Bacon, Hot Fudge, and Radiation

View 708 Friday, January 13, 2012

FRIDAY THE 13^th FALLS ON FRIDAY THIS MONTH

Hot Fudge Sundae falls on Tuesdae

You may rest easy. The government has borrowed money from China, handing the debt to your grandchildren, in order to keep you from being radioactive, and it worked. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found that a particular brand of Bed, Bath and Beyond tissue holder is contaminated with Cobalt 60. If you put it on a shelf in your bathroom and spend half an hour a day in there near it, you might get a whole body equivalent of a chest x-ray – perhaps two – over the year.

Of course if you move to Denver, or take a couple of transcontinental flights a year you’ll get the same effect, and that’s not counting the radiation the TSA will subject you to before you begin your flight. I don’t know what this protection by the NRC cost but I suppose it is more valuable than bunny inspectors. But should we be borrowing money to do it?

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/radioactive-tissue-box-holders-yanked-bed-bath-shelves-article-1.1005746

http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/story/2012-01-13/Radioactive-tissue-holders-pulled-from-stores/52528908/1

http://enenews.com/no-imminent-public-threat-bed-bath-beyond-pulls-radioactive-items-from-stores-cobalt-60-detected-in-tissue-holder

I am told those Marines had bacon for breakfast that day. What will the Secretary of State say to that? But Taliban beware. The US often serves bacon to the troops.

Meanwhile our allies in Afghanistan have allowed a 13 year old girl to leave jail where she was being held for adultery, but only on condition that she marry the uncle who raped her.

Dr, Jim Busby and I had a discussion of reusable spacecraft at LASFS last night. Most of it rambled through history, which is probably my fault, but we did look a bit at what Space X is trying to do. There are a number of paths to reusable space ships, You can find a discussion of that in my SSX Concept papers written, alas, a very long time ago. www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/SSX.html

I never really thought of it before, but the irony of what happened to SSX came to me during the discussion. The Council I chaired submitted space policy papers to President Reagan. The most recommendation made in Fall 1980 as a Transition Team paper talked about strategic missile defense, which Reagan adopted, and when he came out with his Strategic Defense Initiative it was instantly labeled Star Wars by Ted Kennedy and many Democrats. SDI turned out to be a significant factor in the economic war with the Soviet Union, and is generally credited with a major role in Soviet Collapse and the end of the Cold War.

Alas, the major funding for SSX came from SDI, and with the end of the USSR the major driver for reusable spacecraft was ended. Shuttle was designed to be reusable but performance requirements forced NASA to run the Shuttle Main Engines at 110% of their rated capacity. At 95% performance the engines were reusable – just fill the tank and fly again, next day – but at 110% they became rebuildable. They had to be taken apart and refurbished because of the strain on parts such as the impellors. Thus we had no reusable ships to fly a hundred missions a year. We did well to fly three.

So the success of the SDI policy recommended by the Council that also recommended SSX (scale model was DC/X) was instrumental in winning the Cold War and ending one of the major drivers for X programs to develop reusable spacecraft. And so it goes…

It’s lunch time.

We are not alone.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1201/11exoplanets/

But will we find them?

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1201/12jwst/

And should we be borrowing money from China to do it with? I am of the opinion that good technology research always pays off, but some payoffs are much better than others, and much more likely. It’s a matter of allocation of scarce resources. I’d rather build telescopes than pay people to watch stage magicians to be sure their rabbits are licensed, but how urgent is the telescope?