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> “Well they survived long enough to achieve space flight,” Forty-five Trills pointed out. “They can’t be too careless with explosions, can they?” ...
... said no-one familiar with the history of human rocketry.
On which subject, did you know that Ignition! is back in print? Now that book definitely shouldn't be taken as a challenge.
In the iconic book Ignition! every test fire where the test stand doesn't blow up, is considered a success ;-)
The relevant passage from John Clark's "Ignition!":
>”It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”
I liked this book. I’m sure there are newer/better sources, and this book predates 2001 I think, but gives the reader a fairly good insight into oil politics and foreign policy.
More to your question - Afghanistan has no oil fields of consequence and the elected Iraqi government sold oil leases to Total (French) and Shell (Dutch) after the war. They’ve since developed some fields on their own. No American oil company had extracted oil from Iraq.
But America has hundreds of energy companies and I wouldn’t doubt some of them worked contracts though companies that are lease holders or the Iraqi government.
The Apollo rockets used kerosene and liquid oxygen for their first (and largest) stage. The later stages used hydrogen and oxygen, instead.
Collecting and compressing large amounts of hydrogen is unbelievably dangerous, and liquid oxygen isn't far behind - but neither is exactly rare. Kerosene is an article of commerce, and while you'd want to control purity fairly carefully for rocket fuel, which costs, it's more that you need a staggering amount of it than that the fuel itself is unusually expensive.
Interestingly, one of the best books ever written on this subject, Ignition!, is back in print. I highly recommend it if you have any interest in rocketry whatsoever: it covers fuel development, spanning most of the period from the late 19th century all the way up to the Cold War. Clark's style is also eminently quotable:
> [Chlorine trifluoride] is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
If you could imagine it, most atom bombs throughout the 50s were actually incredibly wasteful in their maximum potential power. I can't remember exact figures, but out of the entire atomic payload allotted for Fat Boy - the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki - only a fraction of a fraction of atoms reacted and split. The vast majority of atoms were wasted, but the miniscule amount that did successfully react were still enough to level and entire city and kill untold thousands. We're talking tens of atoms out of a potential billion plus.
God only knows what kind of incomprehensible levels of destruction could be achieved with the precision technology and further development we've made in weapons of war since the 70s. It's almost something simply not worth thinking of.
Midnight in Chernobyl has an excellent chapter on the history, utilization, and weaponization of atomic energy during the cold war before the era of the so-called "Peaceful Atom" in the 70s. Highly recommend it if you're looking for further reading on the subject!
The basic reason is that "green" technologies like wind and solar power are unreliable. Obviously the wind doesn't blow all the time and the sun doesn't shine all the time so the energy output will be highly variable which is a huge problem. To augment the lulls you will need extra reliable (non-green) capacity, you will have to rapidly fluctuate between different energy sources the net result being a less resilient grid and higher energy prices. Solar and wind are parasitic forms of energy - they cannot be relied upon themselves and are only usable at all because they are propped up by reliable sources like fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro power. Trying to power a civilization with them would be suicide.
The best book I can recommend on this topic is Alex Epstein's The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. It's a great read for thinking rationally about climate/energy issues and goes into great detail on the drawbacks of "green" energy. He also has written/spoken a lot about the questions you're interested so those would also be well worth looking into.
>Where do you get that from?
Midnight in Chernobyl and Voices from Chernobyl, both of which I read after watching the HBO shows.
>In the series, radiation is so much more dangerous than in reality.
It took Ignatenko two weeks to die, during which time he excreted blood and mucus stool more than 25 times a day and coughed up pieces of his own internal organs. Ignatenko was one of 27 firefighters who died of acute radiation sickness in the weeks after the disaster.
Get him this book: Ignition!
It is an intimate history of liquid-fueled rocket engines. It is fantastic. Unless, of course, he already has it.
More elegant but not necessarily better
Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (book)
I believe this is some edition of the book available for free online: ignition.pdf
According to the phenomenal book "Ignition!", that's pretty much how modern rocket propellant came about. They did some theoretical work, but most of it was just "This might make a good combination, or it might blow up. Let's try it!"
Because the crime was bullshit most likely, the us depuis of justice has an history of using bogus corruption accusation to extort money to competitors of american compagnies.
https://www.amazon.ca/American-Trap-Americas-economic-against/dp/1529326869
I’m not sure ammonia is applicable to jet engines - I’m sure it’s been tried. Ammonia has been used as the fuel and oxidiser for rockets but by itself has too little impulse. It may show promise as a rechargeable battery substitute.
If you haven’t read it, look up Ignition! by Iohn Drury Clark for all you might ever want to know about setting fire to dangerous chemicals in the name of “coz I can”.
>The US has no record of opposing EU expansion
Reminds of the Alstom case and the book The American Trap: My battle to expose America's secret economic war against the rest of the world
https://www.amazon.com/American-Trap-Americas-economic-against/dp/1529326869
Die USA sind von den genannten dreien die einzigen, die einen aufstrebenden Wettbewerber mit allen Mitteln zerstören werden. Wolfowitz-Doktrin, kann man im konkreten Beispiel schön nachlesen bei Pierucci's American Trap.
It's an engineering euphemism. RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly) is a common abbreviation used in engineering circles. I believe the origination of the phrase was first mentioned in the 1970s book Ignition! which was a book a lot of future rocket and aerospace engineers would read before going in to the field.
"Returned to Kit Form" is a common way to say "it exploded" in model rocketry circles as well. It's just something engineers say because it sounds more intelligent than "blew up" or "exploded"
If you want to know more I loved reading Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants
> all Americans irrespective of their origin country should support America in its geopolitical pursuit. This concept is universal. You support your country no matter what!
So americans should support military aid to pakistans war with india? support the war in Afghanistan? War in Iraq? War in yemen? War in syria? Support stealing companies by force? Support the Vietnam War? Support the kuwait war? Support the native American genocide? Support the Mexican cession? Support the Iranian coup? Guatemalan coup? Congolese coup? Chilean coup? Nicaraguan coup? Honduran coup? Haitian coup? El Salvadoran coup? Bolivian coup?
Just because we don't want china's to be America's next victim, doesn't mean we support the PRC over America.
Okay thats fair.; Exact category is often debated.
The less debated fields don't have a replication crisis per se: They have a falsifiability crisis.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/how-physics-lost-its-fizz/
>~~Your~~ Washington post's article ~~relates~~ is about grand jury transcripts and it also mentions national security
My mother did an LLD regarding the US legal system and its intricacies unknown to most. Ninety-nine percent of what she discovered was unknown even to most American lawyers.
If you want to learn more, read this book: https://www.amazon.com/American-Trap-Americas-economic-against/dp/1529326869
Get ready to have your mind blown away..... Frédéric Pierucci now consults on what he has learned first hand during his involuntary "stay" at a high-security US prison. If I hadn't lived through my mom's four year research about the US legal system, I would have NOT believed a word in Mr. Pierucci's book.
To expand on this consider that from the viewpoint of OPEC countries that oil, though technically a commodity, functions as a sort of sovereign currency whose supply can be restricted or increased at will. To get a bit more abstract, dependency on oil is little different than being a subscriber state in a federal system. As in all MMT, users of a currency are virtually powerless to the sovereign currency controller and just as Greece and Italy had a crisis with the euro circa 2008 because they couldn't restructure their debt the US of the 70's couldn't restructure it's energy dependence when oil got squeezed. Well, not without an overthrow of the currency controllers at least (and it's not far fetched to see the gulf war as a not subtle message to OPEC that if they tried the big oil squeeze again we might be sending those patriot missiles their way next time).
Now imagine an alternative scenario where the powers that be decided that instead of cranking up interest in a misguided notion that to save the economy we must first destroy it had instead applied the concept that a sovereign currency can always repay it's debts and borrowed heavily putting people to work creating alternative and renewable energy sources and replacing gasoline cars with EV's, technology that was readily available even if primitive. Some short term inflation would remain, but no stagnation.
However the main consequence would be that fat cat oil executives would lose their shirts. And that, truly was and remains a consequence that we're not willing to accept. Worth a read: https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123?ref_=d6k_applink_bb_dls
This is a dumb reply. Just because it didn’t kill a lot of people, and the background radiation is low doesn’t mean you want to go around digging thing up and disturbing souls in the exclusion zone. My point was just that people hadn’t been routinely dying from the radiation. There’s a whole Wikipedia article about it and a nice treatment in Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey, a nuclear physicist/reactor safety expert. I’m basically just restating the expert consensus.
That’s a modeling number, but not confirmed with real world data from actual cases. The Wikipedia article addressed that, and Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey has a chapter about it.
If you have a real interest in energy, the legacy of oil and how we got here, read this book. It is superb. The author is a historian, a real one, and the history is simply incredible. It’s not a like or dislike thing simply the impact of this commodity on our lives for generations.
https://www.amazon.ca/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123/
It sure is! There was a time when this was not true of Soviet reactors, but early western reactors were generally substantially safer than early Soviet reactors. It had to do with the way the reaction was mediated. In fact, the Chernobyl disaster occured specifically because it was of a Soviet design whose uncontrolled position was 'explode'. You should read Midnight in Chernobyl if you want to learn more about it. Absolutely fascinating book.
TL;DR: Sure, you can do that. But the more energy you pack in, the more it starts looking like an explosive, with all the problems that entails.
Look up monopropellants. For a light hearted treatement of monoprops in John D. Clark's <strong>Ignition</strong>