Glowing 2015-03-02

[GlytchMeister]

Anytime you can learn something new its a good day, please my freind never stop learning

^ That right there is some primo wisdom.

Back to the comic: so, now that I realize it didn't take blowing a hole through the crust to get lava, I'm wondering why this didn't happen back during the Nui Gui arc when the uranium trap was detonated on top of Bud? Or is the complex just that big and sprawling? And what about the radiation from the uranium trap's fallout?
Ugh. Questions are piling up in my poor brain. I'm gonna go back to Confusion Corner now...

[TazManiac]

Random Replies without attribution as to originating germination;

- Penny driving a VW Rabbit w/ Check Engine Light On in early seasons of 'the Big Bang Theory'.

- Subsurface Explosions are different than Air Burst detonations, yes this has already been covered but I thought of it before getting that far.*

- Whatever happens is whatever Paul wants it to be, so, of course there is Molten Lava in the Aftermath. G'Ma Lilly said it was so. so shaddup.

- I'm 'watching', in the background, as I type this; 'Romeo is Bleeding'. (that's your non-sequitur for the day...)

- The seams help with expressing 3D, and while we're kind of on that subject- Atsali is a fictional character who I'm sure we all feel protective towards and look forward to her growing up.. And she's a Siren too. Thank you Paul.
(non-sequitur #2; go watch 'Mars Needs Moms'. It's fascinating, like a train wreck...)

TazManiac, currently enjoying Sierra Nevada's 4-Way IPA combo sampler. (beware the Golden IPA, its it's own beer-bong just in a glass- you don't really think you are drinking anything, it's so smood... )

* I've always wondered, from a very early age, what becomes of the bubble in the rock created by underground Nuclear Explosions...

[Dave]

Anytime you can learn something new its a good day, please my freind never stop learning

^ That right there is some primo wisdom.

Back to the comic: so, now that I realize it didn't take blowing a hole through the crust to get lava, I'm wondering why this didn't happen back during the Nui Gui arc when the uranium trap was detonated on top of Bud? Or is the complex just that big and sprawling? And what about the radiation from the uranium trap's fallout?
Ugh. Questions are piling up in my poor brain. I'm gonna go back to Confusion Corner now...

Uranium only goes through an "A-bomb-type" exponential-rate fissioning if you get the critical mass into one place at one time very quickly (via a gun-type collision or via a timing-critical implosion). Anything less than this, and the uranium "blows apart" or melts and vaporizes too soon... you can still get a nasty, messy explosion, but it's a much slower event with a much lower energy yield. Think of it as a super-fast meltdown. There's some indication that one of the explosions which tore apart the Chernobyl reactor may have been a supercriticality event of this sort.

The description of what was happening at Mapimi suggested that this was the type of explosion that the Nu Gui had managed to set up.

[GlytchMeister]

I've always wondered, from a very early age, what becomes of the bubble in the rock created by underground Nuclear Explosions...

It pops, I guess.
By pop, I mean it just blows through the surface, making a big ol crater.
I suppose if the detonation occurs deep enough, stranger things will happen. Perhaps it will do something similar to the WW2 (?) earthquake bomb used to knock over a roman aqueduct that withstood conventional bombs.
Some energy is dispersed by radiation, heating the surrounding rock, probably melting it. Some energy becomes kinetic in nature, dispersing as a pressure wave propagating through the ground. The gases formed by any vaporized rock or by the decomposed fissile material may stay as a bubble or bunch of bubbles, perhaps trapped by the molten rock, forming a big geode or a rock "foam" of basalt/granite/geodes? It depends on how deep and how slowly the molten rock cools. Probably a foam, it's hard to keep a big bubble together.
Or the gases could dissolve into the molten rock. Like CO2 in soda. (This is what makes some volcanoes explosive: dissolved gases and water vapor).
Plenty of radioactive contamination. The fallout would be contained by the rock, so it'd all stay put in one area rather than getting picked up by wind.

The only underground nuclear tests I know about are the ones recently mentioned (operation plowshare) and then that one that turned a 2-ton manhole cover into ammo for a nuclear potato cannon.

[GlytchMeister]

Uranium only goes through an "A-bomb-type" exponential-rate fissioning if you get the critical mass into one place at one time very quickly (via a gun-type collision or via a timing-critical implosion). Anything less than this, and the uranium "blows apart" or melts and vaporizes too soon... you can still get a nasty, messy explosion, but it's a much slower event with a much lower energy yield. Think of it as a super-fast meltdown. There's some indication that one of the explosions which tore apart the Chernobyl reactor may have been a supercriticality event of this sort.

The description of what was happening at Mapimi suggested that this was the type of explosion that the Nu Gui had managed to set up.

Ok, yeah. A meltdown of enough material would be enough to wipe out a whole swathe of whatever is underneath. The uranium would gather up more molten rock as it went, only stopping when it became diluted enough that thermal conduction would be enough to cool it below its melting temperature. And knowing the Nui Gui, I wouldn't be suprised if it had a redundant amount of uranium sitting on top of the area. That kind of super meltdown would probably have enough yield to make a mushroom cloud too. I mean, the MythBusters build team could make a respectable mushroom cloud with dairy creamer, a propane tank, a pipe, and a road flare. It doesn't take a nuclear explosion to pull off.

[illiad]

Oh, and 50 years ago, who would have thought that 10 year old minors would show us how easy it is to use computers????

Hmmm. What's the first date on which it became apparent that you need to have a 12-year-old in the household, to make the VCR stop blinking 12:00 12:00 12:00 ...

Dunno, but blame the fool who thought it would a bright idea... at least my microwave clock does not blink after a power outage... just shows the wrong time!

Oh and I love the '70s VCR programming kit!!! 'check engine' lights are a lazy man trying to do 2 jobs at once... you need to check oil and temp, to see if it's gonna turn in a very expensive garage job...

[Grantwhy]

The NORAD thing is a valid point. What happened to the final stage of the rocket and what is in it?

My double-take of the day:

"NORAD? What's the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation to do with this?"

Google tells me it's also North American Aerospace Defense Command. Makes better sense.

Aside: English acronyms of Norwegian institutions are a story to themselves. Like the Norwegian University of Technology and Science (they've changed it since).

Personally I spent a year at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. The joke was to avoid running that acronym through a spellchecker.

The acronym for Eastern Michigan University is the same for a bird that has infamously terrible memory retention to those in the know, but just don't tell the wrong people, they may take it personally. Even if the shoe fits. Especially if the shoe fits.

silly question: do the people at E.M.U. pronounce "emu" the same way as most Americans?

Most Americans I've heard say 'e-moo' while the correct (aussie ) way to say it is more like 'em-you'



thread drift much?

[captnq]

Aaaaagggghhhhhh!!!! My eyes!

My apologizes, but best way to deal with personal horror is to hand it off to someone else.

Q1. Why molten rock:
A1. If the explosion was a subsurface (or even surface) AM explosion, then the detonation would have been focused to some degree. Mucho heat retention. Given that the air was not choked with superheated vaporized rock (we can assume this because our heroines were not left with scorched lungs), then the detonation itself was far below the surface (at least a few hundred) and the rocket they road was in some sort of silo, and a miracle of the technology that made it via the fact that it actually launched.

Therefore the explosion, while "big" was limited in scope to maybe, a few kilotons. Enough to make a rather big sink hole, it sounds like. Said sink hole then colapsed, heat migration occurs, churning of broken up surface rock and super heated rock, yada yada yada, dramatic license, and we have a pit of molten magma.

I just LOVE saying magma. MAGMA. MAG-MAAAAA.... Say it. Lovely word. Molten... MAGMA.

The problem is, you say ANTIMATTER explosion and people think "Planetary crust go Bye-bye!" do you know antimatter explosions happen all the time? It's called Red Lightning. You see, it's possible to have very small antimatter explosions.

Q2: How deep are the eyes on Atsali's Butt.
A2: Seriously? You have a polymorphing bear who can turn into any article of clothing and the depth of said bear's eyes on some kid's keister is the point where you go, "Okay, I was willing to suspend disbelief up until THIS point, but Butt Eyes? THAT'S WHERE I DRAW THE LINE!"

THE LOOK OF DISAPPROVAL:

[illiad]

thread drift much?

guys...... this other forum is staring at you quizzically.....

otherwise, threads past their 'view by date' are ok for the occasional banter....

[GlytchMeister]

The problem is, you say ANTIMATTER explosion and people think "Planetary crust go Bye-bye!" do you know antimatter explosions happen all the time? It's called Red Lightning. You see, it's possible to have very small antimatter explosions.

The "blowing a hole through the Earth's crust" idea was the second option, as I did not understand how such a fast event could melt so much rock. I just got my thermodynamics a little messed up. I get how it works now.

I've never heard of red Lightning before. (Follows link) Oh! That sounds a lot like sprites! Weird things caused by big thunderstorms in the upper atmosphere.
Seems to me they involve positrons, but they aren't antimatter explosions. Nonetheless, very interesting, thank you.
Yay trivia!

[Warrl]

Also, REMINDER: both characters are minors.

And close enough in age that, as far as I am aware, not a single US state's laws care what they do with each other as long as it's consensual.

FPF, where is that pic from???

Based on the style and what is depicted, I think it's related to either Footloose or Cherry! Stepping Back (which two comics are themselves closely related).

The latter has an interesting premise: it's in the Magical Girls genre, but the main character is a teenage male transvestite... not transgender and not homosexual, just transvestite. I'm not impressed so far with what it does with that premise, but it shows potential.

[Thor]

]
silly question: do the people at E.M.U. pronounce "emu" the same way as most Americans?

Most Americans I've heard say 'e-moo' while the correct (aussie ) way to say it is more like 'em-you

e-moo is used, but I say it e-myoo myself, as do most people I know . . . not that the word comes up often in the US.

We also pronounce "kangaroo" as can-GAR-oo, and "koala" as KO-uh-lah, in case you are curious.

[AnotherFairportfan]

FPF, where is that pic from???

Based on the style and what is depicted, I think it's related to either Footloose or Cherry! Stepping Back (which two comics are themselves closely related).

The latter has an interesting premise: it's in the Magical Girls genre, but the main character is a teenage male transvestite... not transgender and not homosexual, just transvestite. I'm not impressed so far with what it does with that premise, but it shows potential.

Yeah - it's [http://www.footloosecomic.com/footloose/today.php]Footloose[/url], a decidedly crazed webcomic, from a poster they were selling at a UK comic con - it's Keti Jones, the primary protagonist - literally, she suffers from Primary Protagonist Syndrome. It seems that the denizens of Faerie are aware that they are in a story, but humans aren't Travel spells involve imploring the artist to move you along to advance the story. Pirates have a "contextual cannon" that fires from one panel to another.

Keti is half werewolf, a quarter human and a quarter sprite, and, as i said, suffers from PPS - which means that her mere presence will twist the Narrative to make her the protagonist.

As to Magical Transvestite Cherry: Steve accidentally became a magical girl when he ran out of the house because his dad was enraged at his being in girl's clothes, and the magical cat that was supposed to deliver the power of Magical Girl Cherry to the right girl mistook him for the girl. Like Keti, he wound up in Faerie at the Dojo, where she studies Kung Shoe under Prada Sensei, and he is enrolled in the School of Marketable Magic with the other (mostly useless and bitchy) Magical Girls.

The girls didn't mind him sharing their changing rooms and showers, because he was gay.

Somehow he never got around to explaining that he wasn't... Top right, Panel 1:



==================

Thhe picture Keti came from:



Keti's mother, Beansprout, who is half-fey/half-human (standing, with fake wings) and Princess Flibbage of Faerie, patron of the Dojo.

[lake_wrangler]

]
silly question: do the people at E.M.U. pronounce "emu" the same way as most Americans?

Most Americans I've heard say 'e-moo' while the correct (aussie ) way to say it is more like 'em-you

e-moo is used, but I say it e-myoo myself, as do most people I know . . . not that the word comes up often in the US.

We also pronounce "kangaroo" as can-GAR-oo, and "koala" as KO-uh-lah, in case you are curious.

This French-Canadian says EE-myoo, CAN-ga-roo, KO-walah...

[My2Cents]

Back to the comic: so, now that I realize it didn't take blowing a hole through the crust to get lava, I'm wondering why this didn't happen back during the Nui Gui arc when the uranium trap was detonated on top of Bud? Or is the complex just that big and sprawling? And what about the radiation from the uranium trap's fallout?
Ugh. Questions are piling up in my poor brain. I'm gonna go back to Confusion Corner now...

Uranium only goes through an "A-bomb-type" exponential-rate fissioning if you get the critical mass into one place at one time very quickly (via a gun-type collision or via a timing-critical implosion). Anything less than this, and the uranium "blows apart" or melts and vaporizes too soon... you can still get a nasty, messy explosion, but it's a much slower event with a much lower energy yield. Think of it as a super-fast meltdown. There's some indication that one of the explosions which tore apart the Chernobyl reactor may have been a supercriticality event of this sort.

The description of what was happening at Mapimi suggested that this was the type of explosion that the Nu Gui had managed to set up.

There are 2 types of criticality for fission, prompt and thermal, which use fast and slow neutrons respectively. In a bomb the reaction is always prompt critical, with the neutron reaction and doubling time measured in shakes (10 nanoseconds). Most reactors rely on slow neutrons with neutron reaction times measurable in milli-seconds and doubling times in minutes, they don’t go boom they just melt. The first Mapimi incident was probably a steam explosion caused by the molten mass reacting with the water table.

Without going into too much detail about Chernobyl, the reactor was a graphite (carbon) moderated design. The operator allowed the reactor to overheat causing a cooling pipe to rupture.
H2O + C +heat => CO2 + 2 H2
H2 + air => BOOM
The hydrogen explosion blew the roof off and wrecked the controls leading to a meltdown. There was no nuclear explosion.

[Dave]

Without going into too much detail about Chernobyl, the reactor was a graphite (carbon) moderated design. The operator allowed the reactor to overheat causing a cooling pipe to rupture.
H2O + C +heat => CO2 + 2 H2
H2 + air => BOOM
The hydrogen explosion blew the roof off and wrecked the controls leading to a meltdown. There was no nuclear explosion.

According to the references at Wikipedia, there seem to be multiple hypotheses about the specific reactions behind the explosions which blew the reactor apart. The first blast seems likely to have been a steam overpressure... it blew the reactor lid off through the roof.

The second explosion (some seconds later) was much larger... it's been estimated at about 10 tons equivalent, or about 40 billion joules of energy... and did most of the explosive damage. One hypothesis is that (as you suggest) it was a hydrogen explosion, with the gas coming from water reacting with the graphite and/or with the superheated zirconium cladding around the fuel.

However, the size of the second explosion, and the xenon isotopes released, suggest a second hypothesis... that it was a prompt-supercriticality "runaway". The fuel elements had ruptured, a portion of the fuel melted and flowed together, the cladding was gone, and there was nothing acting as a neutron moderator. Massive (but momentary) criticality event in one portion of the core, huge energy release, and the core blew apart. It's entirely possible that a hydrogen explosion contributed energy to this, of course.

No way we'll ever know for certain, of course.

It's fortunate that no such runaway seems to have occurred at the Fukuskima reactors. They suffered at least partial core meltdowns, and the structures were badly damaged by hydrogen explosions, but the molten core material did not itself explode, or quite melt all the way through the bottoms of the containment vessels.

[AnotherFairportfan]

It's fortunate that no such runaway seems to have occurred at the Fukuskima reactors. They suffered at least partial core meltdowns, and the structures were badly damaged by hydrogen explosions, but the molten core material did not itself explode, or quite melt all the way through the bottoms of the containment vessels.

Different and safer design, i believe. Soviet reactors were like most Soviet engineering - "The Party says it will be fine, Comrade - build it, or build log huts in the Gulag."

[Dave]

Different and safer design, i believe. Soviet reactors were like most Soviet engineering - "The Party says it will be fine, Comrade - build it, or build log huts in the Gulag."

I believe you're correct. Chernobyl was an old-generation design with no outer containment dome, and (unfortunately) a number of design flaws and operational quirks of which the operating crew were unaware. The Fukushima reactors were fairly standard (for the era of their construction) pressurized boiling water reactors.

[Mark N]

Different and safer design, i believe. Soviet reactors were like most Soviet engineering - "The Party says it will be fine, Comrade - build it, or build log huts in the Gulag."

If the K19 incident is unable to show Soviet thinking about engineering safety then nothing does.

[AnotherFairportfan]

Different and safer design, i believe. Soviet reactors were like most Soviet engineering - "The Party says it will be fine, Comrade - build it, or build log huts in the Gulag."

If the K19 incident is unable to show Soviet thinking about engineering safety then nothing does.

"The Green Hills of Earth" in real life.

Godspeed, Comrades.