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  The goggles do nothingAug 10, 2010 9:20 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I guess one upside to this working ahead and only uploading one page per day this week business is that you at least get the update during the day on which it is meant to occur, rather than the wee hours of the next morning. ;)
 
I've got a bunch of interesting links on A*-related stuff that I came across this weekend!
 
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A reader mentioned to me that actual aerospace engineers they work with seem to enjoy a magazine called Aviation Week. I was poking around their site, and they do have a lot of space-related articles--mostly NASA and such news you can also find elsewhere, but still, they do a good job of collecting it. They've got a gallery where people can upload space-related pictures, and I thought this picture of India's first satellite being transported to its launch site on an oxcart was pretty nifty. They also had a link to this video with a CGI reconstruction of the 1987A Supernova, showing how the remnant we see today might have come about; the blast is thought to have expelled material outward primarily in two opposite ring shapes.
 
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I came upon the US Department of Energy's International Nuclear Safety: Ukraine, Chornobyl Photos gallery; "Chornobyl" is how you spell it when transliterating from Ukrainian, whereas the more familiar "Chernobyl" is transliterated from Russian--the reactor accident took place in '86, when the area was under Soviet control, so at the time we got the Russian spelling.
 
I found the gallery because I was looking for information on an interesting corium formation I had heard of being there, called the "Elephant's Foot" due to its shape: it's a 2-metric-ton clump of "corium," which is basically the "melt" part from a nuclear meltdown, consisting in Chernobyl's case of a good amount of uranium fuel, zirconium (from the melted control rods, I think), metals and things from the bottom of the reactor, which melted through, and concrete; during a meltdown this all forms a blazing hot molten "lava" that flows downward from the reactor. Here are some of the more interesting shots, with my summaries from the somewhat inconvenient separate captions page:
 
Image
image from DOE (source)
 
^ Solidified corium flow in the steam distribution corridor below the reactor--well, this *is* the reactor, melted.
 
Image
image from DOE (source)
 
^ The "Elephant's Foot" 2-metric-ton blob of corium below the reactor site--uranium is heavy stuff!
 
Image
image from DOE (source)
 
^ Checkin' rads outside Chernobyl after the accident. Dig those suits.
 
Image
image from DOE (source)
 
^ The shelter site's deputy director checking out the "Elephant's Foot" in '96. This is all still pretty radioactive, so I was surprised to see the guys here not wearing full protective gear; I guess it must be all right for whatever duration they were down there, but I think if it was me, I'd want to wear the full suit, if only for the crazy headgear.
 
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And then I came across footage of various nuclear tests.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2WQvtGnBQw
 
This is the 23 kt ("kiloton," ie having an explosive force equal to 23,000 tons of TNT; according to Wikipedia, a kiloton of TNT is about a 10-meter-per-side cube; 23 kilotons is absolutely puny by modern thermonuclear weapon standards: for instance, a Trident II submarine missile can contain 8 W88 warheads, and each one of those warheads has a yield of 475 kt, ie the whole missile would be 160 times more powerful than what you see exploding here; another comparison is the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, whose 13-18 kt blast killed 140,000 people) "Baker" test from 1946's "Operation Crossroads" series, which I talked about before here.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wbhPoDzVeo
 
1955's 22 kt "MET" test from Operation Teapot in Nevada. Check out that eerie violet glow bathing the cheerful test viewers. None of them even put their hands over their groins, which as everyone knows is standard defense procedure during a nuclear attack.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv_q8q6Z9_I
 
Official film glamorizing the 1962 test of the portable, artillery-fired Davy Crockett nuclear shells; Attorney General Robert Kennedy attended the test, and can be seen wearing "high-density goggles" in the viewing stands at about 8:42. The idea was to drop the nuclear shell on the enemy, killing most of them by direct radiation intensity, then send in ground troops, in theory able to move around the worst of the fallout cloud, and mop up remaining resistance. Fun times indeed. ("Only two vehicles required a wash-down!")
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp6aZIhHiRE
 
1971's "Cannikin" test at Amchitka, on the tip of the Aleutian Island chain in Alaska. At 5 Mt ("megatons"; a megaton equals 1 million tons of TNT), this is the largest underground nuclear test held by the US; the force of the blast caused seismic shock equivalent to an earthquake of 7.0 on the Richter scale, making the ground about a half-mile around (I forget where I read that distance, so take with grain of salt) jump up about 5 meters, leaving a crater that is now a mile-wide lake, and producing a concussion that killed 700-2,000 nearby, and presumably non-Communist, sea otters. The group that formed to protest these tests became Greenpeace.
 
 
 
 
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