The Year 2038 Problem

[Thomas G. Marshall]

"Thomas G. Marshall"
message
[snip vile attacks]

And, no by the way, I've seen purists attack even posts that were
labeled as "OT" under the argument that OT doesn't excuse a post
deliberately in the wrong ng.

OK, Topic Nazi! I get your point,

You conveniently snipped away the sentence

I certainly don't feel that way.

that came right after that. Now WHY IS THAT? Could it be that you LIKE
misrepresenting the truth? That's called lying, and you should know
better.

you want the "purity" of the
newsgroup to supersede the rights of posters who go off on tangents!
Don't kill the messenger, but people will sometimes have "side
conversations" that are not particularly "on- topic". That is just
life, and the way people are.

AND I AGREED WITH THAT. I even elaborated on why. I have no issue now,
nor ever, with people going off on a tangent in ANY newsgroup.

You Do realize that you're looking like a bigger and bigger idiot, don't
you? You must be pretty embarrassed by now.

Are you going to change the world, Net-Cop?! NO, I don't think so!

Is it *YOUR* job to police this newsgroup? NO!

Do I need this bad attitude after a hard day? No!

So keep your stupid opinions and attitude to yourself, Dick (Tracy)!

IT'S NOT MY OPINION. I SAID THAT I DIDN'T FEEL THAT WAY.

But YOU like to quote only CERTAIN sentences of what someone says.

Go ahead fool, show me where I was "a topic nazi". I was completely the
opposite!!!!!!!!

 

[Mabden]

IT'S NOT MY OPINION. I SAID THAT I DIDN'T FEEL THAT WAY.

Yeah, I know, I was just fucking with you. hehehe. Sorry.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

"Thomas G. Marshall"


Yeah, I know, I was just fucking with you. hehehe. Sorry.

Not a bad technique: get caught making a huge mistake and then say you
did it on purpose.

On purpose or not, you /might/ care for what others here think of you.
You and I weren't arguing in a void...

 

[Mark McIntyre]

The Hindenberg didn't burn because of the hydrogen. You can't see hydrogen
burn (perhaps a little bluish glow).

The Hindenburg burned the cloth coating which was treated with the same
stuff we now use in rocket fuel.

Yesh, I saw that BBC docudrama too. I believe its still case not proven.
And you really think that the presence of a zillion moles of h2 didn't
assist somewhat?

Enough in this OT thread already...

 

[jpd]

Yesh, I saw that BBC docudrama too. I believe its still case not proven.
And you really think that the presence of a zillion moles of h2 didn't
assist somewhat?

Think about it a bit. There's lots of hydrogen that is _not_ mixed with
air, so it can't burn until it encounters oxygen somewhere. (If it'd
been pre-mixed 2:1 with oxygen it would've gone BOOM instantly, but it
didn't. Igniting soap-bubbles filled with that mixture is a class-room
display experiment around here, BTW.)

You can pretty much emulate what happens when you fill a plastic bag
with, say, natural gas and hold a flame to it. The plastic burns first,
then the gas, which slowly forms a nice ball of fire as it gets out of
the bag (or the bag burns away).

Eyewitness reports gleaned from the 'net tell us that it was first
the outer hull, and only after a while the hydrogen burn was visible.
Thinking about it a bit more, I'd say that the actual cause of the fire
(sabotage or ropes instead of wire) is less important. The outer coating
_was_ too flammable, regardless of also being too ignitable.

Which is pretty clear from the after-incident technical investigation.

Enough in this OT thread already...

Don't ask, then.

 

[CBFalconer]

*** rude topposting fixed ***

The United States does NOT use reactor designs like the one
at Chernobyl. Also, Chernobyl did NOT have a containment
building.

I didn't say it did. The point was that dispersal is no answer to
fission products, which depend on physics, not reactor
containment, moderators, etc.

Helsinki (AFP) May 24, 2002
Finland's parliament on Friday approved construction of a
fifth nuclear reactor, the first such plant to be authorized
in Western Europe or North America since the Chernobyl
disaster in 1986.

My condolences to the Finns.

 

[Gerry Quinn]

Think "Hindenberg"

If you pour a gallon of petrol on the floor, you can tap dance in it. If
you pour a gallon of natural gas on the floor, it dribbles out through the
drains in gaseous state. Trust me, I've done both. Heck I've even done it
with a gallon of iso-propanol (they're all handy coolants. The trick with
the last was to open the lab windows before I fell over dead drunk, and
then died of asphyxiation).

If you pour a gallon of H on the floor, you can kiss your ass goodbye as it
passes your head on its way to kingdom come. There /is/ a reason that the
LH test rig at RAL was about a mile from the rest of the lab, behind 20ft
thick earth banks, and inside a concrete bunker with one disposable wall.

Does liquid hydrogen ignite spontaneously in air? I wouldn't have
thought so. While I'm sure it evaporates faster than liquid nitrogen,
the cooling effect of a couple of inches of boiling hydrogen would
hardly be sufficient to stop you walking out. Not if you have shoes on
anyway! Of course there might be an alarming amount of fog...

The Hindenberg, in any case, was full of gaseous hydrogen, probably
safer than liquid, but anyway different. AFAIK, more than half of the
passengers survived, largely because a hydrogen fireball produces a
relatively small proportion of radiant heat.

- Gerry Quinn

 

[q]

*** rude topposting fixed ***


I didn't say it did. The point was that dispersal is no answer to
fission products, which depend on physics, not reactor
containment, moderators, etc.

Reprocessing "spent" fuel rods will eliminate that problem.

Anyway the real future in nuclear technology is fusion.

 

[Jens.Toerring]

The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of thing that
people object to! The result is that radioactive waste is held in
concentrated form and everyone is afraid of it. If it were diluted, the
environmentalists would protest that where there were once a thousand
tons of nuclear waste, there are now a million.

Problem is that you can't properly dilute it down to a level similar
to the concentration in nature. Even if you could bring all the stiff
into a soluble form and a make a very fine powder out of it and then
drop it in the sea it would still take a long long time until it's
dispersed down to an acceptable level. While mixing comes free, thanks
to the second law of thermodynamics, it takes quite some time. But if
you have to speed it up you need lots of extra energy. If that would
be different please explain why e.g. in the Irish sea due to the
Sellafield/Windscale plant (or whatever they call the thing nowadays)
the concentrations are still that high.

Note how frequently you see a casually implied estimate of the threat
from nuclear materials in terms of the mass of material multiplied by
the halflife.

And people complain about quite insignificant amounts of radionucleides
in seawater.

What's "insignificant" is depends a lot on whom you ask. And it meant
something quite different in the fifties compared to what it means
now, even to the stout supporters of the use of nuclear power. It's
simply that nobody knows what levels are "insignificant" since no-one
really understands all the mechanisms by which added amounts of radio-
active materials can influence living organisms. Some people (and not
from the crackpot fringe) even claim that small amounts are healthy -
having such a range of opinions shows quite nicely that nobody really
knows).
Regards, Jens

 

[Peter J. Acklam]

I no longer worry about OT posts in ng's. I've discovered that
often a subject is raised because of the /audience/ known to
exist in the ng, not its particular subject.

That is supposedly against the charter of the big 8. So be it.

I'm not against off-topic posts because of a charter, but because
it lowers the signal to noise ratio of a newsgroup. I want to
read about UNIX. If I wanted to read about hydrogen power vs
petrol, I would subscribe to the appropriate newsgroups.

Peter

 

[CBFalconer]

I'm not against off-topic posts because of a charter, but because
it lowers the signal to noise ratio of a newsgroup. I want to
read about UNIX. If I wanted to read about hydrogen power vs
petrol, I would subscribe to the appropriate newsgroups.

Then why do you crosspost to four additional groups, including
c.l.c? The fact that the originator was too sloppy to set
followups to one group is no excuse. You are signalling your
willingness by partaking in the wide OT crossposting.

 

[CBFalconer]

CBFalconer wrote:
.... snip ...

Reprocessing "spent" fuel rods will eliminate that problem.

Nonsense. You have obviously never had any contact with that. It
is an euphemism for extracting plutonium, possibly including
weapons grade. The foulest fission products remain. Think
Humpty-Dumpty.

Anyway the real future in nuclear technology is fusion.

*Some* possible fusion reactions. Free neutrons flying about have
a tendency to be captured and create unwanted non-stable
isotopes. AFAICS the US has abandoned further research in this
direction, and in most nuclear scientific advances. The crowning
evidence is the fate of the super-collider.

 

[Michael Wojcik]

[Followups restricted to comp.programming, where this is at least
marginally on-topic.]

It was truly amazing that as little failed as it did. You can test each
of the following, fix it for y2k, and verify it independently:

nuclear sub software
NYSE software
FAA control tower software
McDonald's french fry calibration software

I wouldn't worry too much about McDonald's french-fry cookers.

I'm not a Y2K doomsayer. I'm agnostic on the question of whether
there would have been a real "crisis" had no remediation at all been
performed; I just don't know of enough actual Y2K problems to guess
whether there would have been significant infrastructure problems,
much less loss of life. (I did not personally see any Y2K bugs in
production code that seemed likely to cause loss of life. I have
heard of one, from a source that ought to be reliable; it would have
only affected a few people, though of course for them it would have
been more thant severe enough.)

My suspicion is that even without remediation, civilization would not
have crumbled. However, numerous entities would have suffered
disruption of their normal activities and financial damage, in some
cases severe.

What annoys me are all the people who claim that there was no problem
and nothing needed to be fixed. That is simply not true. I fixed a
Y2K bug in a piece of software that would have processed transactions
out of order if they were queued across rollover, for example.

 

[Daniel Rudy]

And somewhere around the time of 05/27/2004 10:03, the world stopped and
listened as Joona I Palaste contributed the following to humanity:

Bob Day <[email protected]> scribbled the following



Oh yeah? How about all those stories about everything from your coffee
maker to your car engine's sparkplugs stopping working on the exact
second the year 1999 changes into the year 2000? If that's not "vastly
overblown", what is? Dogs turning into cats and vice versa?

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The computer in your car doesn't care what the date it. If it did, then
every time you disconnected the battery, you would have to set it. The
same thing goes to a whole slew of embedded controllers, which is what
most of the hype was about. The threat was business systems like
inventory, order processing, database, spreadsheet, operating systems, etc.

 

[Joona I Palaste]

And somewhere around the time of 05/27/2004 10:03, the world stopped and
listened as Joona I Palaste contributed the following to humanity:

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The computer in your car doesn't care what the date it. If it did, then
every time you disconnected the battery, you would have to set it. The
same thing goes to a whole slew of embedded controllers, which is what
most of the hype was about. The threat was business systems like
inventory, order processing, database, spreadsheet, operating systems, etc.

Would you believe I already knew that? I wasn't saying *I* thought
coffee makers and sparkplugs would stop working. I was saying there
were stories about people thinking so.

 

[Gerry Quinn]

Anyway the real future in nuclear technology is fusion.

Yes - as they say, it's always twenty-five years in the future!

- Gerry Quinn

 

[Gerry Quinn]

Problem is that you can't properly dilute it down to a level similar
to the concentration in nature. Even if you could bring all the stiff
into a soluble form and a make a very fine powder out of it and then
drop it in the sea it would still take a long long time until it's
dispersed down to an acceptable level. While mixing comes free, thanks
to the second law of thermodynamics, it takes quite some time. But if
you have to speed it up you need lots of extra energy. If that would
be different please explain why e.g. in the Irish sea due to the
Sellafield/Windscale plant (or whatever they call the thing nowadays)
the concentrations are still that high.

"That" high? They are higher than elsewhere, it's true, and newspaper
reports have more than once screamed that the technetium content is far
greater than the natural levels - but it would be, wouldn't it, since
technetium is not found in significant quantities in nature.

What's "insignificant" is depends a lot on whom you ask. And it meant
something quite different in the fifties compared to what it means
now, even to the stout supporters of the use of nuclear power. It's
simply that nobody knows what levels are "insignificant" since no-one
really understands all the mechanisms by which added amounts of radio-
active materials can influence living organisms. Some people (and not
from the crackpot fringe) even claim that small amounts are healthy -
having such a range of opinions shows quite nicely that nobody really
knows).

I also think this is plausible. Just as a few bugs are needed to keep
our immune systems active and indeed prevent them from turning on us, it
seems plausible that a bit of radiation will help keep our DNA repair
mechanisms in tip-top shape.

But anyway, the disagreement also shows that the effects of moderate
amounts of radiation are far from devastating, or we *would* know!

What would happen the world if we detonated 500 nuclear weapons in the
atmosphere with an average yield of about 1 megaton? Nothing much,
apparently, because we have done...

- Gerry Quinn

 

[Mark McIntyre]

On Sun, 30 May 2004 07:38:33 +0000 (UTC), in comp.lang.c , jpd

(about the burning of hydrongen in air)

You can pretty much emulate what happens when you fill a plastic bag
with, say, natural gas and hold a flame to it.

No you can't, and for goodness sake don't try this at home. Hydrogen
diffuses into the surrounding air VERY quickly, and burns almost
immediately. Did you never set fire to a test-tube of the stuff in school?

The plastic burns first,
then the gas, which slowly forms a nice ball of fire as it gets out of
the bag (or the bag burns away).

But natural gas has a higher density than air, and diffuses quite slowly.

 

[Mark McIntyre]

Does liquid hydrogen ignite spontaneously in air? I wouldn't have
thought so.

You're right, but it does ignite awfully easily.

While I'm sure it evaporates faster than liquid nitrogen,

MUCH.

the cooling effect of a couple of inches of boiling hydrogen would
hardly be sufficient to stop you walking out. Not if you have shoes on
anyway!

If you've shoes, better hope there's no segs in them...

 

[q]

http://www.boc.com/gases/pdf/msds/G100.pdf

Does liquid hydrogen ignite spontaneously in air? I wouldn't have
thought so. While I'm sure it evaporates faster than liquid nitrogen,
the cooling effect of a couple of inches of boiling hydrogen would
hardly be sufficient to stop you walking out. Not if you have shoes on
anyway! Of course there might be an alarming amount of fog...

The Hindenberg, in any case, was full of gaseous hydrogen, probably
safer than liquid, but anyway different. AFAIK, more than half of the
passengers survived, largely because a hydrogen fireball produces a
relatively small proportion of radiant heat.

- Gerry Quinn