Why say 'brisance' when you could say 'jounce per ounce'.
More Bounce to the Ounce
21–30 of 66 posts
Re: More Bounce to the Ounce
#22I've thought that if this idea is picked up it would have to be in space. Testing the rocket on the surface of the moon (point the plate straight up) would probably have been necessary anyway. Ordinary chemical rockets can be tested on the Earth's surface, this concept, not so much. This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon; if future lunar inhabi…
> This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon Congrats; you have come up with a way to make nuclear waste disposal 100x more dangerous and 1000x more expensive!
And set the stage for "Space 1999"'s lunar escape from earth.
Re: More Bounce to the Ounce
#23This idea is a significant part of Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
Re: More Bounce to the Ounce
#24Re: More Bounce to the Ounce
#25I've thought that if this idea is picked up it would have to be in space. Testing the rocket on the surface of the moon (point the plate straight up) would probably have been necessary anyway. Ordinary chemical rockets can be tested on the Earth's surface, this concept, not so much. This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon; if future lunar inhabi…
> This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon Congrats; you have come up with a way to make nuclear waste disposal 100x more dangerous and 1000x more expensive!
You need to think more clearly about this.
Reprocessing is very expensive; $1000/kg and up. Launch to space will likely become much cheaper than this as fully reusable launch vehicles become available. Even if the spent fuel must be armored against accident the cost of launching it to LEO, and then to the moon, is likely to become much cheaper than the cost of reprocessing it here on Earth.
Space disposal has the positive advantage that the seven very long lived fission products are removed from the biosphere, along with the very long lived actinides like Np-237.
Re: More Bounce to the Ounce
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon Congrats; you have come up with a way to make nuclear waste disposal 100x more dangerous and 1000x more expensive!
And set the stage for "Space 1999"'s lunar escape from earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_1999
Nice set design, but honestly unwatchable. An accidental testament to the genius of ST:TOS.
Re: More Bounce to the Ounce
#27Wild cowboy ideas of yore. Will we ever be able to make it safer to use on earth or would we save that for a moon base -get to the moon and from there blast away with these atomic fahrting machines…
With any luck, by the time we're serious about sending big spacecraft out and about we'll have figured out a workable fusion drive. You'd still need to launch them from space since they're a little spicy from a "don't stand downwind" perspective, but unimaginably better than using nukes against pusher.
Re: More Bounce to the Ounce
#28Article briefly talked about delivery, which is tricky to do precisely at best of times, but didn't really mention how to address delivery into a nuclear blast. Hundreds of meters behind the craft about once a second doesn't seem like it would be enough time for the blast to clear so would get in the way of sending a new capsule backward. Anyway I'm sure it's just an implementation detail
In a vacuum, there isn’t a fireball hanging around for the next charge to cross; the plasma is moving outward at thousands of km/s.
Re: More Bounce to the Ounce
#29Article briefly talked about delivery, which is tricky to do precisely at best of times, but didn't really mention how to address delivery into a nuclear blast. Hundreds of meters behind the craft about once a second doesn't seem like it would be enough time for the blast to clear so would get in the way of sending a new capsule backward. Anyway I'm sure it's just an implementation detail
A lot of the work was done to a design point of 0.25 seconds, and Dyson's book says the issue there wasn't the blast clearing, but just being able to move the machinery fast enough. I kind of share your puzzlement; I can see the blast clearing this quickly in space (the debris moves at tens of thousands of km/sec) but not in the atmosphere.