This Is Why We Don't Shoot Earth's Garbage Into the Sun

Ethan Siegel at Forbes makes a solid case for for why we don't launch our radioactive waste and other hazardous garbage into the sun.  The laws of physics and economics seem to always keep things real.

How to Steer the Saturn V

3D Printed Rocket Engines

The Mightly Milky Way

Our galaxy is far bigger, brighter and more massive than most others. The Milky way is not average, it is colossus!

Into the Unknown

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to launch from Florida on March 30, 2021. The launch schedule is running years later than initially projected and of course it went way over budget.  If successfully launched and deployed, it will be worth it.

But everything must work perfectly from the get go.  There can be no manned repair missions like there were for Space Hubble Telescope.  The orbital position is 1,000,000 miles from Earth.

The video here was made in 2016, but you will get a good idea of the complex engineering involved. This telescope must be shielded from the light of the sun and will see far beyond anything seen from the Hubble.  It could be ground breaking.

Molten Salt Reactors Providing Power in the USA in 20 Years?

Nuclear Engineer, Lou Qualls, Ph.D. spoke this week at the Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning about the future of the molten salt reactor technology that was developed by the late Alvin Weinberg, Ph.D. back in the 1960 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Will this timeline be too late?  In my opinion, there has been little continued learning about this technology.  Weinberg devoted the latter part of his life promoting and lobbying the government to develop this energy source, but was told to 'go away.'  For the last few years we have been giving the technology away for free to other countries.

Why Do Planets Have Magnetic Fields? - Explained by Donald Scott

Look What's Happing in That Little Corner of the Ukraine

Here is a BBC story on what it's like for residents in and near the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone these days.

50th Anniversary of U-233 Start of Molten Salt Reactor

Somehow I overlooked the 50th anniversary of the Oak Ridge National Lab's Molten Salt Reactor going critical using Uranium-233.  In retrospect, Glenn Seaborg (on the right in the above photo with Alvin Weinberg) wrote that killing this research was probably a mistake.  Read Kirk Sorensen's write-up on this milestone by clicking here.  One issued that should be noted is that the Dept. of Energy is currently working on disposing of the ORNL stockpile of U-233 in a radioactive disposal site Nevada National Security Site.  This is being done due to the cost of securing the U-233 stockpile.  Let us hope that the disposed U-233 can be retrieved some day, if needed.

Going Nuclear Episode 7 - Plutonium Production

Here is your nuclear chemistry lesson for the day.  It is a strange element and dangerous if proper safeguards are not implemented.

South Pole - Night in Antartica

Inside NASA's Last Moon Mission

This is a very good quality HD video of the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in December 1972. I had the privlige of meeting Dr. Harrison Schmidt on two separate occasions.  One was while I was a chemistry student at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas in 1974.  After his lecture, we went to the Student Union for coffee and to chat.

The next meeting was in the Geology Dept. at the University of Tennessee in 2002.  He even remembered his visit to HSU 28 years earlier.

Can Nuclear Power Plants Resist Attacks or Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP)??

Our energy and electronic infrastructure is vulnerable to X-class solar storms and nuclear weapons that are detonated at high altitudes.  It is possible to protect this infrastructure?  New designed nuclear power plants can incorporate systems to provide this protection.  Existing nuclear power plants can be upgraded along with electrical transmission lines.  Read more from this article from Forbes by clicking here.

Milking the Thorium "Cow"

How to produce Actinium from a "cow" of Thorium... Filmed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. More links and info in full description.

Was Low-Dose Radiation From the Atomic Bombs Beneficial?

120,000 survivors of the atomic bomb blasts in Japan have been studied since the 1950s.  A recent study done at Shujitsu Women's University has resulted in some interesting conclusions.  Survivors with exposures between 500 millirads and 50 rads of radiation had lower mortality rates than control subjects not exposed to atomic bomb radiation.  Read more here.

Vapors Rising Released this Month

A good friend of mine has published his first novel, Vapors Rising, this month and can be found on Amazon.  He and I both are familiar with the quaint city of Hot Springs, AR and he has written a very interesting story blending fiction with a lot of real events and places.  The details are amazing and there is a good bit of humor.  Check it out in paperback or Kindle edtion.

Deepfake-Busting Apps Can Spot Even a Single Pixel Out of Place

This technology may be able to determine whether a photo has been altered from its original. I think this has been a needed tool for a long time.  Read about it here.

12 Mind-Bending Perceptual Illusions

Check this out.

USS Sturgis Ready for the Scrap Yard

I worked on the project performing MARSAME surveys on the USS Sturgis for the past several months.  This bit of history from WW-II and then the late 1960s to mid-1970s was an amazing vessel.  She was modified in the late 1960s and it is told that as a teenager, Jimmy Buffett worked on the conversion of the ship.  It was used in the Panama Canal Zone as a floating 10 MW power plant until 1977 and was towed back to the shipyard in Virginia.  The decontamination work was done in the Port of Galveston beginning in the spring of 2015 and was finished in August of this year.

WW-I Documentary by Peter Jackson

By the end of October, famed Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson will release an amazing documentary based on film clips from various sources on World War I.  The frames per second of the films have been enhanced using a computer algorithm, color has been added, and sound added. Jackson used lip reading experts to decipher what filmed individuals were speaking.  It is an amazing piece of work.

This blog format does not take advantage of the widescreen video format, so I recommend that you go to the Mail Online site to get a better view and to also read the article.  Click here.

Here is another clip: