar panels whenever possible saves RTGs for those...), but part of the premises of TFS is not terribly accurate.
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
Even on Mars, the MER rovers use RHUs (radioactive heating units) to keep the electronics warm during the Martian night and winter. Ditto for most any mission going beyond the Earth's orbit, especially for landers (which see night).
An orbiter can conceivably be pointed to the sun, but the solar constant is pretty low. Jupiter is 5 AU away from the sun, so the solar constant is 1/25th of Earth: a monster 40 Watts/square meter. Compare this to radiation cooling to cold sky which is about 100W/square meter. Better have pretty good insulation, which takes volume and mass, both in short supply on a spacecraft.
Juno has enormous solar panels, which raise all sorts of practical problems.
You've got to decide whether you want to burn your mass allocation on solar panels or on science instruments.
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Re:Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
It'd have to be one damn beefy laser, since at the distances we're talking, even a very tightly focused laser beam has diverged to a huge diameter. A ridiculously harder problem than hitting a space elevator climber. Tens of thousands of kilometers, vs about 600 million kilometers at the closest. I don't think it's practical at this time to beam power from earth to Jupiter. Solar power would be way stronger than anything we could provide.
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Uhm, yeah, nobody said about missions which have to survive nights (or even all orbital ones)
Your comparison of received and radiated energy glances over the fact that body of spacecraft is quite compact vs. solar panels being secondary structures outside of it. Juno most likely still has radiators to get rid of waste heat.
The decision to use solar panels was a practical one - you shouldn't use at will RTGs which are in very short supply, if there's alternative available for given science objectives (one th
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, it is important to point out that Juno [wikimedia.org] is the first attempt at traveling to Jupiter using solar panels instead of RTGs... That is quite an engineering feat in and of itself. The story poster's statement of solar energy being too weak for solar arrays beyond the orbit of Mars will likely be disproved by Juno in the coming years.
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Well, yes they are. Juno (the NASA probe) could settle for solar panels and a somewhat reduced science mission precisely because solar cells have improved - but it still takes a large and heavy array and makes considerable impact on operations. They'd much prefer to use RTGs, but the fuel simp
Solution to the problem is simple... (Score:5, Funny)
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Missed Opportunity? (Score:2, Insightful)
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NASA is just holding out until they can buy what they need from Iran.
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The US was in on the industry, remember the entire Nuclear Weapon Complex the US had/has from Savannah River to Oak Ridge to Pantex to Rocky Flats to Los Alamos to Hanford?
Plutonium is a pain to produce, clean up and deal with.
Re:Missed Opportunity? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Missed Opportunity? (Score:4, Interesting)
That in itself doesn't say very much, does it?
Have you ever seen a typical home that hasn't been touched since the late 40's-50's? It had a refrigerator, a radio everyone huddled around, a single light bulb and one outlet in each room (there being very few rooms to begin with), if you were fortunate--two outlets if you're very lucky. They didn't have central air, or big screens TVs and computers humming along all day, burning through thousands upon thousands of kWh.
I see that 10% number float around from time to time. Don't know where it comes from, or if it's remotely accurate at all--but if I had to guess: should we undertake *ALL* of that energy research and weapon building today, it would be dwarfed compared to the country's power bill for A/C alone.
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I'm living in one of those houses, built in 1950. I still need to do a bit of upgrading. Two ungrounded outlets in each room on opposite walls. Contains the following branch circuits in original fuse box:
The house was heated with an oil burner that circulated hot air by convection. The power usage expectations are so low that basically the whole house is powered off of two 15Amp circuits and the
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, I've seen all that before, and worse. My house was actually built in 1919 (it was a very fancy house for the age), and although it was planned infinitely better than most 50's houses I have worked on, the electrical is basically completely backwards. Every switch was switching the neutral. Every polarized outlet was wired opposite the way it should be done. I've yet to figure out how this one three-way circuit actually managed to work (4 pole switches?!).
The main (well, only) branch circuit looked like
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Yep, what I describe is a pretty typical post WWII house and what you describe is fairly common for turn of the century (although the wiring to two parallel fuses is interesting...). In your case, if you didn't have bare conductor on ceramic insulator, you were lucky.
Switching neutrals in near turn of the century wiring wouldn't surprise me. Some of what you found were updates done by people who didn't know what they were doing -- the polarized plugs, for example, aren't original. Previous owners of my
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There are a couple problems with that.
1. The only efficient manner in which to make useful quantities of Pu-238 is by irradiating Neptunium-237, which is found in "spent" reactor fuel in low quantities (~0.7%). This process takes quite awhile. If we started irradiating the Neptunium right now, we wouldn't see any usable amounts of Pu-238 for at least 5 years.
2. Creating Pu-238 also results in greater quantities of Pu-239, which is the type you'd use in a nuclear weapon. This is a security concern for obv
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Civ IV (Score:5, Funny)
Cultural Victory? Nope.
Diplomatic Victory? Nope.
Space Race Victory? Nope.
That leaves Domination Victory and Conquest Victory.
Decisions, decisions.
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No cultural victory? Really? You can't walk down the street in Mumbai without seeing bootleg DVDs of Hollywood movies, TV shows and American pop music.
Obama might be a popular fellow, but Lady Gaga probably commands twice his worldwide audience.
NASA had another option in 1981 (Score:5, Interesting)
Never heard anything more about it, anyone else know more?
Re:NASA had another option in 1981 (Score:5, Informative)
Using a gamma emitter (rather than an alpha emitter like Pu-238) means you need A LOT more shielding (and thus more weight and volume) to prevent it from screwing with the electronics and instruments.
Re:NASA had another option in 1981 (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure that given some thought a workable solution could be found. I'd still like to know if anyone has heard of any work being done or did it get buried for some reason?
Re:NASA had another option in 1981 (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point, but considering that the electronics are alerady radiation hardened against gamma ray, alpha particles and cosmic rays of much higher power I would really be surprised if much extra shielding would be needed.
That depends on how much the RPG contributes to the radiation environment of the spacecraft. Keep in mind that it is a nearby source that will be irradiating the rest of the spacecraft for the life of the mission.
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Why? They became comfortable with designing a system around something specific. If they were to have to use another gamma emitter like Uranium, Cesium or any number of any things, it would mean that they would have to do some work.
Where did the balls in America go? A challenge like this used to be trivial. Don't have a certain kind of gamma emitter? No problem! Build a better mousetrap!
Have you ever read "Foundation" by Asimov? (Score:4, Interesting)
At the beginning, where Isaac describes the slowly decaying Galactic civilization; that's what the United States reads like more and more.
The signs are everywhere: Leadership that's seriously out of touch with the people; infrastructure that's still good but getting worse; dwindling education, increasing racial tension and population segregation; etc.
We remember the good old days, and the good old days WERE brighter. Technology overall still advances, but what's not advancing is our position in it. Thanks to a distinctly anti-intellectual culture and an increasing distrust of "da gubbmint" combined with a ridiculous war, our economy is in a shambles, our regulations are a mess, and our population often seems more interested in "being heard" than listening long enough to identify the problems.
I find it sad to see our nation on the decline.
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I noticed the signs back in the 80's, I could see the US was near its peak and have been watching its slow glide down. Just like every "Great Nation" since earliest history, Aztec, Inca, Greek, Nubia, Mesopotamia, Babylon, etc., etc..
GREAT SCOTT!!! (Score:3, Funny)
We've got 5 more years, someone at NASA better be working on Mister Fusion. And hovercars.
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What happened? I remember in 1985, Plutonium was available in every corner drug store, but in 2010, it's a little hard to come by.
Notta Problem (Score:2)
I'm sure N. Korea or Iran would be happy to sell us some.
Reactors (Score:3, Insightful)
Shouldn't we be building breeder reactors that make Plutonium? It might help with global warming by retiring some caol fired power plants.
Fast breeder plutonium reactors = sick joke (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know why NASA doesn't just buy some left over stuff from the UK, France, South Africa, Israel, Egypt, hal
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You are quite wrong. The Russian BN-600 sodium cooled fast breeder has been in operation since 1980. The larger BN-800 is being built in Russia and a joint venture has been established to build two in China.
India plans to bring it's first domestically designed fast breeder reactor on line in 2011. With plans for 4 more by 2020.
There are a number of projects in the US to develop small modular fast reactors - US Dept of Energy SSTAR being one of them.
Breeder reactors (fast uranium or possibly thermal mo
None of that is plutonium is it? (Score:3, Informative)
I suppose people can always pretend I've given the wrong answer by changing the question, but I'll assume it wasn't deliberate because that would be extremely childish.
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I don't know what your point is, but for example EBR-II and its derived Integral Fast Reactor can burn uranium and/or plutonium and breed plutonium from fertile uranium. GE Hitachi have a commercial design called the SPRISM.
Your claims about no new breeder reactors of the with a uranium/plutonium fuel cycle since 1968 are just plain wrong.
Re:None of that is plutonium is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
New plutonium? Please also note that EBR-II is a late 1950's design that went live in 1965 and ACTUALLY RAN ON URANIUM.
If you are going to try to correct people please learn about your subject matter.
Liquid sodium reactors are a dead end technology until somebody solves the problem of liquid metal embrittlement in areas with a lot of voiding from neutron damage. If you have an answer to that, then sure go ahead and push that wheelbarrow - but for everyone else the lessons from the 1970s were very clear that it's either a roadblock to overcome before any more reactors of that type are built or a dead end.
I really wish nuclear advocates would learn about the new and interesting stuff instead of the dreams of the 1950s.
Time to buy from Canada (Score:2)
But we're magnaminious, and we have the second largest supply in the world.
And the moral high ground
Does the US still have working atomic bombs? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a real question as to whether the US still has working nuclear weapons. [defense.gov] Much of the production capability was shut down years ago. For over a decade, the US had lost the capacity to make nuclear "pits". They used to be made at Rocky Flats, which shut down in 1993. Los Alamos now has a limited production capability for new nuclear pits, but no pit made there has been tested in an actual detonation. The complete ban on nuclear testing, even underground, means there's some doubt about whether new physics packages actually work. Current practice is to build duplicates of designs from the 1970s.
One of the non-radioactive materials for H-bombs is out of production, and attempts to make more of it have not been successful.
There's also a tritium shortage. Tritium, with its short half-life, has to be replaced periodically. That's getting to be a problem.
The second team is building these things today. Early atomic bombs were designed by Nobel prizewinners. Today, the people involved are far less qualified and not very motivated. Almost everybody who ever designed a bomb that went off has retired. There's a proposal to design a "dumber bomb" with a very long shelf life, but without testing, nobody really has confidence that would work.
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Please, that's so unlikely as to be laughable. Obviously the US Ministry of Defense isn't content with its 1+ trillion USD budget, and is pushing for a couple extra hundred billions.
This has to be true. After all, we've never heard of a government spending a trillion dollars without getting quality results [wikipedia.org] for the money!
Critical level (Score:5, Funny)
They've got a critical amount of Pu-238 and they want more?
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I see what you did there.. =^)
Civilian vs. Military demand for RTGs (Score:4, Insightful)
The US has been using up its existing stockpiles of Pu-238 to build RTGs for a mixture of civilian deep space projects and black intel operations such as non-solar-powered stealth spy satellites and seabed-emplaced submarine monitoring stations. The Russians agreed to sell the US some Pu-238 under a licence that prevented it being used for military functions but they shut that down when it became obvious the US was reallocating most if not all of its home-grown stockpile to the military side of things. Like oil Pu-238 is fungible and the Russian supply of Pu-238 was effectively enhancing US military capabilities.
No big deal... (Score:3, Insightful)
...you don't need Plutonium to make Muslims feel good about themselves, right?
I mean, since this is possibly NASA's FOREMOST mission: ... and math and engineering,"
"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- (Obama) charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science
Transuranics for happiness: (Score:2)
Oh, I think 20 kg of high purity Pu-239 would make some individual Muslims feel very good. Specifically, Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. It's not HEU, but it'll sure do in a pinch.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a whole host of others might be less than thrilled by it, though.
They reassigned it to black projects (Score:3, Interesting)
The agency in question is probably the NRO. So basically, it has gone from NASA into the NRO black space project.
Vagaries of geo-politics (Score:2)
This is why it's risky to rely solely on single ouside suppliers for critical items. The funding for new Pu-238 production by DOE has been held up at least in part due to the availability of it for sale by the Russians.
It's a good source and a reasonable solution, provided unforeseen problems like the contract trouble that's stopped us buying it don't come up. But, in world affairs, they sometimes do.
Unfortunately, it would take several years to start producing it again even if funding were available now.
Si
Not even Pu? (Score:2)
Remember, the US government cancelled the Constellation program and post-Shuttle manned spaceflight capabilities, with the hopes that they'd *buy seats* on Russian spacecraft.
And now they can't even agree on buying some plutonium from Russians?
How many people really think that buying those seats on Russian shuttles will happen without any problems?
Face it, America gave away its manned spaceflight. Making deals with Russia can't be relied on -- even small things like plutonium can't be reliably obtained, let
Re:Maybe the Muslims will help us out... (Score:5, Insightful)
You have issues dude. I identify myself as Muslim and it's a creed, but science-wise "Muslims" (Middle East) have lost it (i.e. stop being mad about it).
Yes, Algebra and Algorithm are Arabic words traced to the amazing Mohammed Ibn Musa Al-Khawarizmi (who was "Persian" btw, yes, the people we intend to bomb), and f#@king YES, India was there first.
But that doesn't take from him (or his civilization/creed) the right to call the names.
(For the purposes of this post, I will interchange creed and civilization, even though they're far-far-FAR from being the same thing).
It's a phenomenon Neil Degrasse Tyson describes as "Naming Rights" (I'm no scholar, so maybe it has another name). But basically, when a nation/region excels and innovates, they get the right to name their discoveries and they effectively "own" them.
Why is the rest of the world using .hk, .uk and .whatever domains? Why is the US the only country that enjoys .gov, .mil and .edu without a trailing .us?
Because, this s$#t was invented here, and "we"* earned it.
Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Pluto.. all Greek mythology names, why? They were "it"** back in the day.
So, what happened to the Muslim world? Well, Al-Ghazali [wikipedia.org] decided to take them 300 years back into oblivion.
No scientist/mathematician/programmer/thinker/etc. would ever express prejudice. Empathy and sorrow for ignorance, maybe, but not hatred.
Now... where are we? We have racism (been to AZ lately?), prejudice (Muslim/Jew/*INSERT RELIGION* haters) and a whole lot more.
A lot of Americans do not believe in evolution or other scientifically proven facts. We kill our enemies for our "god-given" rights and we (the majority of us) want religion taught in school.
I wonder if GWB was our "Al-Ghazali", or maybe it will be Obama. Whomever it is, we must stop it and freaking move forward. Otherwise, we're fscked. We'll be the nation that our grandchildren and history talks about as "they invented XYZ, but muhahaha, look at them barbarians." And the elite nations at the time will nuke the ish out of them for being so backwards.
I want us to prevail, but with attitudes like yours and the extreme ignorance level the populace have, I'm afraid it's already too late.
I better start learning Chinese (Ni Hao) :(
And finally; to be on-topic; NASA needs to get some more of that "shiz-nit" :P
----
* I'm kind of one of you("us") now!
** A.K.A. The $h#t
Re:Maybe the Muslims will help us out... (Score:4, Funny)
Don't care if it's off-topic, great reply man! Far too often we, as Americans, take our issues with policy and political leadership and smear it across whole swaths of culture and people. I take extreme issue with those that would cause others undue harm, especially terrorist and despot regimes, but for God's sake I don't hold their people/citizens entirely responsible unless they personally participate and prove that they deserve it.
Re:Maybe the Muslims will help us out... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks! and I whole-heatedly agree with you!
I recently watched The Unthinkable [netflix.com] (if you haven't watched it, it's a great movie), and as to not spoil it for anyone, all I can say is that I was sitting at the edge of my seat and rooting for Samuel Jackson throughout the movie.
Bin Laden is an a$$hole, and the 72 virgins (myth) will be well-hung top-men scavenging his and his goons' cavities while slow-roasting them to perfection (yes I hate them as much as you do, probably even more so).
The stories that have been hitting Slashdot about censorship in Pakistan and other Islamic countries gathered quite a few "look at them backwards Muslims", instead of generating empathy about the sad state of these countries.
I should know, I lived in a couple of them growing up. People are afraid for their lives and cannot speak up. People can't discuss politics in coffee shops, because that guy smoking hooka is new and he might be from internal affairs, and if he marks you, your family won't even know what happened to you (Egyptian NSA-equivalent calls it "sending someone behind the sun").
America used to be the great nation everyone there talked about. It was wonderland, where you can criticize leaders and "be alive the next day". Where your creed and background did not matter, only what you knew and what you can do.
But somehow when we started meddling with their affairs, we became the villain. There's an Arabic saying that goes something like "Me and my brother would fight my cousin if he does us wrong, but if a stranger comes in, my cousin and I will team up".
The solution is _not_ to go into these countries with military force to "spread freedom", the solution is to stand up against tyranny with words, show them an example of democracy over here and not to co-operate with their regimes to oppress people.
Final words: Any kind of zealotry (religious/nationalistic/software) is ignorant, and I hope that I see a world without hatred before my time is up here. I doubt it, but I'm still an optimist inside and one can dream.
Re:Maybe the Muslims will help us out... (Score:4, Insightful)
Empathy? According to prevailing beliefs (held by all but ignorant red-staters), the state of those countries is what the people of those countries want, and for Americans to feel that this is wrong is to be disrespectful of Islamic culture.
That assumes
1) The people can listen
2) The people will listen
3) The people will believe what we say, despite all the propaganda (much of it coming from the US itself...) painting the US as the root of all evil
4) The people, other than those at the top, matter at all.
I don't have a solution. If there was some sort of home-grown pro-freedom movement, the best the US could do is oppose it. But as far as I can tell (from 10,000+ miles away...) there isn't; the people want their chains. Not surprising; there's a lot of people in the US who want them too.
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Empathy? According to prevailing beliefs (held by all but ignorant red-staters), the state of those countries is what the people of those countries want, and for Americans to feel that this is wrong is to be disrespectful of Islamic culture.
In my opinion, its a little bit more subtle than that. The wider moderate Islamic society wants peace and liberty. However, it also wants a smooth transition from the current state of affairs to the world where freedom of expression is tolerated. There's an Islamic proverb, "Better 1000 days of tyranny than 1 day of anarchy." It describes the state of affairs in Islamic culture very well. Everyone wants change, but no one is willing to risk the anarchy necessary to effect it.
Another issue in the Islami
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There's an Arabic saying that goes something like "Me and my brother would fight my cousin if he does us wrong, but if a stranger comes in, my cousin and I will team up".
Here, we call that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", and it hasn't worked out so well for us. It's why we cozied up to Saddam Hussein (because he was fighting with Iran) and to the mujahideen (because they were fighting the Russians) back in the '70s and '80s, and look how those situations turned out.
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In conclusion, you don't sound very educated in either science, philosophy or your religion. I suggest a spot of reading before firing that mouth of yours off any further.
Wonderful, an ad hominem attack from an AC. Please create an account so that we can have a discussion instead of one-off posts (I wonder if you'll ever see this).
Al-Ghazali was probably the greatest thinker mankind has ever produced, and the implication that he took science backwards is just plain wrong.
Greatest thinker mankind has ever produced? No comment. But, no, I still stand behind him taking Islamic science backwards.
The period I criticized him for is 1095, when he threw science and scientific investigation out the window and replaced it with Sufism and revelation as the only way to truly understand the universe. When he said "there was no
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That ad-hominem was added after a fairly lengthy post including several points. It doesn't surprise me that you've decided to ignore them all and skip straight to the last line.
I skipped to it because it seemed that I was going to waste my breath talking into the void (AC's do not get notified about replies, do they?).
Just so as you know, Einstein was also deeply religious, he saw his study of the natural world as being an investigation into the methods of God. Given that you seem to think that he was less religious than Newton (if such a thing could be quantified) then you are once again mistaken about the nature of a person you are referring to.
I'm aware of that. I do not have a direct quote, nor do I care to search for one. I was simply trying to get a point across that when we say "only god knows this", it means we're giving up and are not going to investigate further.
*Part 1, I have to head out, and I will get back to you in 6-7 hours from now*
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we (the majority of us) want religion taught in school.
Thankfully, that same majority in which intellectual dishonesty and ignorance is so pervasive is also laden with apathy. And even if the majority somehow got a bill through the Congress, I think a great deal of the freethinkers in America are relatively confident that the Supreme Court would quickly strike it down as unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.
Re:Maybe the Muslims will help us out... (Score:4, Insightful)
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It is only with freedom and liberty does civilization thrive.
History disagrees. Every civilization, from Ancient Sumer, right up to our own had slavery at one point or another. The fact that we get by right now without slavery in the US says very little about the necessity of freedom and liberty for civilization. In fact, I'd almost argue the opposite - slavery and oppression are the two tools that allow civilizations to go from city or nation state to empire. Recall Rome. As a republic, it conquered Italy. Under an emperor, Rome was able to conquer most of Eur
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Off-topic still and replying to myself, the GWB/Obama simile above is horrible since neither one of them is a scholar.
I need to stop posting so late at night.
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Al Ghazali? You got this from a blog, didn't you?
From the wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Al-Ghazali's criticism of Aristotelian physics and Aristotelian cosmology played an important role in the development of an independent astronomy over the next several centuries. From the 12th century onwards, Islamic astronomy began becoming a science primarily dependant upon observation rather than philosophy, primarily due to religious opposition from Islamic theologians, most prominently Al-Ghazali, who opposed the interference of Aristotelianism in astronomy, opening up possibilities for an astronomy unrestrained by Aristotelian philosophy.
Al Ghazali died in 1111. But the "stagnation" attributed to Islamic science came centuries later [wikipedia.org].
There was, however, a more recent al-Ghazali. Perhaps the blogosphere, desperate for a simplistic meme, has intertwined the biographies.
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Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Pluto.. all Greek mythology names, why? They were "it"** back in the day.
Those are Roman mythology names, not Greek. Which just goes to show, as the Romans were even more "it" than the Greeks.
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About time we quit doing it and get the same benefits by outsourcing to other countries. You don't have to get there first to enjoy the benefits of technology. Consider China, which went from zero to economic miracle since 1948.