comic | episodes & e-books | store | about
< previous post | next post > | all news from Apr. 2011 News archive | News search | RSS
 
  Them Ruskies are up to something againApr 28, 2011 11:41 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:You didn't think mem training was all fun and games, did you? :P
 
~~~~~~
 
A*'s Facebook page is apparently popular enough now (maybe it had been for a while; I just found out about this trick :P) to have a nice short address. So instead of the boring old
 
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Supermassive-Black-Hole-A/155265446287
 
which doesn't exactly flow trippingly into the URL field, you can now get there with just
 
http://facebook.com/smbhax
 
How's that for progress!
 
~~~~~~
 
Somewhat ironically considering we're also at the 50th anniversary of the flight of Yuri Gagarin, whose death--along with a good friend of his 14 months earlier--may have been due to Soviet technical negligence and possibly sinister political maneuvering, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, in the Ukraine earlier this week for the observation of the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, took the opportunity to call for nations to work on rules for safer nuclear energy.
 
The article has a couple interesting factoids concerning the disaster:
 
"The Chernobyl explosion released about 400 times more radiation than the U.S. atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima. The U.N.'s World Health Organization said at a conference in Kiev last week that among the 600,000 people most heavily exposed to the radiation, 4,000 more cancer deaths than average are expected to be eventually found."
 
It also notes that the Ukraine is still $300 million short of the funds needed to erect a better containment structure over Chernobyl's ruined #4 reactor--it's planned to be the world's largest mobile structure, since it will be rolled into place over the existing concrete "sarcophagus".
 
Sad that the world's leading nations still haven't pitched in enough to make that happen. Speaking of sad notes left over from the Chernobyl disaster, here's another:
 
"Russia, Ukraine and Belarus have cut the benefits packages for sickened cleanup workers in recent years and the memorial events were overshadowed by their complaints for more aid. Prime Minister Mykola Azarov vowed Tuesday that benefits to Chernobyl victims would continue to be paid."
 
Makes me wonder if at some point in the far-flung future the nuclear industry--assuming its still going--might be costing more than its making, due to maintenance on accident containment sites that have to be funded and maintained for a long period of time, or even more or less into perpetuity, like Chernobyl. But then again, nuclear reactors have better safety systems these days, and even something like the recent Fukushima accident is expected to be cleaned up in a matter of decades, maybe. (That Wikipedia article I just linked also has an interesting comparison with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, where it was 11 years before the partially melted reactor core was opened, and several more years for cleanup to be completed.)
 
Then again again, even non-accidental nuclear industry work generates waste that has to be buried in perpetuity, which also costs a bit. Oh well maybe eventually it'll just be cheaper to launch it into the Sun--problem solved!
 
~~~~~
 
Oh! I also had more storyboards from later in this episode to leak out, seeing as how I doodled 'em last night:
 
Image
 
What's this? Our hard-as-nails galactic bounty hunter sipping tea in *my* hard sci-fi webcomic??? Hm well maybe she's practicing for the royal wedding. :PP
 
 
 
 
·····
 
 
 
 
 
< previous post | next post > | all news from Apr. 2011 News archive | News search | RSS
 
© Copyright 2024 Ben Chamberlain. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy