This sort of problem is probably one of the few things for which nuclear explosives are objectively perfect. Coming up with Rube Goldberg-ian strategies that require perfectly matching orbits, long lived space craft, and complex control schemes is idiotic. A gravity tractor has to work for a hundred years. A painting…

Disappointed (although not freaking the fuck out) fan here.

I don’t think my problem is that tropes were subverted. I think my problem is that it feels like there’s a better, more emotionally impactful movie inside this one. I also feel like the character arcs are all out of whack. When Finn started this movie out as…

Question. This has been described as a hit to kill interceptor, but at 0:57, the interceptor very clearly explodes or otherwise blooms in whatever wavelength of light the camera is looking in immediately before intercepting the target. Was the bloom a last second attitude correction or do these now include a…

Oh, I even forgot to address my favorite red herring. Of course a B-61 bomb costs more than it’s weight in gold: you dig gold up out of the ground and if you drop a golden bomb on something it goes thud.

Literally every part of a nuclear weapon is synthetic including many of the individual atoms. You don’t just get…

Not to be the bearer of bad news here, but while there are plenty of reasons not to “expand and strengthen” the nuclear arsenal (strategic considerations, cost-benefit analysis, treaty obligations all come to mind immediately) you raise exactly zero of them. Not only that but your knowledge of American strategic…

So regardless of how the asteroid breaks up, if you take an asteroid (momentum #1) and give it a kick in one direction from a standoff explosion (impulse #1) the overall change in the momentum will be in the direction you want, even if the asteroid breaks up. So the whole system will now be moving (if you sum up all…

I think what explains Donald Trump is that he has no sense of long term consequences for his actions or his statements. The book that took him from random real estate developer to pop culture reference was “The Art of the Deal,” not say, “The Art of the Stable, Viable Long Term, and Profitable Deal that Yields Steady…

Depending on how long ago Cpl. Hale was diagnosed, the drugs have gotten better. I was diagnosed with Colitis at age 11 and 16 years later I’ve got 6 marathons (including 3 Boston Qualifier times), 3 ultramarathons, and a half ironman to my name.

The issue with the sun is that while it is very hot, it also sits there for a long time and is very big, so the reactions rates for hydrogen fusion in the sun are actually extremely low. So low in fact, that the sun doesn’t really fuse hydrogen with hydrogen at all. It uses something called the CNO cycle where carbon,…

Stellerators don’t “contain” fusion energy any better than tokamaks. They have fewer known plasma instabilities than tokamaks leading to an easier time having long pulse plasma discharges without some transient coming out and melting part of your wall. When we talk about containing fusion power we normally talk about…

Lockheed Martin’s team is in fact no where near to solving the myriad neutron shielding and materials science problems facing fusion energy. They haven’t even really gotten into the plasma instability control problem. They gave a colloquium at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory a few months ago you can watch for…

So, as you might expect things get.....complicated. In a future fusion reactor you’ll have many different design constraints: plasma confinement, instability control, heat loads, fueling, exhaust, neutron damage, tritium production, and about 400 other things. Stellerators (in their current configurations) have better…

Well a fusion plasma will be 10 times the temperature of the center of the sun and put off 14 MeV neutrons, so fairly powerful. In this case though not much to worry about. Even in a catastrophic plasma breakdown you’ll just vaporize some of the interior of the wall and the impurities will quench your plasma and it’ll…

It’s a disease. My apologies.

ITER and DEMO will both use Deuterium and Tritium under their current science plans. D just comes from sea water but tritium has to be manufactured. All the tritium we have now is left overs from the arms race, but we’ll need more to produce more long term. In theory fusion reactors could produce their own tritium but…

The core science issues that ITER seeks to solve will actually have a fair bit of cross talk with a stellerator concept (neutron shielding, plasma exhaust, reactive plasma control of transients, etc...). There are a number of DEMO concepts now that include tokamaks, spherical tokamaks, stellerators and others. ITER’s…

So, W7-X is not a fusion reactor. It is a plasma technology testbed that is relevant to future stellerator based fusion reactor designs. Not only will it produce no power, it will not run with the Deuterium-Tritium (D-T) mix that would allow it to have any sort of self sustaining fusion reaction, nor does it have the…