18-Jan-14 World View -- Kerry says that he won't be fooled

[gerald]

I sometimes compare crisis wars to sex. Both are part of our DNA, and
both are essential for the survival of the human race.

You can frame this in moral terms. There's moral sex and immoral sex.
There are moral wars and immoral wars.

But none of it can be stopped, or the human race would not survive.

John,

If there is a global nuclear war leading to the loss of control of the worlds nuclear reactors ( as in fukushima -- There are currently 437 operable civil nuclear power nuclear reactors around the world, with a further 71 under construction
http://www.world-nuclear.org/Nuclear-Ba ... -reactors/ ) the combined radiation would most likely wipe out humanity.

[John]

> If there is a global nuclear war leading to the loss of control of
> the worlds nuclear reactors ( as in fukushima -- There are
> currently 437 operable civil nuclear power nuclear reactors around
> the world, with a further 71 under construction
> http://www.world-nuclear.org/Nuclear-Ba ... -reactors/
> ) the combined radiation would most likely wipe out
> humanity.

I totally disagree. Remember that the invention of dynamite was
supposed to end humanity as well.

I've estimated that of the 7 billion people on earth, something like 3
billion will be killed in total -- from war, from famine, from
disease, from nuclear weapons, etc. The remaining 4 billion will be
left behind to rebuild the world, until the Singularity comes and the
machines take over.

Another thing to remember is that China's nuclear weapons are pointed
at the U.S., Pakistan's at India, India's at Pakistan, and so forth.
So there are a few countries that will be targets, and the rest of the
world will be relatively safe from nuclear weapons.

Get yourself a place in the wilderness somewhere, and you'll probably
be ok. Or perhaps do what Vince Cate is doing -- get yourself one of
those floating cities, and prepare to live in the middle of the ocean.

[gerald]

Understand, Gerald. John's position, not desiring to speak for John, is, I believe, that the British morality, that caused them to leave India rather than engage in wholesale societal repression, resulted in a crisis conflict - so how compassionate, in actuality, were the British?

In my own life when confronted with a choice between a moral, or immoral action it will usually be my choice to be to execute the known moral action as opposed to executing an "evil" and thus avoid what may be a prospective future greater evil. Now having illustrated that digital choice, I have to acknowledge that the world isn't digital. That is, there are prospects that are possible, and then there are prospects that are assured. Britain, in the shadow of the liberation of millions of Europeans during and after WWII, really had no moral choice but to leave India - a fact that Gandhi used to great effect against the British - whether or not the British were aware of the coming genocidal Hindu/Muslim conflict or whether they were not.

I do not want to imply anything in your example of choice, but to me it appears that in your decision regarding a moral or immoral action you at some level are considering the consequences of Karma --- http://www.thefreedictionary.com/karma
1. (in Hinduism and Buddhism) action seen as bringing upon oneself inevitable results, either in this life or in a reincarnation.

[NoOneImportant]

Gerald,

And Karma is certainly one explanation, but karma has no repeatably predictable form. I see it much like simple arithmetic; to illustrate: which two numbers when added together equal 10? Certainly 9+1, but there are also others - there is, in essence, more than one way to get to the desired end; and karma may be viewed as one way.

The essence of Generational Dynamics is that there are a finite number and sequence of pragmatic - need to be lived - circumstances and conditions of societal progressions/life. Those events sooner, or later culminate in a crisis war. The crisis war's conditions are so traumatic that they impress en-mass an implicit understanding of the descent into depravity and terror found in man - made manifest in a crisis war. That impression, through experience, is indelibly etched into all of the survivors of the crisis conflict. The enormity of those conditions/circumstances can't be practically "learned." Civil society makes no provision for, nor does it even acknowledge the presence of the monster released in the crisis war; the lessons of the crisis conflict to be learned must be lived through - experienced. Once cemented into the psyche by living through the crisis conflict, with few exceptions, all survivors - losers and "victors" - are forever transformed. That change causes their ultimate objective, implicitly, and en-mass (as a "generational memory") to become the overall objective of the future conduct of all crisis war survivors. That is, their objective in life's choices is to assure that those circumstances/conditions never re-emerge, that they are never to be experienced - crisis war - again. That objective only lasts so long as there is en-mass memory, for when it dies, and die it must, we are destined to relive a similar occurrence of past phases, again culminating in a crisis conflict.

For me It explains WWII, it explains the Cold War, it explains the 60s, and it explains the mess we're in now.

[gerald]

> If there is a global nuclear war leading to the loss of control of
> the worlds nuclear reactors ( as in fukushima -- There are
> currently 437 operable civil nuclear power nuclear reactors around
> the world, with a further 71 under construction
> http://www.world-nuclear.org/Nuclear-Ba ... -reactors/
> ) the combined radiation would most likely wipe out
> humanity.

I totally disagree. Remember that the invention of dynamite was
supposed to end humanity as well.

I've estimated that of the 7 billion people on earth, something like 3
billion will be killed in total -- from war, from famine, from
disease, from nuclear weapons, etc. The remaining 4 billion will be
left behind to rebuild the world, until the Singularity comes and the
machines take over.

Another thing to remember is that China's nuclear weapons are pointed
at the U.S., Pakistan's at India, India's at Pakistan, and so forth.
So there are a few countries that will be targets, and the rest of the
world will be relatively safe from nuclear weapons.

Get yourself a place in the wilderness somewhere, and you'll probably
be ok. Or perhaps do what Vince Cate is doing -- get yourself one of
those floating cities, and prepare to live in the middle of the ocean.

Ok, so if the radiation levels do not do a global extinction event the robots will,-- end result , the same, humanity's extinction. We will be just a smudge in the sediment.

cheers

[NoOneImportant]

Complain, complain, complain... you're just never happy

[tim]

I sometimes compare crisis wars to sex. Both are part of our DNA, and
both are essential for the survival of the human race.

You can frame this in moral terms. There's moral sex and immoral sex.
There are moral wars and immoral wars.

But none of it can be stopped, or the human race would not survive.

John,

If there is a global nuclear war leading to the loss of control of the worlds nuclear reactors ( as in fukushima -- There are currently 437 operable civil nuclear power nuclear reactors around the world, with a further 71 under construction
http://www.world-nuclear.org/Nuclear-Ba ... -reactors/ ) the combined radiation would most likely wipe out humanity.

From "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons":

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD ... tTRDoc.pdf

Delayed (or long range) fallout, which is that reaching the ground after the first day, consists of very fine, invisible particles which settle in low concentrations over a considerable portion of the earth's surface. radiation from the fission products and other substances is greatly reduced as a result of radioactive decay during the
relatively long time the delayed fallout remains suspended in the atmosphere. Consequently, the radiations from most of the delayed fallout pose no immediate danger to health, although there may be a long-term hazard. The biological effects on people, plants, and animals of radiations from early and late fallout are described in Chapter XII

[gerald]

tim ---
so in other words enjoy the population reduction

yea what ever --

http://www.alternet.org/story/155283/th ... page=0%2C1

The Threat Not Just to Japan But to the U.S. and the World

"An even more catastrophic worst-case scenario follows that a fire in the pool at unit 4 could then spread, igniting the irradiated fuel throughout the nuclear site and releasing an amount of cesium-137 equaling a doomsday-like load, roughly 85 times more than the release at Chernobyl.

It's a scenario that would literally threaten Japan's annihilation and civilization at large, with widespread worldwide environmental radioactive contamination."

And if people aren't around to maintain the reactors due to war?

There are approximately 500 nuclear plants with cooling pools having spent fuel, ad nuclear bombs and it is party time! --- global extinction.

Well, I guess the world is due for another Cambrian explosion.

cheers

by the way I think the whole thing is fascinating

[NoOneImportant]

Tim -

Thanks for the .pdf, there is no substitute for just knowing - with definition.

Gerald,

The SFPs are an unrealized real problem. The heat of decay, as all nuke plant operators know, is the issue. You may scram - attempt to shut the reactor off - a reactor, but without the continued presence of coolant circulating through the core, the core will be in danger of melting, even though not in operation for a week or more. The culprit is the heat-of-decay of all the short half life elements decaying that were created as a normal process of reactor operation. This danger lasts for in excess of a week or more. That heat (heat-of-decay) is created spontaneously even though the reactor is technically non-critical, or turned off for the first week or so after all criticality is terminated by the full insertion of the all the control rods that stop all nuclear fission; thus terminating critical uranium/plutonium chain reactions. The half-live of the various isotopes may be found at - http://www.iem-inc.com/toolhalf.html. These are useful numbers for nuclear fallout purposes also.

Unfortunately many years ago the movie the China Syndrome glorified nuclear core melt downs. In so doing the nature of the danger resident in the spent fuel pools (SFP) was completely ignored; the rational being that the "spent fuel rods" are spent - right? Wrong. It is the spent fuel that can be seen as possibly the greater danger, as it is the spent fuel that has been undergoing chain reaction irradiation for several years - usually 1/3 of a reactor's fuel elements are replaced every 3 years. The "spent fuel" is the hottest of the hot material. President Carter - that last wonder thinker to occupy the WH - made the decision that all spent fuel will be stored on site at each nuclear power generating facility, and the spent fuel will not be reprocessed to reclaim the residual uranium, plutonium, and other useful by-products of reactor operation.

The term "spent fuel" is in fact a misnomer. New nuclear power plant reactor fuel elements usually have a limited number of atomic elements within them: a 5% concentration of U235 (the fissionable element necessary to be split and thus generate heat for electrical power generation), 95% U238 (the non-fissionable element, some of which over time captures a neutron and spontaneously decays within a couple of days into plutonium, an element that will fission), zirconium tubes that house the uranium, and an inert gas surrounding the uranium inside the zirconium tubes so that the uranium won't react with anything. Spent fuel elements still have a 2.5% concentration of U235, but additionally have a plethora of newly created radio isotopes, not the least of which is Pu239 in concentrations of 1% - 2.5% (also a fissionable element). These newly created elements - the normal by-product of reactor operation - have half-lives (time intervals where they decay into some other element generating spontaneous energy - heat) of anywhere from a few moments to thousands of years - and there are lots of them, and they are a real witches brew.

The message is: the spent fuel rods are anything but spent - they are the hottest of the hot regarding radioactivity. It takes years for spent fuel rods to "cool" to the point where they may be safely stored without water to cool them. As a normal part of the spent fuel handling process the fuel elements - rods - are stored in pools that are constantly being replenished with an appropriate amount of water to keep the spent elements submerged and cooled - should anything interrupt that SFP water replenishment (a tsunami in the case of Fukashima) what is normally a relatively innocuous process of letting the spent fuel rods just sit in a pool of water for years, becomes a very large problem of keeping the very hot - both physically, and radioactively speaking - spent rods from melting and aggregating - coming together - in the bottom of the pool and continuing to generate enough heat to evaporate all the water from the pool.

Now we get to the really nasty part; uranium can and will generate enough heat, if not immersed in a coolant, so that it will physically melt, come together self-heat, and catch fire and physically burn, thus spreading oxides of, not just uranium, but of uranium and all the other nasty by-products of the nuclear fission process - an unintended, and unanticipated consequence of having the SFPs dry out. Again the same web site noted above giving the half lives of the various radio isotopes - http://www.iem-inc.com/toolhalf.html

A quick note on half-lives. If you have one of some thing and a half-life of, oh say, two years, at the end of two years you will have half of the original item, and the other half will have "decayed" - changed - into some thing(s) else. That something else, if still radioactive, will have, depending upon what radio isotope it has become, it's own half life, and the new half life is unrelated to the starting element's half life. To illustrate U238 - non-fissionable - will capture a neutron and immediately emit a beta particle - an electron - and have one of the neutrons in its nucleus change into a proton and become neptunium 239. Neptunium 239, an element that has a half life of 2.3 days, where upon after 2.3 days half of the neptunium 239 will spontaneously have decayed into plutonium 239, an element with a half life of 24,000+ years. All radioactive decay in nuclear fallout, and nuclear reactor operation deals in half-lives with all radioactive materials.

[tim]

Well, I guess the world is due for another Cambrian explosion.

Nuclear weapons are not going to kill everyone. Of course the war will be more horrific then anyone can imagine, but there's not going to be global nuclear winter or global radiation that kills everyone.

A Japanese man who lived through both Hiroshima and Nagasaki lived to be 93: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/m ... ivor-japan

Chapter 12, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons:

12.12 The data in the table also show that more than 80 percent of the population within 0.6 mile (31 10 feet) from ground zero were casualties, In this area the blast wave energy, thermal exposure, and initial nuclear radiation were each sufficient to cause serious injury or death. Beyond about 1.6 miles, however, the chances of survival were very greatly improved. Between 0.6 and 1.6 miles from ground zero a larger proportion of the population would probably have survived if immediate medical attention had been available. Although the particular distances mentioned apply to the yield and conditions of the Japanese explosions, it is to be expected quite generally that close to ground zero the casualty rate will be high, but it will drop sharply beyond a certain distance which scales with the energy yield of the explosion.

EFFECTS OF THERMAL RADIATION ON THE EYES

12.79 It is of interest that, among the survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eye injuries directly attributable to thermal radiation appeared to be relatively unimportant. There were many instances of temporary blindness, occasionally lasting up to 2 or 3 hours, but only one case of retinal injury was reported.

I don't mean to talk down the power of nuclear weapons, but the idea that ash in the sky is going to blot out the sun or we are all going to be vaporized keeps people from preparing.